So I am a little behind the curve on this one, but it is just too amusing, and outright frustrating, to allow to pass without comment.
Back when Our Glorious now-President was campaigning for his current job, he made the following promise:
Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them. As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.
President Barack Hussein Obama broke this promise 9 days after his inauguration.
Here we are, almost a year later, and President Barack Hussein Obama signed a bill on Wednesday that was put on his desk on Monday… I guess there is no sense in trying to keep up with an alread-broken promise. However, Our Glorious President’s lack of integrity is not the topic of this particular post, despite the lead-in – the real topic is his lack of reading comprehension.
The bill he signed was a heavyweight spending bill with appropriations and funding for more than a few governmental agencies, but there was also a nice little amendment attached originally intended to allow Amtrak passengers to carry firearms onto trains in the same manner that airline passengers can on planes (locked up, in storage). I say “originally intended” for a reason, though – the bill Our Glorious President signed did something a little different:
It may sound absurd. But President Obama signed a bill into law Wednesday that requires passengers who carry firearms aboard Amtrak be locked in boxes for their journey.
No one is really sure where the minor rephrasing took place, but theories (i.e. finger-pointing), of course, abound:
Senior Congressional sources familiar with the error suggested the problem may have been introduced in the “enrolling” process of bills. Once both the House and Senate approve the final version of a bill, the text of the legislation is sent to an “enrolling clerk” who actually copies the bill onto parchment paper. The parchment version of the package is then sent to the White House for the president to sign into law.
Another theory is that the mistake could be something as simple as a printing error. The House and Senate run multiple versions of bills before they send the final copy to the White House to become law. Another possibility is that Congress sent President Obama the wrong, non-proofed version of the bill to sign.
However, regardless of where the error originated, it is Our Glorious President’s job, as a duly-elected representative of the entire American people, to read every gorramed thing that comes across his desk before he signs it. His signature on a bill makes it the law of the land, and if he has gotten into the habit of simply signing anything and everything that crosses his desk without personally reviewing, reading, examining, and weighing it, not only is he miserably failing at his professional and personal responsibilities, he is also creating inexcusable situations like this one. Hell, President Barack Hussein Obama was in such an inexplicable rush to sign the bill that his pen hit paper before Congress, who noticed the error, could correct it :
Aides to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., became aware of the problem Wednesday night as the House voted on its final slate of bills for the year. Pelosi’s staff tried to negotiate with Republican aides to see if they would agree to change the text of the bill without revoting the entire piece of legislation. But it was all for naught as Obama had already signed the measure into law.
If Our Glorious President had kept his campaign promises, maybe now we would not face an actual, honest-to-God law requiring law-abiding citizens to be transported in boxes if they try to take a train and bring their firearms along.
Yes, that provision of the law will not take effect for six months, the law can be corrected, and it probably will be corrected… next year. But let me make this very clear: a mistake of this magnitude never should have happened. Our government has checks and balances installed to prevent these very errors from occurring, and the fact that this did happen indicates that someone (or multiple someones) is not doing his or her job.
And given that Our Glorious President was the last person to handle the bill before it became law…
Remember this mistake when people tell you that the government can do something… anything… “better”.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I was a little behind the curve on this: Bob S., SayUncle, Joe Huffman, and David Hardy all beat me to the punch.
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