By this stage of our experience, it is time to speak a plain and painful truth: The unending disappointments in the courts cannot be laid entirely on the conservative judges, for they do what conservative judges ever do. They try to work under a stern discipline, with decisions precisely and narrowly framed, without deciding more than they need to decide, without grasping more power than they need, and leaving power in hands other than their own. The heartbreak of the courts is a reflection, rather, of a political class that has backed away from the work distinctly its own. It has left that work to be done by someone else, in decisions strung out, in painful increments, never reaching a resolution.

(Hadley Arkes, “The Kennedy Court,” First Things [January 2007]: 11-3, at 13)