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President Otto Penn
Instead of ranting about the biggest scandal in presidential history, I want to keep this short and elicit the legal opinions of the former presidential committee signing everything in the name of Joe Biden.
It has been clear, and even more evident, that he has been out of the picture for quite some time now. Let’s do some math with information I’ve looked up since hearing a few revelations on the Trish Regan Show. It seems in pardons alone, he issued 8,064. A single pardon is a serious undertaking that only the president is allowed to do. If Biden spent five minutes on each person, learning about their injustice, and worked half of an eight-hour day just on pardons, that would result in 168 half-days on this alone.
I put the following to the legal brains here: We need a good test case against the autopen for precedence. Biden told Mike Johnson he did not sign an executive order to freeze new liquid natural gas export permits. His autopen most likely did. Would this make a justifiable case to nullify every law passed with an autopen signature?
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It would seem to, but the only testimony we have that he didn’t sign it is his, and at this point it would be hard to make that stick.
I don’t know that we’ll be able to successfully invalidate any of the signatures.
Is there evidence that he WAS competent when those signatures supposedly happened, and only now is it possible to assume that he’s not competent to say that he didn’t?
I thought it was widely accepted that the 8K signatures were in fact made by autopen. Would that be contested, if an effort to overturn the orders were to be made?
With him being as incapacitated as he was, nobody can say with a straight face this was legit.
It is a question involving the internal workings of another branch of government. So far, SCOTUS has left the integrity of these processes undisturbed. No quorum, that’s for Congress to solve. It would be interesting, though, if Trump, whom Biden attempted to strip of executive privilege, tried to nullify the autopardons. There are still lots of bananas around.
No doubt about it if cast of character different – for Trump or other not Dem: off with his head.
Nah. Any handwriting expert will classify most in seconds, some in minutes, and a few might require a magnifying glass. And if any doubt remains, go after the ink. Elementary stuff.
The Bush 43 DOJ issued an obviously non-binding opinion that cleared the way for autopen signatures. Obama did it at least once when he was over seas but as a precaution, re-signed the bill when returning. So there is no SCOTUS opinion on the usage.
If the pardons are your thing there is no Constitutional provision or federal statute that says pardons must be issued on paper and signed. Prior to 1853 no one but the President was involved in the process. The petitioning process was given to the DOJ and the current Office of the Pardon Attorney was created in 1894. In both terms, Donald Trump has regularly bypassed the DOJ in issuing pardons.
Pardons are a plenary power of the executive and cannot be overturned either by the courts or the Congress (Ex-parte Garland, (1866)).
If I were a J6er, or one of their supporters, I think rooting for Trump to find a way to revoke pardons handed out in the previous administration is a little self defeating. But that takes foresight and a refusal to not getting caught up in the news cycle.
The LNG EO is the best example I can think of because he said he didn’t sign it. A court will probably say he’s just a feeble old man and dismiss it.
The challenge to the use of the autopen is not over the use of the autopen itself, but whether Biden knowingly authorized the use of the autopen. So just proving that the autopen was used will (likely) not invalidate anything signed using the autopen. There would need to be proof that Biden did not in fact authorize the use of the autopen for a particular document, or that any “authorization” made by Biden was not done with some minimal level of mental competence.
I don’t know, but it is possible that the president can authorize pardons by categories. I believe President Trump has done so.
The issue is not the autopen. It is whether Joey Boombatz actually intended to issue the pardons. It is another instance of the larger problem of an administration with nobody on top–how legit is delegated authority (and did it even exists) when POTUS is a semi-vegetable. Barring some smoking gun in a detailed, documented memoir, I don’t see how you prove that Cornpop’s Nemesis was completely uninvolved in every instance.
Side note on signatures: My sister-in-law was one of several workers in the Reagan White House who were authorized to forge POTUS’ signature on photos, notes and souvenir items. For years, my brother would claim that he could tell whether a Reagan photo or letter signature was the real deal or done by some staff proxy (some were not very accurate forgeries).
There are a host of difficulties to mounting legal challenges to the use of the autopen in the Biden administration.
For any challenge, proof that Biden did not, at the time of signing, both authorize the use of the autopen and have the minimal level of mental competence to understand what he was authorizing, would be very difficult. Such proof would almost entirely depend on getting the person in the Biden administration who used the autopen to admit that the person knowingly committed a very serious wrong (maybe even a crime) by affixing the president’s signature to a document that the president did not functionally authorize.
To even get to the point of being able to try to prove that a document (Executive Order or pardon) was signed without Biden’s competent knowledge or consent, you’d have to establish “standing” in court (the requirement that U.S. courts decide only actual controversies or cases, and do not issue advisory opinions).
For Executive Orders, you’d have to find someone who was in some individual, particularized, way harmed by the Executive Order. Just being a “taxpayer” or other very broad category is insufficient.
For the pardons, it would probably take a United States Attorney (federal prosecutor) willing to charge one of the “pardoned” individuals with a crime ostensibly covered by the “pardon,” and then put up with the public relations and media blowback while the U.S. Attorney fights with the court over the validity of the “pardon.”
The point isn’t if the auto pen was used. It is if its use was authorized.
I don’t know how many signatures there were. Say 4000. If Slow Joe spent 5 minutes on each signature (reviewing it, asking questions, etc.) that’s 20,000 minutes or 333.33 hours. Split up into 4-hour half days, that’s over 83 days of authorizations. Did he – could he – spend that amount of time on them all? I don’t think so, but that doesn’t lead to any one of them being “unauthorized.”
That’s approximately the situation in Ex-parte Garland. After the Civil War, Congress passed a law that required attorneys practicing in federal courts to swear an oath that they had never served in the Confederate government. Augustus Garland had served as a CSA Senator from Arkansas and received a pardon from Andrew Johnson. To bar him from practicing, Garland argued, was to punish him for a crime that he had been pardoned for and SCOTUS agreed.
Under Garland, any charge brought by a federal prosecutor would probably be dismissed with prejudice.
Do you honestly think Trump signed all 1,500 J6 pardons individually? (By your mathematical formula 125 hours of signing work between Noon and 10pm on Inauguration Day.)
He had four years to get ready, EJ!
Your happy little Dopey Joe interregnum supercharged the Big Bad Orange Man. Talk about being hoist by your own petard.
And anything he signed prior to being sworn in is just an autograph. But you know that.
Project Veritas says Jill was the puppet master.
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/david-hogg-reveals-jill-bidens-chief-of-staff-ran-the-white-house
They could all have been prepared beforehand, and only signed later.
If blanket pardons are to be continued, the President should be videotaped not only signing the blanket pardon, but initialing each individual name . . .
The math still doesn’t work.
I was only referring to your comment about things signed before taking office.
Excellent video on this by Nellie Miranda.
Can a nuclear first strike attack come from an autopen signature of the US President?
Can a peace treaty between nations come from an autopen signature? How about signing executive orders?
How about a Presidential resignation?
It seems to me from a common sense laymen’s point of view that there ought to be a tiered system for signing off on things of various levels of importance or priority. Or perhaps the work should be delegated so that responsibility can be followed. Certain things rise to a higher level than others. I can totally see some mundane rules being formalized with an autopen. However, on more critical things perhaps there should be checks on the autopen to avoid potential nefarious deeds or a fast one trying to be pulled.
Most of that will be moot in the future when the election is about which AI we vote for to be POTUS.
I saw a comic about this years ago, referring to President Quayle, and maybe President Amy Carter, and then President Headroom…
It’s the same recycled arguments that have no basis in law or the constitution.