> To me, as an outside observer, it seems like the unseemly political shenanigans around appointments to the US Supreme Court are because the will of your Founders is too hard to override politically, and if the system of government was as great as it is made out to be, the philosophy and leanings of individual SCOTUS justices would not be such a huge deal.
You’ve got it precisely backward. Liberals make the “philosophy and leanings of individual SCOTUS justice” a “huge deal” because they rely on the courts to legislate policies they can’t get through Congress.
You talk about the difficulty of amending the constitution, but how does that relate to the controversy around judicial appointments? When France and Germany legalized abortion, same sex marriage, etc., they didn’t amend the constitution. They just passed a law. But liberals didn’t have the votes in Congress to pass those laws. So they got it done through the courts. And then they create a controversy around judicial appointments because conservative jurists foreclose that strategy.
With respect to hot-button judicial issues in the US, the courts in Europe is a lot more like the American conservatives than the American liberals. In 2016, the European Court of Human Rights found that there was no fundamental right to same-sex marriage in the European Convention of Human Rights: https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-.... That was the year after the United States Supreme Court found exactly the opposite.
Around the same time as Roe v. Wade several courts in Europe considered the same issue. None concludes there was an expansive right to abortion: https://repository.law.uic.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2...
> These decisions seem to reflect several possible solutions. At one end of the spectrum is the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court which held that the U.S. Constitution prohibits abortion legislation designed to protect the life of the unborn prior to viability. At the other end of the spectrum is the decision of the West German Constitutional Court which held that the State has an affirmative duty to protect the unborn life at all stages of pregnancy.
To this day Roe remains an aberration in the developed world. Under it, the government can’t ban abortion (even with exceptions for emergencies) prior to viability, at the end of the second trimester. Under Roe the abortion laws of nearly every European country would be unconstitutional. (Only the UK’s would pass muster. Most prohibit elective abortion after the first trimester.)
Difficulty of amending the constitution is irrelevant, because the controversy is caused by things that can’t get enough support nationwide for ordinary legislation.