Obama and the left are attempting to co-opt the term “judicial activism” by altering its meaning. When conservatives began complaining about it, probably in the early 1970s, it meant that the Court was legislating from the bench. The most obvious (and important) example is Roe v. Wade. Abortion wasn’t favored by many states, and never would have been legislated. So, the liberal-dominated Court of that era used a spurious “right to privacy” combined with “emanations and penumbras” to make abortion the law of the land.
If the Supremes should strike down Obamacare, “judicial activism,” as the phrase is commonly understood in the paragraph above, is not the issue. In Roe v. Wade, the Court effectively produced legislation from the bench. In the Obamacare case, the Court is doing (or should be doing) its defined duty by ruling on whether a law is Constitutional. But, as all good Alinskyites are aware, if you control the language, you control the debate.