By January 8, as NBC News reported, Joe Biden was all out of available “options” to restore security to America’s southern border.

That was nonsense when it was reported, as I wrote at the time. Not only had Biden declined to pursue many of the mechanisms available to the president to enforce immigration law and provide additional security at the border, he was already reluctantly pursuing some of the “options” to which he previously objected.

Now, in the wake of the failure of a long-negotiated bipartisan border compromise bill — one that Biden hoped would force his hand in the eyes of constituents who are hostile to the enforcement of border security —NBC News revealed that Biden has discovered some additional “options” the president hadn’t fully exhausted.

“The plans have been under consideration for months,” NBC’s report read — an admission that should lead to a critical revisitation of Biden’s dubious early January claim that he had done next to nothing to secure the border and was all out of ideas. Nevertheless, “the measures are still being drafted and are not expected to take place any time soon.”

No rush, Mr. President. The crisis will still be there when you get around to addressing it.

Perhaps the president’s lethargy is attributable to the hope on the part of his campaign that Biden can blame the chaos at the border on the GOP. That seems to be his administration’s plan. But as I noted yesterday, it’s an untenable one:

If the president wants his message to stick, he has to at least attempt to take action to close the border insofar as he can. He can claim that there’s only so much he can do in the absence of statutory reforms, but he would have to do something. . . . But if additional efforts to close the border are even partially successful, that will undermine the dubious talking point that nothing can be done about the crisis. If Biden takes no action or merely gestures in the direction of border security, he still has his talking point, but he also still has the crisis that is rapidly consuming his presidency.

It seems like the president will eventually err on the side of engaging with the border crisis, but only after it has spiraled a little further out of control. That will likely deprive him of his last, best hope for weaseling out of the consequences of his own actions (or, rather, lack thereof). That’s surely reckless, but, to put it in terms that the progressives who landed Biden in this pickle would recognize, “Hope dies last.”