I have good news for you, then. President Biden will sign the bill on Monday, January 6.

Several decade’s long effort to repeal these laws finally resulted in a bill eliminating those laws being passed by Congress and this bill, passed by large margins by both the House and Senate, was officially “presented” to Biden on December 27.

According to the Constitution, outgoing President Biden has just ten days, Sundays excepted, to either veto, sign this bill into law, or take no action, resulting in a “pocket veto.”

Well, if you look at the official White House listing of what Biden is doing regarding various bills these last couple of days of his travel to various posh vacation sites, he’s not doing much.

One wonders if Biden, or whoever is actually running things, and presenting documents for him to just sign, will just go for the pocket veto, and stick it to us on the way out the door.

I think it was more that Biden had “won” in 2020 and they assumed that he could win again in 2024, and another Democrat might not be able to win. Would someone who could have replaced Biden would have gone with very different policies? To a rational outsider that might appear possible, but given the likely candidates, it’s unlikely. Somebody who didn’t have the approval of the party operatives couldn’t have gotten into the White House too replace Biden.

There were two … what Biden might call “inflection points” in the media’s response before the final one last summer. One that surprised me was how they went from seeing Biden’s abysmal performance in the 2019/2020 debates to whole-heartedly endorsing Biden. Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Biden was the candidate who could beat Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Wanting Sanders out of the way and Trump out of the White House, the media could ignore Biden’s mental decline.

Enough time passed between the debates and Jim Clyburn’s endorsement for earlier impressions to be forgotten. Biden was also someone who the media was very familiar with. If you accepted Biden’s wackiness for decades you could miss disturbing signs of decline as just Joe being Joe. Talking about Corn Pop and the little hairs on his legs that stood up when they got wet was just Joe being Joe.

The other moment was when talk of Biden being a temporary, transitional figure went away, and the media suddenly decided that Joe could go the full 4 or 8 years. That happened early in the administration and nobody really noticed it happening. Someone compared the media to a school of fish or flock of birds that suddenly all change direction as a group without thinking about it or making signs that we would recognize as communication. Of course, we know about Journo-list now and the other backchannels of communication, but it’s still startling how sudden, dramatic, and unanimous the changes are.