For decades in obscenity cases, a four-Justice minority would file sometimes lengthy dissents, ending with the correct point that they could have forced the Court to hear the case.
***Something about that just strikes me as ridiculously crass. I’ll bet no one knows why they didn’t just force the court to hear it. They felt strongly but not strongly enough, just like today. They sometimes act more like politicians than supreme court justices, and our constitutional republic suffers because of it.
It wasn't politics. It was practicality. As Einstein remarked, it is foolish to keep repeating what you've done before, expecting the outcome to be different.
John / Billybob