Okay, fine. The Court hasn’t demonstrated any particular eagerness. I just said that to draw you out to reply to my “blockbuster” comment.

I agree about the unusual alignment variable.

How do you figure? Medellin was the ninth case granted certiorari and the ninth case scheduled for argument. The cases being moved up in the line are Gall and Kimbrough, the federal sentencing cases.

“I predict an Executive power blockbuster.”

That’s quite possible. We may see an unusual alignment in this case, i.e., not the standard “conservative” v. “liberal” division.

Isn’t it interesting how eager the Court was to put Medellin right on there? I predict an Executive power blockbuster.

That is an interesting, plausible, and workable way to draw the line, and I plan to read the WLF amicus in Torres, which I noticed after posting my comment.

Perhaps this is answered in the brief, but it seems that your practical solution, while securing a pragmatic fix to the problematic cases that have arisen, would instantiate the wrong principle into our body of constitutional law. What do you say to those who would observe that the word “party” is not mentioned in the Constitution and contend that ballot access is, as a matter of principle in a representative democracy with free and fair elections, a substantive individual right?

You are correct that there is some degree of tension between the claims of the plaintiffs in Washington State Grange and the claims of the plaintiffs in New York Board of Elections — which is one reason political parties favor the plaintiffs in the first case and the defendants in the latter case. But I think that a credible case can be made that the political parties should win the Washington case but lose the New York case. The Washington case involves a state statute that requires a party to allow non-members to participate in the selection of party nominees. That provision sounds to me like a serious infringement of the associational rights of party members. In contrast, the New York case does not involve participation of non-members in the candidate selection process; it only concerns whether parties should have broad control of the method of selection (e.g., convention or primary). If only New York Republicans have a say in who the Republican candidate is going to be, I don’t see much infringement of associational rights if the state (or, in this case, the federal courts) imposes limits on the selection method.