Writing at National Review Online’s blog “The Corner,” William Voegeli offers astute observations about the degree to which liberals are willing to accept the limits of constitutional democracy. Voegeli’s comments respond to comments from the Roosevelt Institute’s Mark Schmitt.

Schmitt’s central point is that conservatives are completely wrong to insist that “liberalism’s aspirations for the welfare state are limitless.” To the contrary: “Liberalism is always about finding the right boundary between market and state, public and private, fairness and liberty.” …

… It would be easier to believe Schmitt’s reassurances about items on the liberal wish-list that are never going to happen, if some of them didn’t have a way of happening. And it would be easier to accept his invitation to join the democratic process if his political allies weren’t so committed to rigging or nullifying that process. Gay marriage is one far-fetched agenda item that recently and suddenly became near-fetched. Three years ago Californians opposed to it thought they were joining the democratic process in a way common in their state for many years. They gathered signatures on petitions, got an initiative on the ballot, and voted on it. Two years later a federal judge ruled not that those Californians had made a wrong decision in voting to prohibit gay marriage, but that they had presumed to decide a question they had no right even to address.

Similarly, in 2006 the people of Michigan believed that the democratic process encompassed the process of approving or rejecting affirmative action at the ballot box. Federal judges set them straight, too, on the basis of an inspired interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of the equal protection of the laws. It turns out that equal protection includes the equal right to seek unequal protection. By incorporating a prohibition on affirmative action into the Michigan state constitution, the court ruled, the people of Michigan had made it impermissibly difficult for minority groups in favor of affirmative action to re-legalize it. Like those in California, the voters of Michigan had addressed a political question in good faith, according to civics-class precepts, only to find out that the question was not within the purview of mere citizens. If Mr. Schmitt, the Roosevelt Institute, or the magazine he used to edit, The American Prospect, has denounced these transgressions against the democratic process, and the all-or-nothing impulse of anti-democratic judges and advocacy groups to nullify political decisions with court rulings, it’s an extraordinarily well-kept secret.