President Obama expressed frustration in a public statement at the White House Thursday over a split vote on a case before the Supreme Court, focusing his ire on Senate Republicans for refusing to confirm his replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Obama bemoaned the Court’s 4-4 affirmation of a lower court decision blocking his administration’s attempts to protect illegal immigrants from deportation through executive orders.

“The fact that the Supreme Court wasn’t able to issue a decision today doesn’t just set the system back even further, it takes us further from the country that we aspire to be,” he said. The president blamed the Court’s inability to reach a decision on “the Republican failure so far to give a fair hearing to Mr. Merrick Garland, my nominee to the Supreme Court.”