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Notes -
That's a plausible story, albeit one that's a fulfillment of FCFromSSC's "The Constitution is dead", though it still runs into some issues as a model:
More immediately, it also doesn't explain the pattern here. If there's nine votes to deny the Duncan cluster because they have very strong view of federalism, it doesn't get a relist. If eight, or seven, or six votes to deny the Duncan cluster exist, a handful of relists happen while Justice Thomas writes a barn-burner dissent, but if he's writing too slow, they can call his bluff at any time and force the vote. What are they gonna do, piss him off more than Roberts pissing on Bruen?
That's the weird, and noteworthy, and inexplicable part. Any model that predicts a denial of certiorari needs to explain why that didn't happen three months ago. The court could have punted all these cases, gunnies would complain a little, and that would just be another step in a pattern that's been around for decades. Instead, they've spent six months contemplating a set of cases that have been on their radar for over a year. Indeed, the standard argument from court listeners is that Kavanaugh is the marginal vote, and he's the one that's going to be the most badly humiliated by those whole process given Snope, and it's only going to be more humiliating the longer the relist cycle goes.
Similarly, any model that predicts a grant needs to explain why that didn't happen in early April. If a grant happens in the 13+ cases, it's a arguably a record; if it happens in two weeks, it's unarguably so. If a grant happens in multiple 13+ cases, it's even more extraordinary. And those are the cases with the best vehicles! And a denial for Duncan while granting cert in Lamont is even weirder, since there's no plausible story where Lamont's lower case is bad law but Duncan is a-okay, and denying in Duncan cements its law and demands hundreds of thousands of people give up property they lawfully purchased under a legitimate court order. Even if the court needed the later cases and is struggling over vehicle questions, 8+ relists is still a massive outlier, and it's all the greater an outlier for having considered these cases a year before they came to the court.
Why? is a serious question, here.
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