Dahlia and Barry write at Slate:

 While the Supreme Court didn’t time these cases to arrive on the eve of a hotly contested presidential election, the fact that the court is poised to flex its federalism muscles at precisely the moment that the Tea Party has organized itself around the principle of states’ rights, and Occupy Wall Street has raised fundamental questions about government accountability, is a marvelous coincidence. The court isn’t just up to its neck in election-year politics. It is also hearing cases that raise issues more salient and more immediately relevant to voters on both sides of the aisle than the worn-out culture warclichés politicians have been shadow-boxing for decades.

I don’t know if the timing is as fortuitous as the article states. As I have argued elsewhere in my series of posts on Federalism 2.0, over the past few terms in cases like Bond, Stern v. Marshall, PCAOB, McIntyre Machinery, Ltd. v. Nicastro, etc. the Court has to ground many areas of its jurisprudence in federalism and concerns for states’s rights.

Not the first time I’ve disagreed with Barry and Dahlia’s work on slate.