Abstract
A main concern raised by scholars is that the use of judicial review is, or has the potential to be, antidemocratic. Previous research has examined if courts behave in this fashion and how the political branches influence, use, and interact with the judiciary. This project takes this research in a different direction by using an original dataset of House and Senate press releases from 2014–2017 to analyze how legislators discuss the judiciary and its use of judicial review. Drawing a distinction between “regular” and “counter-majoritarian” criticisms, this paper asks whether, when discussing the courts, legislators express concerns about the use of judicial review or simply frame their discussion around agreement, or disagreement, with the outcome. In the process, the analysis offers a new version of the counter- majoritarian difficulty. The results suggest that while there is a broad, bipartisan concern about judicial review, the specifics and sources are distinctly partisan.