Donald Trump said on Tuesday he is terminating all documents, including pardons, that he said his predecessor Joe Biden signed using an autopen – an unprecedented attempt to rollback a previous president’s actions using what legal thinkers view as a flimsy pretext.
The autopen is a device used to replicate a person’s signature with precision, typically for high-volume or ceremonial documents. It has been employed by presidents of both major parties to sign letters and proclamations.
Legal scholars broadly agree the constitution does not require a president to physically sign many documents, including pardons, with their bare hands to make them legally enforceable, according to PolitiFact. Federal law also lacks a mechanism for a president to overturn a previous president’s pardon.
There’s a gap in there – using the autopen for some signingns, sure, why not? But then the gap and then the bureaucracy using the autopen to sign things the President doesn’t know about. And so, in some sense, is not really signing.
So how much of the second as going on? My assumption, simply based upon no knowledge at all but my suspiciions of every bureucracy, ever, is quite a bit. Irrelevant of party or supposed senility too. But maybe that’s just me.
How to find out? Well, a useful first step is to throw the lot ourt and see what can in fact be proven……
Still, Trump is known for decisively taking action that flies in the face of legal precedent and then letting the courts sort it out. Autopens have not faced serious legal challenge until now.
‘Xactly.
At least The Guardian was honest enough to name the source as PolitiFact.
Part and parcel of course was whether old Joe was actually mentally capable at the time.
How much of his decision making could be nullified by his advanced ga-gaism.
Joe has Ernest Saunders Guinness Alzheimer’s – it’s a hokey-cokey type condition where he couldn’t stand trial for keeping classified documents to which he was never entitled, but he could run for president because he was the ‘best Biden ever’, but then he couldn’t run for president because he couldn’t string a sentence together, but he could sign thousands of pardons, but he couldn’t find his way off a stage, but he could deliver weird speeches with a demonic red backdrop, but he couldn’t operate at all other than between 12 noon and 1pm, but he could say that America could be summed up in one word which was ASUFUTIMAEHAEHFUTBW, but he was tirelessly working for the American people, but he couldn’t understand where Rep. Jackie Walorski was because he’d forgotten she had died in a car accident a month ago, but he was sharp as a fucking tack, bro.
PS Trump is getting on, have you noticed how he only works twelve hours a day including holding three hour extemporaneous press conferences off the cuff where he takes the piss mercilessly out of these loathsome cunts?
Brave move. If Trump succeeds in over turning his predecessors pardons, the Dems will do the same to him only harder.
The Dems are going to do whatever they do to him irrespective of what he does to them.
They already changed the law to allow for retrospective action against him, tried to impeach him, tried to prosecute him for paying back loans on time, and tried to bankrupt him via bullshit civil actions with insane costs judgments.
They planted classified material on him by couriering it to him, they raided his home and went through his wife’s knickers, and applied entirely different standards to those they applied to Biden.
They very possibly have been behind two assassination attempts, one of which only failed because he turned his head at the moment the trigger was squeezed.
They undermined him totally during his first term and are having a very good go at it during his second.
They are trying to turn the military against him by making vague threats of future Nuremberg-style action against service personnel who follow ‘unlawful’ orders, though they cannot say which orders and why they might be unlawful, only that they may at some later date under a crooked court be found to be illegal.
They have placemen and women in the courts, and in the Republican Party, working to thwart him.
They fixed the 2020 election against him, luckily.
They have spent nine years now traducing and defaming him via their mates in the press and TV, and they are doing their level best to cancel anyone who stands by him.
They are employing street mobs to close down anyone who might be on his side, their supporters are shooting his supporters dead, and shooting National Guardsmen dead, and when this happens the Dems and their media whores are blaming him for it.
I think Trump might be forgiven for thinking that there’s not a lot else they can do, bar more of the above, and that he might as well get on with fucking them up good and proper because if he doesn’t then shit is going to get double real if Vance doesn’t win next time round.
Good summary.
one of the best posts in the site’s history
So much is made possible by activist federal judges while the supposedly conservative SCOTUS pretends not to notice.
I cannot recall conservative judges acting in this way although a democrat executive would simply laugh at them Eric Holder-style.
You’re too kind.
I stand corrected!
It’s true, though – what can they do that they haven’t already done, or tried?
If Trump has made sure he can prove he signed all his personally, and a lot of the, were filled, then yes, this is not a good move.
Everything he signs is likely on camera. Haven’t you noticed that Trump *likes* being in public?
Alternatively he is making the wise move of setting a legal precedent so that he could use autopen himself without any fear of them later being revoked.
The only way to make an Executive Order un-revokable is to not actually do it by Executive Order, but legislation.
And even that could be revoked, but it’s harder as it needs 400+ people to agree instead of a stroke of a pen.
Then it’s about damn time they did!
The Yanks were lucky. At least the autopen was used just to sign documents. We have a human autopen as Prime Minister…
“taking action that flies in the face of legal precedent and then letting the courts sort it out. Autopens have not faced serious legal challenge until now.”
