On the menu today: President Trump has made the preposterous claim that he can declare Joe Biden’s pardons “void, vacant and of no further force and effect.” If Trump’s argument about his far-reaching, unprecedented presidential powers ever gets up to the Supreme Court, the Supremes will reject that so quickly and overwhelmingly, NBA players will be impressed. But there are at least a few reasons to wonder how much Biden understood what he was signing at any given moment — from Mike Johnson’s tale of Biden being unaware of a liquid natural gas export ban, to the fact that in the two months since leaving office, Biden has spoken in public . . . once . . . for two minutes . . . in a pre-taped statement on video. How is Joe Biden doing these days? We have no idea.
Autopen, the Least-Impressive Transformer Ever
Color me highly skeptical that one president can reverse the pardons of a predecessor or declare them “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT.” (Color me even more skeptical that Donald Trump would want to establish that precedent!)
If the Trump administration has some serious evidence that Joe Biden didn’t know what he was signing, or that someone with the authority to use the “autopen” for the president’s signature abused that authority during Biden’s presidency, they ought to cough it up.
For example, as doddering as Joe Biden was, I find it hard to believe that the former president didn’t know he was pardoning his own son.
And by Tuesday, the White House was backtracking, insisting that Trump’s adamant declaration on Truth Social that “Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!” was merely raising questions:
“The president was raising the point that, ‘Did the president even know about these pardons? Was his legal signature used without his consent or knowledge?’” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at her regular briefing Monday.
“Was he aware of his signature being used on every single pardon? That’s a question you should ask the Biden White House.”
Yeah, that’s not what the president said at all, but by now we’re used to Trump’s staff rushing in with a “what he meant to say” explanation.
Probably the best and most compelling evidence that Biden was signing things he didn’t read or understand is House Speaker Mike Johnson’s description of confronting Biden about his executive order barring liquid natural gas exports to Europe, and Biden insisting he had done no such thing, and that his executive order had only called for a study of the issue. Biden’s White House announced that policy change on January 26, 2024, describing it as “a temporary pause on pending decisions on exports of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to non-FTA countries until the Department of Energy can update the underlying analyses for authorizations.”
For what it’s worth, apparently at the beginning of the presidency, the president submits a signature that is used for a graphic file that ends up being used every time in the Federal Register:
While it is true that many of Biden’s executive orders carry a signature matching the one posted by the Oversight Project, the National Archives, which runs the Federal Register, said in an emailed statement that official documents published in the Federal Register use a copy of the president’s signature that “comes from one graphic file.”
“At the beginning of each administration, the White House sends a sample of the President’s signature to the Office of the Federal Register, which uses it to create the graphic image for all Presidential Documents published in the Federal Register,” communications staff at the National Archives wrote.
This explains why the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project found that all of Biden’s signatures matched except the one used for his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race. Every signature on the Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush executive orders and presidential documents in the register is the same as well.
Way back in 2005, the White House Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush declared in a memo, “The President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law. Rather, the President may sign a bill within the meaning of Article I, Section 7 by directing a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.” (That memo refers to the “Whelan Memorandum,” as in our own Ed Whelan!) The precedent that a president’s signature affixed by autopen has the same legal and constitutional weight as one done by hand has never been challenged, until now.
But with that said . . .
. . . did you notice that we haven’t seen Joe Biden speak in person at any public event since Inauguration Day? It’s been two months.
Biden did attend Mass in Wilmington, Del., on Monday morning, so we have proof of life, so to speak.
On February 1, Biden offered a two-minute pre-taped video message at the Democratic National Committee’s winter meeting.
And as far as I can tell, that’s it. Jill Biden appeared at the Super Bowl, without her husband.
But Biden’s done no interviews, given no speeches. He’s not even given any responses to shouted questions from reporters. He’s allegedly writing a memoir of his White House years, but we know that thing will be ghostwritten.
Now, everyone can draw their own conclusions from this; it’s not unusual for a former president to stay out of the spotlight after his presidency ends.
But just about everybody in the Democratic Party told us from January 2021 to July 2024 that the octogenarian Biden was good to go for another four-year term. Democrats insisted, “Joe Biden has been transparent about his health,” no matter how many times Biden had public lapses in memory. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, during an appearance on CNN in June 2022, insisted that Biden was so energetic that she can’t keep up with him. She said in November 2023 that she would put President Biden’s stamina up against anyone’s. In February 2023, Delaware’s Democratic Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester insisted Biden’s “energy is higher now than maybe when I first met him” in the 1980s.
To paraphrase the prominent legal expert Vincent Gambini, everything those folks just said was horse pucky.
So, the fact that Joe Biden has barely been seen in public since Inauguration Day makes it fair to wonder just how mentally and physically sharp he is these days. And if he’s not so sharp and aware of what’s going on around him now . . . what condition was he in for those last few months of his presidency?
ADDENDUM: A key part of being conservative in the past few years has been a tendency to notice things before it’s socially acceptable to notice them. For example:
- It is only now acceptable to notice that the first cases of Covid emerged just down the road from a Chinese state-run laboratory conducting gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in bats, in laboratory conditions insufficiently safe for that kind of research.
- Throughout 2020, it was socially unacceptable to notice that Covid-19 presented a much more serious threat to the elderly and immunocompromised than it did to younger and healthier people, and to children in particular.
- Until mid-2021 at the earliest, it was socially unacceptable to notice that shutting down schools for at least a year in most of the country was going to have terrible effects on children’s education, socialization, development, and growth.
- It was only socially acceptable to notice that Joe Biden was old and doddering after the debate in June.
Last week, Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, traveled to Moscow to present the U.S. proposal for a 30-day cease-fire in the war in Ukraine.
On Friday, I wrote that Vladimir Putin had effectively flipped the bird to the Trump administration’s proposal, only offering the previous-rejected deal on the table that amounts to a unilateral disarmament of Ukraine in exchange for promises to not invade further.
In response, I was told that my noticing that makes me akin to a whiny kid in the backseat asking, “Are we there yet.”
Well, it’s Tuesday morning here, midafternoon in Moscow, and Russia hasn’t indicated any interest in ceasing firing. As I asked yesterday, how many days have to pass before it is socially acceptable to state that Russia has turned down the proposal?