Now that she’s no longer shackled by the expectation of relative neutrality, Yale lecturer cum Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse has seized the opportunity to blast both barrels at the current Republican candidate (and his sidekick) as well as the long-standing trope of their position toward the type of justices who should sit on the bench.

…Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, the Republican nominee’s running mate, under the headline“Donald Trump Is Ready to Lead.” His essay contained this line about the Supreme Court: “Donald Trump will appoint men and women who will strictly construe the Constitution and not legislate from the bench.”

No points for originality, that’s for sure. Amusement value? Not immediately obvious. “Strict construction” and judges who won’t “legislate from the bench”: these are among the most trite and tired lines in the Republican playbook.

If lines are “trite and tired,” then they can simply be dismissed. After all, addressing them again would be exhausting.

The image of the judge as a legislating boogeyman is familiar to anyone with the patience to have watched Republican senators perform their roles, back when there used to be Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Ouch. See how she got in her licks on the Senate’s absurd failure to fulfill its constitutional mandate of advise and consent? Good one.

So my first response to Mike Pence’s USA Today effort was to mutter, “Oh, please, not again,” and turn the page.

A brilliant passive-aggressive start, since Greenhouse finds it so “trite and tired” that it’s unworthy of her time and effort, and yet it obviously is worthy since she wrote all about it. And if she hadn’t, then I wouldn’t be able to cut and paste her words.

What Governor Pence and the Republican campaign officials who drafted his defense of his running mate obviously don’t realize is that legislating from the bench is now obsolete as an epithet. It’s so 1980s.

The Trump crowd just didn’t get the memo, so they don’t realize that what was once despised on the political right is now celebrated. The judge as boogeyman has become the judge as savior — at least when intervening to block executive branch action or to strike down a regulatory requirement in the name of free speech.

Oh, she is a tricky one, that Greenhouse. No wonder she now works in New Haven, where only the smartest and most passionate feel at home. Since I appreciate her intellect, I cannot attribute Greenhouse’s conflation to ignorance or mistake, and so I’m left to believe that it’s purposeful, that she meant to sneak it in under the readers’ radar.

You see, her judges as saviors comes from their blocking “executive branch action” or striking down “a regulatory requirement in the name of free speech.” That’s the antithesis of legislating, but you would have to appreciate the law to realize she just tried to snooker you.

In the face of a paralyzed Congress that has failed to address issues, and failed to enact policies that Greenhouse desires, the president has done it instead, usurping the legislative function in a flagrant violation of his constitutional authority.  That’s why they call one branch “legislative” and the other “executive.” The latter executes what the former enacts.  It’s not that the executive, in the absence of legislation, gets to execute whatever he pleases.

And then there’s the even more curious “regulatory requirement in the name of free speech.” You’ve probably heard of free speech before, not because it’s embodied in the First Amendment to the Constitution but because it’s not absolute and you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. All the people with law degrees from Twitter say so.

But regulatory requirements, meaning pronouncements by petty bureaucrats appointed to their jobs by that same chief executive who has decided that the separation of powers only applies when Congress fails to do what Greenhouse thinks they should, are an even more banal usurpation of constitutional authority.* At least the prez was elected. Nobody elected petty bureaucrats to fill in for the paralyzed Congress.

So how dare those conservative saviors on the Supreme Court legislate that petty bureaucrats can’t make up laws on their own and ram them down a nation’s throat? How dare that Court hold that the First Amendment matters more than the feelz of regulators? Of Greenhouse?!?

There’s a good deal to say about this, starting with the fact that the judiciary — the Third Branch — of course is itself an integral part of the government, albeit the unelected part. So judiciary-versus-government may not be the most useful framework for examining the boundaries of the judicial role. And not all judicial interventions are created equal – that’s where the debate really lies.

It’s not that Greenhouse is wrong about conservatives being as enamored with the Supreme Court doing a bit of legislating, just like liberals. Sure, it’s cheap political talk, the sort that sells candidates to the unsuspecting public.

The notion of legislating from the bench was never more than a political slogan. Now it’s simply fatuous.

So what’s wrong with Greenhouse’s screed then? Beyond the two examples she uses being spectacularly wrong, and the exact opposite of legislating from the bench, her end game is to normalize the Supreme Court’s authority to legislate, to have the un-elected justices rule that her progressive Utopia is dictated by the constitutional vagaries of Equal Protection in connection with the butterfly effect and wondrous concepts like dignity.

Greenhouse calls bullshit on the Republicans claiming they will appoint Supreme Court justices who do not legislate from the bench because Greenhouse wants the Court to legislate from the bench. And if she can tar the conservatives as hypocrites for doing so, then it’s perfectly acceptable to applaud the liberals for doing so as well.

Greenhouse might have used the old saw, “the end justifies the means” to make her case, but then, such phrases harsh the ability to believe in one’s self-righteousness when calling the other team hypocrites because you want to enjoy the benefits of the very same thing. The other team may well be hypocrites, but not for the reasons Greenhouse claims, and even so, both teams are wrong. It’s just a court.

If you want to create that progressive Utopia you are so passionate about, do it through Congress. And if you can’t win enough seats to support your position, that’s because the nation doesn’t want your Utopia. That’s how American government works. Circumventing it through the Supreme Court is the wrong way for either team. And Greenhouse is smart enough to realize that, even though she’s intellectually dishonest enough to believe the ends justify the means.

*No, this is not about the authority granted regulatory agencies by Congress, such as under Title VII or Title IX, but about bureaucrats going light-years beyond any authority granted in their experiment in social justice engineering to see what they can get away with by appealing to public feelz and manufacturing sufficient spin to create a half-credible argument that they’re entitled to do anything they want.