Judges pretty much act independently once they get on the bench so I'm not really sure why Harper's concerned that the court is currently being stacked with a lot of Liberal appointments.
A liberal is a person who believes that water can be made to run uphill. A conservative is someone who believes everybody should pay for his water. I'm somewhere in between: I believe water should be free, but that water flows downhill.
Lord Chamberlain's readers or controllers, which were a handful of people working directly to him, were a very assorted group of people and some of them tried very hard to be as liberal as they could.
I think that this liberal progressive agenda is not the thing that the American people want and it's antithesis to who we are as a constitutional republic.
If this liberal potential is properly channeled, we may expect the area of freedom of the United States to increase. The problem is to spend up our rate of social invention in the service of the welfare of all the people.