As far as I can see, President Obama has at least two good options before him. The first would be to try to drive out turnout in 2016 by nominating someone who a) will agree with his party on pretty much everything, and b) can be spun easily into a martyr. As we learned with the Sotomayor nomination in 2009 (and as I learn each time I criticize her), it is extremely easy to pretend that Republican opposition to unacceptable judicial philosophies is “really” opposition to the immutable characteristics of whoever happens to hold them. If Obama is worried that his party might lose the election in November, he’d be smart to choose a radical candidate who reflects one or more of the Democrats’ key minority constituencies, and then to demagogue the hell out of the resultant contretemps for as long as he feasibly can. In truth, conservative opposition to this candidate would have no more to do with his identity than progressive opposition to Clarence Thomas has to do with his being black. But this is politics, not physics, and nonsense flies cleanly through the air these days. If Obama is so minded, he can give that nonsense a push.

Obama’s second good option would be to heighten the civil war within the GOP by offering up a nominee that could feasibly be approved. If the president were to propose, say, the D.C. Circuit’s Sri Srinivasan, he would be able to point out repeatedly that Srinivasan had served in the Bush administration’s Office of the Solicitor General, and to note that, last time the Senate had been asked to vote on his nomination, it did so 97-0. (Among those who voted for Srinivasan in 2013 were Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz, all of whom have suggested that the Senate should wait to replace Scalia until the next president is in office.) As far as I can see, a Srinivasan-type appointment would provoke a serious fight within the Right, potentially weakening it ahead of November. In one quarter, you would hear the go-along-get-along types arguing that the president has a right to choose whomever he wants as long as they are “qualified,” and warning that a Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton nomination might yield someone much worse. In another quarter, you would hear the firebrands terming anybody who was so much as considering acquiescence to be a traitor to the cause. If Obama wants to see a public spat between the Republican nominee and some of the party’s elders in the Senate, this course strikes me as a clever way of doing it.

All in all, the President has the upper hand here.