So the courts haven’t been involved before, but Trump is flying in the face of legal precedent. Right. Someone doesn’t seem to understand that ‘No one has ever questioned our dodgy behaviour before’ isn’t the same thing as ‘legal precedent’.
Good point, I think the word they were looking for is “convention” in place of “legal precedent”.
You could argue that the electorate, or at least its photocopiers, knowingly voted for a senile crook and that therefore his undercrooks using the autopen is perfectly OK. I’d like to see that argument made in public.
This is like the deep fake thing. If you can do an accurate replica of a signature, then what is it worth anymore? Who cares if there was a hand on the pen? What matters is trust that the person named actually approved it.
Exactly. Autopen is fine, as long as there is evidence the pres knew it and approved it. No such evidence exits for Biden. It is crystal clear that staff used it. It is likely they got money for things like pardons.
Trump – we don’t deserve him – signs documents with a Sharpie on camera for the world to see.
Trump’s move is perfect. Kill ’em all; let the courts deal with it.
Gamecock is disappointed it took Trump 11 months to take this action. I don’t think there is anything new that triggered this, just took 11 months to build up the gumption.
A possibility is that Trump has been waiting for 11 months for his legal team to tell him how to overturn fake executive actions. And they are stumped. So he got tired of waiting, and took charge. Or they finally told him to nullify them. A lot going on behind the curtain, no doubt.
We may finally have something that actually is “unprecedented.”
Aside: if a WH staffer conspired to free an imprisoned mass murderer with a fake pardon, Gamecock thinks that should make them an accessory to mass murder. IOW, give him the same sentence as the one he freed. Including life.
I think it’s pretty much the pardons that is the thing aimed at here.
Every Biden executive order can be overridden by a Trump one. The only one that isn’t revocable that way is a pardon.
But a pardon does need to be given knowingly by the President. No one else has that power.
Never ceases to amaze me how so many commentators studiously avoid the actual issue at hand so much of the time.
The whole point of the autopen usage is that the “signature mark” – which I cannot being to think is irrelevant – could have been made by someone other than the President.
That’s the rubicon that Biden crossed.
To avoid that problem, it is vital that every substantive usage of the autopen needs to be backed up by very very solid evidence that the president did so authorise _in each individual case_. Obama did it because something needed signed pronto and document and president couldn’t be brought together fast enough.
That is absolutely not the case here at all. To that extent, all such uses of the autopen when it’s known that the president was in town should be treated as extremely suspect at best.
If it’s a volume thing – as it was with the last minute pardons – it’s still iffy. For executive orders, it’s entirely inexcusable.
Sadly he probably knew about his blanket pardon for himself and his family, so difficult to invalidate that.
But he may not have known til after he was told. We simply don’t know. Trump is right: kill ’em all.
Then let them bring forth the evidence. It shouldn’t be hard if that’s true.
Nothing to do with using an autopen. Any Presidential Executive Order can be reversed by Presidential Executive Order. They are intrinsically flimsy, they are done explicitly because the president thinks they can’t legislate for it. If you want it written in stone, bloody well legislate for it, just as with Supreme Court rulings.
I don’t think they can just reverse pardons in the same way. There’s also a good argument they shouldn’t.
If the pardon was illegal, then that’s a different story.
What might make it illegal? A bribe?
Not signed by the president. Presidential pardon requires participation of the president.
That’s the thing – it’s not a reversal he’s doing. It’s more like annulling an invalid marriage; it *never happened* because the wrong person did it.
Which in the case of an annulled marriage makes any children retrospectively into b*stards as you may recall from history. Awkward that.
Sadly not true as many of Trump’s attempts to reverse Biden EO’s are being stymied by blue state Federal District Judges.
By comparison on day one of his own presidency pre-auto pen Biden actually signed 17 EO’s of which 12 were direct cancellation and annulment of those previously signed byTrump with minimal (zero?) pushback:-
https://politico.com/interactives/2021/interactive_biden-first-day-executive-orders/
We have two-tier justice, they have one-way (it only works when we do it).
For comparison’s sake this is how Trumps EO’s have been largely negated:-
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/how-many-of-trumps-executive-orders-are-being-challenged
It started out as being done for lack of time. This is why there’s a single President and e.g. the army isn’t being run directly by Congress.
You are correct though that a lot of executive orders are being done today because they don’t think it can be pushed through Congress for whatever reason.
I think that at least part of the point of this is that we have evidence (from emails etc of staffers) that there was considerable doubt whether Joe Biden (aka Pedo Pete) was actually aware of the pardons being issued nominally in his name. And I suspect that this might matter. If one of the pardons is challenged, the paper trail proving that Biden was aware of and approved the pardon would be the key to its validity. If no such evidence exists then the pardon is actually invalid as they are issued personally by the President. I don’t think a court will require that he personally signs each one, but they may well want documentary evidence that the President actually approved it.
Very likely many of the blanket type pardons like those issued to the Jan6 committee and to the Covid crew could not meet that test.