The deadlocked ruling has thrown out President Obama’s plan to grant a temporary amnesty from deportation to millions of immigrants whose children were born in the United States and have US citizenship, leaving a lower court ruling blocking the initiative intact. Announced in November 2014, the proposal was met with heavy opposition from Republican-led states and resulted in a lawsuit lodged by the state of Texas and 25 others which eventually prevailed in a federal trial court in the Fifth Circuit. The defeat-by-default is likely to further fan Democrat calls for the Senate Judiciary Committee to consider the Obama administration’s nomination of Merrick Garland as successor to the late Antonin Scalia in the crucial ninth chair of the Supreme Court bench, a process that the Republican-led Senate is hoping to defer until after the upcoming national elections.

Sources: Bloomberg BigLaw Business; Wall Street Journal