In my recent Slate piece on the Supreme Court and the affordable care act, I wrote:

First, for the first time a Democratic candidate may be able to run for president against the Supreme Court. Conservatives have done this in the past, railing against the expansion of rights by the Warren Court, but Democrats have been much less successful. Now the strategy could work. By 2016, both Justice Scalia and Justice Kennedy will turn 80. If a Republican wins in 2012, Scalia and Kennedy will probably retire before the end of that first term. That would give the new Republican president the chance to entrench the five-justice Republican majority for decades—and to cement it, by replacing Kennedy with a wholly reliable right-wing vote.

I also discussed how the partisan realignment of the Supreme Court (the conservatives are all Republicans, the liberals all Democrats) affects perceptions of the Court.

Today’s New York Times piece shows that these ideas now are getting a full airing, and that the ACA ruling will be tied, along with Citizens United and Bush v. Gore to a more politicized Supreme Court.

I also made the point that a 5-4 ruling striking down the ACA as exceeding congressional power would reveal the gap between a “hypothetical Supreme Court” and the “real Supreme Court.”  Linda Greenhouse, in a must-read column showing her best Kremlinology skills, makes some similar observations.