President Barack Obama couldn’t be more excited to have this fight.

Who he’ll nominate, or how he can realistically expect to get that person the 14 Republican votes in the Senate he’d need to put a third Supreme Court justice on the bench — those are questions he still has to deal with, just 72 hours into a selection process the White House had always prepared for but didn’t expect to activate.


The White House had begun to settle into an eighth-year mind-set, wrapping up old business, checking in with agencies to make sure that the smaller regulations they were settling for in place of an agenda were all going to be done by the end of the year.

Now the White House has a mission. Something new. Instead of trying to influence the conversation, Obama is the conversation. And for a president who’s proved time and again that the best way to get him to do something is to tell him he can’t, they’ve been given a political gift no one in the White House would have ever believed.

It’s an old constitutional law professor’s last wish come true, one more big thing to ripple through history.

Tuesday afternoon in California, Obama strode out in front of the cameras, no tie, loose and ready to go in full sarcastic bring-it Obama mode.

He’s here. He’s going to do this.

“The Constitution is pretty clear about what is supposed to happen now. … There’s no unwritten law that says it can only be done in off years,” Obama said in his news conference Tuesday after wrapping up his summit with Asian leaders. “I’m amused when I hear people who claim to be strict interpreters suddenly reading into it provisions that are not there.”

Last Thursday afternoon, he was meandering through an interview with Ellen DeGeneres about what he was going to miss about being president en route to a three-day California golf weekend. Tuesday afternoon he was jabbing Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz and everyone else who drives him crazy with constitutional originalism jokes and a reminder that the guy they never truly accepted as president actually — and still — is.

Obama’s face was full of the glee that’s running through the White House and Democratic offices on the Hill over seeing Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa and other Republicans back away from their absolute refusal to consider a nominee.

The day before taping “Ellen,” Obama took an hour on his Springfield nostalgia tour to complain in front of the Illinois state legislature about how broken the political system is, and what’s at stake if the country didn’t get serious about doing something about it.

Outside of the Obama die-hard fan club, no one seemed to care or could figure out why he was doing it. It barely made any headlines. The state legislators were starting to forget about what he said before they even left the room, writing off the speech as neat and great to have him there, but not something that they were thinking was going to make much of a difference.

In Springfield, the best illustration Obama got of the divided, broken system was a predictable State of the Union-style breakdown of Democrats standing and applauding for most of the lines, Republicans staying in their seats and staring down at the floor except when he threw them a bone that fit their agenda. More than once standing in front of the General Assembly, he mocked them for it. Nobody paid much notice.

Now he has a clear message: Republicans must stop the obstructionism that has had them say no to him, as a bloc, on nearly everything he’s tried to do from Day One.

Much like in his Springfield speech or his State of the Union address that kicked off his politics-is-broken theme, Obama wasn’t very interested in getting into his own complicity in the way the political system’s evolved, with everyone waiting out the other side until the next election, and spending days doing nyah-nyah statements about what the other ones did. People who’ve spoken to Obama say he sincerely regrets not changing politics in Washington, as was the big promise of his presidency, but he keeps his distance from taking responsibility.

In an aside during the news conference, Obama mocked Marco Rubio for running “as fast as he can” away from the bipartisan immigration bill that the Florida Republican said on the presidential campaign trail that he never really meant to become law. That’s essentially, though, the same argument that Obama made to explain why he, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry all joined a filibuster effort against Samuel Alito when his confirmation came up in 2006.

“What’s fair to say is that how judicial nominations have evolved over time is not historically the fault of any single party. This has become one more extension of politics,” Obama said, noticeably leaving any explanation or mention of himself out.

That wasn’t what he was trying to get across Tuesday.

“This will be the opportunity for senators to do their job,” Obama said. “I intend to do my job between now and Jan. 20, 2017. I expect them to do their job as well.”

Obama and his aides have been saying versions of that line for years. Last week, Republicans in Congress said they wouldn’t give Office of Management and Budget Director Shaun Donovan the traditional budget hearing in Congress, since the document he and the administration produced wasn’t going anywhere. It wasn’t. It’s not. Budget proposals never do, especially in the final year of a presidency. And no one other than a few apoplectic White House aides could act surprised or even interested that they’d done it.

Context matters.

McConnell’s getting a fair amount more attention from his declaration that Obama shouldn’t bother nominating someone to the Supreme Court, let alone expect that person would get a hearing.

The way Obama laid out his case Tuesday, he’s trying to make the most of what he’s hoping will become a bigger political recoil among senators. Advise and consent, he suggested, doesn’t mean that Republicans have a good argument for blocking his nominee from the court, even if they have the majority, even if they don’t like him or the person he puts up.

He put it in the kind of legal terms meant to rib the stare decisis-loving Republicans on that too.

“If we are following basic precedent,” Obama said, “then that nominee will be presented before the committees, the vote will be taken, and ultimately, they’ll be confirmed.”