But it was a damn influential sentence. The Supreme Court’s split effectively kills President Obama’s 2014 proposals to allow 4.5 million immigrants to apply for protection from deportation and work permits. It vindicates Senate Republicans’ strategy of holding the court at eight members after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. And it raises the stakes of the presidential election in November. [...]
In the long run, they may have rendered the federal government even more dysfunctional by further eroding one of the most important remaining Senate norms. Even in the medium run, they may have chosen poorly: Senate Republicans might not like the justices a President Donald Trump would nominate — and if the 2016 race continues as it has, they’ll never get the chance to find out anyway. [...]
If Democrats had to have a setback in this Supreme Court term to dramatize the stakes of the election, this was certainly the one that might do the most to mobilize key voters. Millions of Latino voters know unauthorized immigrants; in some cases, eligible voters are the siblings or children of immigrants who would have qualified for Obama’s abortive immigration programs.
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