Would you support this proposal for getting rid of judicial activism?

Newt Gingrich is getting news, and criticism, for a suggestion as to what we can do to combat judicial activism. He wants to have judges hauled before congressional committees to re-explain and to justify what the judges already put in writing in their rulings. Talk about a bad case of using a piece of spaghetti to knock down a brick wall.

I have a different suggestion. The SOURCE of judicial activism is the three phrases that appear in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment. Justice Felix Frankfurter once said that these three phrases have "purposed vagueness." Prof. John Hart Ely said, in his 1980 book "Democracy and Distrust," that two of these three phrases are so vague that they are, in effect, open invitations for judges to be "activists," and that the phrases were intended to be as vague as they are.

"No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person the equal protection of the laws."

Both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause have been used *frequently* to strike down laws just because the justices think that they are bad laws. And even granting to those justices that they are right -- those laws are unwise or unnecessary -- does it really make any sense to say that the 14th Amendment was adopted to give the federal judiciary that much power? The Privileges or Immunities Clause has rarely been invoked, but according to Prof. Ely, it *could be* invoked just as much as the other two clauses have been.

So let's just agree that Section 1 of the 14th Amendment needs to be re-worded to mean something narrower, and clearer. Rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights can be "absorbed" into the 14th Amendment, the meaning of the Due Process Clause is limited to "procedural due process" and there shall never again be any "substantive due process," and the Equal Protection Clause bans racial discrimination, nothing more than that. Can you live with that?