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.”
Obama also called the idea that an eight-justice Court can function is a “fantasy,” later scolding Republicans that, “if you keep on blocking judges, from getting on the bench, then courts can’t issue decisions.”
But in contradiction to his finger-wagging about an eight-member Court, the president had just a few minutes earlier praised the Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Tex. at Austin—a 4-3 split, with Justice Kagan recusing herself—which rejected a constitutional challenge to the University of Texas’s affirmative action program.
“I’m pleased that the Supreme Court upheld the basic notion that diversity is an important value in our society and that this country should provide a high quality education to all our young people, regardless of our background,” said Obama. “We are not a country that guarantees equal outcomes, but we do strive to provide an equal shot to everybody. And that’s what was upheld today.”
