Politics & Power Quote by Michael Kinsley

Kinsley lands the punch by treating a supposedly solemn institution like episodic television. "Averted for another year" frames the courts not as an impartial referee but as a ticking time bomb, temporarily defused. Then the kicker: "Stay tuned". It is breezy, almost bored, and that tone is the point. The line assumes the audience already knows the pattern: a term ends, a crisis narrative spikes, and the next term inevitably teases the next round of high-stakes ideological improvisation.

The phrase "conservative judicial activism" is doing double-duty. It flips the usual partisan script in which "judicial activism" is a club used against liberals. Kinsley is calling out how the label functions rhetorically: not as a neutral description of judges remaking law, but as a partisan accusation selectively deployed. His intent is to puncture the comforting myth that restraint is a stable conservative principle. The subtext is sharper: the real activism is often hidden behind procedural language, deference talk, and originalist branding, which lets big doctrinal moves masquerade as mere fidelity.

Contextually, this reads like end-of-term punditry, the annual moment when court-watchers tally wins and losses and argue about whether the judiciary behaved itself. Kinsley's cynicism suggests that "averted" is not praise but a stay of execution. The politics of the judiciary have become serialized, and we have become the audience: anxious, habituated, and weirdly entertained by institutions that were never meant to be entertainment.