“In the absence of sufficient contemporaneous documentation indicating that cognitively deteriorating President Biden himself made a given executive decision, such decisions do not carry the force of law and should be considered void.”
That was what a major report released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee concluded about former President Joe Biden’s autopen usage during his presidency. The report on Biden’s mental acuity while in office and his autopen use was spearheaded by committee Chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Tenn.
The committee’s report notes that the Biden administration “left no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him.â€
It seems Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and House Republicans agree with the committee’s conclusions.
The conclusions about Biden’s executive decisions being “void†means there will soon be a very serious legal challenge to the orders Biden gave, but didn’t verify, while in office.
Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X that her office has “already initiated a review†of Biden’s autopen usage and thanked Comer for his detailed report.
To a certain extent the Oversight Committee has simply confirmed what most Americans already knew. That is, Biden was clearly in severe mental and physical decline from the time he was elected and struggled to handle the basic duties of office. One didn’t need to be a doctor or have insider information to know that. It was obvious nearly every time he made a public appearance.
What the report has done is shine a light on some of the inner workings of the Biden White House. The report paints a damning picture—one could even call it a conspiracy—of how Biden’s aides, both formal and informal, manipulated their position to secure executive orders, pardons, and clemencies that the president may have had no knowledge of.
In one example of how decisions were made in the White House the report highlighted the process that led to a series of pardons as Biden was leaving office. Among these pardons were Biden family members, including his son, Hunter. Biden had said earlier in his presidency that he wouldn’t pardon his son.
The Oversight Committee report says that no official documentation exists regarding how the pardon judgments were made. Instead, the decision to grant these pardons was handed down by “second hand†to the second in command under Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients, Rosa Po. After receiving the list, Po called Zients “who verbally authorized the use of the autopen from home.†The report said that Zients “did not even know who actually used the autopen to apply the signature after his aide, using his email account with his permission, communicated that the autopen was authorized for the clemency actions.†Zients allegedly went ahead with the autopen pardons without confirming anything with the president.
It couldn’t be clearer now that Biden was simply the figurehead of a deep state presidency. His handlers generally made sure to keep him out of the spotlight as much as possible while the executive apparatus went on autopilot. Court intrigue rather than individual decision making by the man elected by the American people was how business was done.
Biden ate ice cream, doled out gifts to family members, and occasionally came out of cold storage to wave to crowds and assure the people he was alive. Funny given the tenor of the current so-called “No Kings†protests aimed at President Donald Trump. Biden’s final days certainly seemed a lot more like late-stage monarchy to me.
The Oversight Committee report brings up another potential long-term issue. While it’s unlikely that the United States will soon again experiment with putting a man in steep mental decline in the president’s office, it’s not impossible that a situation of a missing in action president might arise again in the future.
Given the immense power the executive branch wields, it would perhaps be wise to regularize the process by which executive actions are verified.
As John Harrison, a constitutional professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, said at a Senate hearing about Biden’s autopen usage, Congress has the power to oversee whether the president’s orders are actually being given by the man who was elected to office. Perhaps it’s time Congress regularizes that. Better yet, it may be wise to simply disallow autopen usage in the future.
The autopen business remains a big deal because it’s tied to one of the most significant scandals in American presidential history: the coverup and denial of the Biden’s mental decline while in office.
Because of this coverup the American people can’t be certain that official acts by the president were his acts at all, so we’ve been thrown into an unprecedented legal situation of deciding what he did that was valid and what was potentially “void.â€
It’s easy to see why the Democratic Party and their media enablers who helped cover up Biden’s decline remain so deeply unpopular with the American people.
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