Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael Kinsley

Kinsley’s move here is to puncture a familiar self-image: conservatives as principled referees of constitutional “restraint,” liberals as the ones forever shopping for new rights in old text. He starts with a feint toward fairness - no, conservatives don’t “cherish property” in the same sentimental, mission-statement way liberals are accused of cherishing equality. That opening disarms the reflexive culture-war framing. Then he springs the trap: even without the moral romance, conservatives have their own doctrinal lever, and they pull it when it suits them.

The takings clause, in this telling, isn’t just a technical protection against government seizure; it’s a pathway to re-litigate policy through courts. Kinsley is pointing at a strategic symmetry: both camps accuse the other of “activism” while quietly cultivating preferred forms of it. Conservatives, he implies, can oppose expansive readings of equal protection as illegitimate policy-making, then turn around and celebrate expansive readings of “takings” that hamstring regulation, zoning, labor, environmental rules - the entire administrative state by another route.

The subtext is less about property versus equality than about branding. “Judicial activism” becomes a weaponized adjective, not a consistent theory. Kinsley’s journalistic cynicism lands because he treats constitutional clauses as political technologies: flexible enough to be principled in public and opportunistic in practice. The context is the late-20th-century legal-political realignment, when conservative legal movements learned to fight on terrain they once claimed to distrust - the courts - and needed a constitutional vocabulary to make that feel like restraint rather than power.