Watch: Exhausted-Sounding Biden Starts to Read Out Bill Title, Gives Up After Just 2 Words
President Joe Biden signed four bills on Tuesday aimed at helping veterans and their family members as well as examining racial disparities in veterans services and maternal health outcomes for female military service members.
You know, your typical, run-of-the-mill progressive takes on veteran services that largely avoided the more glaring issues at the Department of Veteran Affairs but no doubt will help some very well-deserving American heroes.
By the looks of things, however, it was unclear how much Biden himself knew about the legislation he was signing.
At least, that would be the impression given by the lethargic manner in which he signed the bills in question, as the 79-year-old president seemingly got tuckered out just trying to read the title of one of the bills and muttered to himself that he should probably “just sign it” instead.
“Here we go,” a seemingly quite jovial Biden said when preparing to sign one of the bills.
“‘Amend title …,'” he hazarded before giving up and mumbling, “Well I’m not going to read it all, I’ll just sign it.”
“Alright, here we go. Amend title—eh, I’m not gonna read it all. I’ll just sign it.” pic.twitter.com/kfwOlIJMEF
— Jake Schneider (@jacobkschneider) November 30, 2021
I mean, probably a good move, to be honest. Who knows how it would have gone if he’d tried to mumble the whole lengthy title out.
The names of the four bills he signed were the “Hire Veterans Health Heroes Act of 2021,” the “Protecting Moms Who Served Act of 2021,” the “Colonel John M. McHugh Tuition Fairness for Survivors Act of 2021” and “A bill to require the Comptroller General of the United States to conduct a study on disparities associated with race and ethnicity with respect to certain benefits administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, and for other purposes.”
If it was that last one — yeah, that was a good move.
While Biden was signing another of the bills, the senators who joined him for the occasion were subject to a very, very pregnant pause as he looked over the legislation, as though for the first time, muttering something about “Here we go” before seeming to take a stab at reading the thing.
Awkward silence from senators as Joe Biden starts to read out the title of a bill he’s signing before giving up… pic.twitter.com/Sgpiyani99
— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) November 30, 2021
This didn’t seem to go very far, for the president finally asked the lawmakers, “Are you ready?” as though they were all about to join him for another test drive at the GM plant or something vastly more exciting than watching him sign a bill.
Just another day in the Biden administration, I suppose.
According to The Hill, the president gave some detailed remarks about the legislation he was signing with relative coherency and joked with the cheerful senators who had gathered to watch the clearly riveting exercise of signing the legislation.
Yet the fact remains that when it came down to it, yet again, Biden appeared confused, tired and, in this instance, almost bored with his job while the cameras were rolling for the whole world to see.
What’s really bad about this is that while yes, we could easily add it to our well-stocked collection of examples of the president’s apparent cognitive health decline, it’s also a repetition of a theme that Biden sometimes appears to not even really know or care very much about what he’s signing, doing or speaking about.
He kicked off his presidential tenure by signing a series of executive orders that he couldn’t even keep straight, after all, and that it wouldn’t be remotely unreasonable to speculate he had little, if anything, to do with authoring.
Biden is the executive of the federal government of the United States. Bills go to his desk after they are passed by the legislative branch for him to either sign or veto as he sees fit — this is a huge part of his job as president.
Yet on Tuesday, he was acting about as interested in the bills he was signing as I usually am when presented with the opportunity to peruse the terms of service on an app download in full.
He’s basically just doing the executive equivalent of scrolling down to the bottom and dishonestly clicking “I have read the terms and service” without knowing what the heck he’s agreeing to.
I should admittedly probably pay much more attention to privacy agreements I enter into with Big Tech companies, but I’m just one, small, random private citizen.
Joe Biden is the leader of the free world and is supposed to be running the country. Is it too much for him to simply speak coherently and try to appear interested while exercising one of his most important duties for the cameras?
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