| America is, yet again, facing a Supreme Court nomination battle. Shaping the nation's top court has increasingly become an extension of our polarized politics. Here's what's going on and what to expect from this latest Supreme Court opening. Why is this happening now?Well, most immediately, because liberal-leaning Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer announced he'll retire after the court's term ends this summer. At 83, he's the oldest justice, and his retirement was expected. Democrats are just glad it's happening now, when they get to name his replacement and keep a liberal on the court. Stepping back a bit, we've seen so many recent Supreme Court openings because an aging court is turning over. When he was in office, President Trump got to nominate three justices in four years — nearly half of the new justices in the 21st century. As the court gets younger, this could be the last nomination in the near term. Three of the nine justices are under 60. How Democrats are going to control this processThey control the White House and have a bare majority in the Senate, and these days, that's all you need to get a Supreme Court justice through. (It's now a relic in American politics, but Supreme Court nominations used to be rather collegial affairs, as Philip Bump visualized here. Senators from the other side were largely deferential to the president's constitutional right to nominate the next justice.) Now, it's tribal warfare. That's a reflection of everything in politics these days. But things got really amped up in 2016, when Senate Republicans held open a Supreme Court vacancy for almost a year until Trump took over from President Obama and could nominate someone conservative. Then they sped up the process right before the 2020 election for another vacancy so Biden couldn't nominate a replacement to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. So Democrats feel like not one but two seats were stolen from them, and they aren't likely to care much what Republicans think of Biden's pick. (Senate Republicans are near-universally expected to oppose this person, but they're debating how hard to fight, knowing they can't stop it, as Mike DeBonis reported.) Who is Biden going to nominate?Biden said he's going to nominate a Black woman sometime next month. That narrows the list greatly, since there aren't many Black women in the federal judiciary. The likeliest choice is Judge Ketanji Jackson Brown. "She probably has a security detail already," one source joked to me. She clerked for Breyer and recently got approved by a majority of the Senate to sit on one of the nation's top appeals court, a training ground for the Supreme Court. She's also related by marriage to former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan, who has endorsed her judicial qualifications in the past, Aaron Blake noted here while exploring four issues that could come up in a confirmation battle. Here are other Black female judges who could be contenders on Biden's short list. Senate Democrats likely need all 50 senators to vote for Biden's pick, and as I wrote here, the party base isn't exactly on the best terms with two of its most centrist senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. It's possible, although not that likely, they make trouble about Biden's pick. What does this mean for Roe v. Wade? Abortion rights — and other issues liberals champion, such as affirmative action — are still on the chopping block. This remains a very conservative court. It has leaned conservative for decades, but Trump and Senate Republicans really remade it in their image. Even when Biden gets his pick on, the court will still have six conservative-leaning justices to three liberal ones. The court is currently deciding whether to knock down the nearly 50-year precedent that established a constitutional right to abortion. Sometime this summer they'll announce their decision (it will be one of Breyer's last), and observers on both sides think Roe could be significantly weakened or even overturned. And there's not much any of the liberals on the court can do about that. Want more analysis like this? I'm the author of The 5-Minute Fix newsletter, where every weekday we walk through the biggest political stories and why they matter. Sign up here. Or ask me a question about politics and I may answer it in my newsletter.  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