Al Franken hopes to use the upcoming Senate hearings on a replacement for retiring Justice John Paul Stevens to challenge what he sees as "judicial activism" by the Supreme Court's leading conservative wing.

Returning to a theme he brought up during last summer's confirmation hearings on Justice Sonya Sotomayor, the Minnesota Democrat wants to turn the tables on Republicans who often complain about "activist" liberal judges who they say make law from the bench. Exhibit A, for Franken, will be the Supreme Court's recent Citizens United ruling that removed long-standing legal restrictions on corporate political broadcasts in campaigns. Democrats, not the least President Obama, have voiced concerns that the decision will open elections to a flood of corporate advertising. "It's become more apparent that this court is a judicially active court, and we want somebody who isn't that way," Franken said in an interview Tuesday. Franken's theme dovetails with a larger Democratic strategy of portraying the Roberts court as an ally of Big Business against the common man or woman. But the focus on judicial activism, historically a conservative theme, is one that Franken is claiming as his own. "I kind of, oddly enough, set the agenda a little bit, or brought an argument forward that has kind of been prescient," said Franken, a member of the Judiciary Committee. "That became sort of the leitmotif for the (Sotomayor) hearings. But I was the first one to raise that, even though I'm so famously not a lawyer."