President Joe Biden offered a peculiar response to reporters asking him to comment on vows by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson to block his proposed Supreme Court reforms.
The comments came on the tarmac at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport as he arrived at the Texas capital to deliver a speech on the court reforms at the LBJ Presidential Library.
When asked by a reporter about the Louisiana lawmaker's proclamation that the reforms are "dead on arrival," Biden said, "That's what he is." After reporters asked for clarification whether he was talking about Johnson, he said, "He is. Dead on arrival."
It's unclear what Biden meant, exactly. Some commenters on social media tried to parse it, each with their own various theories of what the president was trying to say.
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"He means in November Johnson will be out if Dems get the house back," explained the account @Takuma1700.
Some MAGA commenters, however, chose a darker interpretation, suggesting that this comment was actually a threat of violence.
"Our Commander-in-Chief just threatened to take out the Speaker of the House," proclaimed Margot Cleveland, correspondent for the far-right outlet The Federalist.
There's probably a simpler explanation than either of these things, wrote Jonathan Greenberg, a former strategist for the pro-Israel lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee: "Here’s wily Hill veteran Joe Biden using the old 'I’m rubber, you’re glue' strategy."
Biden's court reforms, which follow several years of a hard-right Republican-appointed majority rewriting core precedents and civil rights against the opinions of most legal scholars and the general public, call for limiting justices to staggered terms of 18 years, effectively meaning one new justice is appointed every 2 years and each president has a predictable number of appointments. He also called for a binding code of ethics to prevent justices accepting gifts from benefactors with business before the court, and explicitly overturning the court's recent ruling that grants presidents a presumption of criminal immunity for official acts.
Watch the clip below or at the link here.
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