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At first glance, such provisions might seem to represent a victory for the bills' adversaries, compromises that will force Congress to rethink the laws in a few years, when cooler heads (and perhaps a new president) might prevail. But it would be a mistake to view the sunset provisions in the tax bills and the Patriot Act this way. Though the Bush Administration may have preferred, all things being equal, to do without them, the inclusion of these provisions helped get the laws through Congress—and there's little reason to believe the sun will ever set on these statutes.

In more recent years, many conservatives have argued not for judicial restraint but for judicial activism, in the form of frequent invalidations of federal legislation. Increasingly the target has been national power -- and their villain has been Franklin Roosevelt, not Earl Warren. There has been open talk of restoring the "Constitution in Exile" -- the Constitution as it was understood in 1930, before the election of Roosevelt and the rise of the modern regulatory state. Douglas H. Ginsburg, a notably fair-minded judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, recently captured the new view in an essay for the Cato Institute's "Supreme Court Review": "The Great Depression and the determination of the Roosevelt Administration placed the Supreme Court's commitment to the Constitution as written under severe strain in the 1930s, and it was then that the wheels began to come off." Several of President Bush's judicial nominees have rankled Senate Democrats, and even some Republicans, by expressing enthusiasm for curbing Congress's powers -- at a time when the Rehnquist Court has been moving in just that direction.

What's happened here is that conservative and business groups have achieved such a lock on the federal government apparatus -- courts, regulatory bodies, Congress and the White House -- that policies with popular support can't be easily enacted. So Democrats are taking action where they have power, at the state level. So of course, conservatives are unhappy. Here's the money bit:

"States are trying to pre-empt Congress on national issues, and it's quite dangerous," says Michael Greve, director of the federalism project at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., that promotes limited government.

Tacitus is right that this is pretty amazing. Especially since the state officials involved are not agitating for restrictions on the federal government's right to do things, as conservative federalists do here in Washington. They're simply taking action to improve life for residents of their states. So, naturally, the federalists are now complaining that states are usurping the rightful duties of the federal government.

[The Senate debate did not really cover] the most important factor in Pryor's swift rise from Mobile, Alabama, to the national stage: his longtime courting of corporate America. "The business community must be engaged heavily in the election process as it affects legal and judicial offices," Pryor told business leaders in 1999, after refusing to join other attorneys general in lawsuits against the tobacco and gun industries. To facilitate that engagement, Pryor created a controversial group called the Republican Attorneys General Association, which skirted campaign-finance laws by allowing corporations to give unlimited checks anonymously to support the campaigns of Pryor and other "conservative and free market oriented Attorneys General."

With such activism, Pryor positioned himself in the vanguard of a stealth campaign by American business to change the way that state and federal law is interpreted. Since 1998, major corporations -- Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and the insurance giant AIG, to name a few -- have spent more than $100 million through front groups to remake courts that have long been a refuge for wronged consumers and employees. By targeting incumbent judges, they have tilted state supreme courts to pro-business majorities and ousted aggressive attorneys general. At the same time, corporate lobbyists have blitzed state legislators with tort-reform proposals, overseeing the passage of new laws in 24 states over the past year alone.

Americans distrust government's powers and motives. They immediately get the joke that has a federal inspector or a state administrator fatuously saying: "We're from the government and here to help." Such suspicion is a healthy instinct -- but one that is being carried to destructive and demagogic lengths.