Four months into Republicans’ plan to block President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick because it’s an election year, he finally agreed with them — on one point, at least.

It is indeed an election year, Obama said, and now they’re going to have to spend the four-and-a-half months between Thursday’s Supreme Court decision ending his immigration executive action and the election dealing with what that means.


Obama and Democrats are hoping the answer is new energy behind some of their favorite attacks on Donald Trump and Senate Republicans.

The Supreme Court’s deadlocked decision, which has the effect of upholding a lower court’s ruling against Obama, could help boost turnout among liberal voting blocs in two ways — by energizing supporters of immigration reform and making real the consequences of the Republican vow to let the voters decide on the make-up of the Supreme Court.

“We’ve got a very real choice that America faces right now,” Obama said. “We’ve got a choice about who we’re going to be as a country, what we’re going to teach our kids, and how we want to be represented in Congress and in the White House.”

What he said, was basically the theme of Hillary Clinton’s statement, as well.

"Today’s deadlocked decision from the Supreme Court is unacceptable, and show us all just how high the stakes are in this election,” it read.

And as for all the talk of the blows to his legacy, Obama laughed them off, eager to throw down, goading the court and the Republicans to see how this might work out for them.

“It was a one-word opinion that said, we can’t come up with a decision,” Obama said. “Maybe the next time they can—if we have a full court issuing a full opinion on anything, then we take it seriously.”

At least for Thursday, Republicans felt vindicated. The president is to blame for the immigration negotiations going sour, they say, and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has made a huge issue of rejecting what he says has been immense executive overreach out of this West Wing.

“It’s a win for Congress, and it’s a win in our fight to restore the separation of powers. Presidents don’t write laws—Congress writes laws,” Ryan said Thursday.

But the Democrats have other ideas — and Obama used the decision to reinforce every big political point Democrats had been planning to emphasize against the GOP — congressional inaction, apathy at best toward Latinos and other immigrants and their calculated obstruction on the Supreme Court.

Obama didn’t mention Trump by name, but the presumptive GOP nominee lurked in nearly every sentence, wrapping it all together for the president: offering “fantasy” responses to the problem based on “spasms of politics,” symbolizing “fearmongering” that comes and goes but isn’t what Obama says the country is about, and raising the specter of being the one to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat with a justice who would have turned the 4-4 split decision into a clear loss for the White House and the immigrants hoping to have their legal status cleared up.

Running against Washington is the oldest trick in politics, but Democrats are trying to put a different spin on it this year: it’s not that Republicans are wrong or corrupt or complacent, it’s that they just don’t do anything at all, even in the face of crisis. That’s how they’re trying to pick up on the protest politics that propelled Trump and Bernie Sanders—voters, they’re betting, are hungry for action, not parliamentary procedures that keep votes from hitting the floor.

For that, the reminder of at least four years of waiting on immigration reform (including, Obama reminded people on Thursday, the House refusing to let the bipartisan Senate bill even get to the floor) lines right up with the sit-in House Democrats staged through the night Wednesday to try to get a vote on gun control.

More than just offering to do something, Obama said, Democrats are offering what he says is a real plan. And here, Trump not by name again: “that’s the real amnesty: pretending we can deport 11 million or build a wall without spending tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer money is abetting what is really just factually incorrect.”

Most of the Democratic response on the court case, though, is going to be specifically targeted at engaging Latinos, whom Trump may have already riled into being the highest percentage voting bloc come November.

“I’ve often said that the Dreamer movement needed to become a voter mobilization movement,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas. “Obviously, a lot of the dreamers and many of their parents are ineligible to vote, but they have American citizen relatives and friends who can be their voice at the ballot box. And I think this will certainly spark that.”

Then, of course, there’s that empty court seat. The White House had for months been looking ahead to the end of the Supreme Court term for more 4-4 split decisions that they’d use to reanimate the case for filling the empty seat. Thursday’s decision gives a new bite at that, mixed in with the Republicans don’t do anything argument, mixed in with what Obama wants to be the frightening prospect that alternatively, mixed in with the prospect that Trump could be the president who’ll fill the vacancy turn the balance of the court the other way.

“This is what we feared the most by the Republican refusal to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), in remarks on the Senate floor just after the decision came down. “A split court now leaves in place for the timing being an injunction across the United States, literally affects millions of people living across the country. they were unable to reach a decision, split 4-4. That should never have happened. If the Senate Republicans hadn’t taken this unprecedented, unconstitutional approach toward that vacancy, we wouldn’t have been in this position.”

Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who’s in the mix to be Clinton’s running mate, said it bluntly in his remarks Thursday afternoon to the National Association of Latino Elected Officials.

Immigration reform is coming, he said.

“It’s not going to be, 'si se puede [yes, we can],'” he said. “El año que viene [by next year], it’s going to be, be logramos [we made it]. I have no doubt about it.”