>while having pushed for expedition in 2016.

That's a weird way of saying "nominated a candidate via the regular process".

Nominating a candidate now is also the regular process.

Yes, that's true. But it's important to note that Republicans deviated from this process 4 years ago and will now just resume business as usual while being a lot closer to the actual election than in 2016.

> If they acted that way, no one would really care who gets nominated to the supreme court.

How could this be done? Political issues are in front of the court every day and minute. This makes it immensely political. How could then those mere arbitrators be non-political?

It was always political. It will always be.

> It is because the supreme court has taken the habit of ruling on matters that should be left to the legislator and effectively to make new laws that it has become a bitter fight for nominations.

Uhm. You know this is also something that has been going on forever, especially in every "common law" system.

Possibly refuse to rule. In France they introduced a mechanism to throw the ball back to the parliament.

They do that too, a lot in fact. Most of the cases that request a certiorari are denied.

https://supremecourtpress.com/chance_of_success.html

And in the majority of those cases the SC does only instruct the lower court on that specific case, refraining from creating new law as much as possible.

France is a "civil law" country. Courts there cannot "make new laws", they can only invalidate them. (And as far as I know this applies in general to all civil law countries.)

> France is a "civil law" country. Courts there cannot "make new laws", they can only invalidate them. (And as far as I know this applies in general to all civil law countries.)

The German Supreme Court has, on two occasions, declared new constitutional rights: the right to informational self-determination (when deliberating a census process law) and the right to integrity of data processing systems (when outlaying voting computers). I don't know if that counts though since technically they argued that other constitutional rights implied these rights (but weren't mentioned explicitly because the German Basic Law was drafted in 1949).

Well, clearly both parties seem to have expectations that the court will rule on controversial matters like abortion. The fact that it also declines to examine many other cases doesn’t really change that.

Sure, and controversial laws were submitted for constitutional review everywhere around the world (where there are constitutional courts). And picking judges was always a political thing. Just as picking the top prosecutor. And so on.