Biden: The Autopen Years

Of all of President Trump’s zany ideas — making boring, self-righteous Canada the 51st state, we take Gaza, Perkins Coie lawyers banned from federal buildings — his claim that Joe Biden’s pardons are invalid because they were signed with an autopen is a winner.

As discussed last week, Biden used the pardons not to show mercy to specific individuals, but to change the law. We’re told that no one may ever challenge a president’s clemencies, because the pardon power is “plenary.” But however plenary it is, it cannot be so plenary as to allow a president to eliminate the legislative and judicial branches. Biden’s blanket pardons of entire classes of crimes and punishments do just that.

Suppose President Stephen K. Bannon pardoned, en masse, nearly all criminal violations of the Clean Water Act. Go ahead, dump pollutants into rivers, discharge chemical waste onto wetlands, funnel nuclear waste directly into clean water reservoirs. Maybe the EPA will convict you, but not before you’re pardoned.

Next up, pardons for criminal convictions under the Clean Air Act, freeing developers to get on with it and rip asbestos from the walls of derelict buildings and manufacturers to belch toxic smoke from their factories and build two or three new coal-burning power plants every week. You know, like China!

The best news? After President Bannon issues similarly sweeping clemencies to those convicted under the Endangered Species Act, I can finally open my long-dreamed-of restaurant that serves nothing but red wolf. Everything will be endangered-licious, from appetizers to Red Wolf Velvet Cake.

Totally proper use of the pardon power, right? Why wouldn’t our founders want a president to be able to single-handedly rewrite federal law, nullifying any statutes that he doesn’t like? Why else would they have called him “the king of America”? Surely, it’s every bit as sound as Biden’s Jan. 17, 2025, proclamation that the never-ratified Equal Rights Amendment “is the law of the land.”

Admittedly, this isn’t the precise point of Trump’s declaring Biden’s pardons signed by autopen “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT.”

For one thing, the only pardons Trump explicitly mentions as being “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT” are the preemptive ones given to members of the Jan. 6 committee. Besides sounding a tiny bit churlish, those pardons were at least granted to nine specific individuals and, therefore, are within the pardon power.

But the other point Trump made was that the autopen signatures proved Biden had no idea what he was doing, as if that were ever in dispute. Anyone who saw Biden’s June 27, 2024, debate performance is well familiar with his galloping senescence, but Trump is nothing if not thorough. More important than Biden not actually signing the pardons, Trump said, “he did not know anything about them!”

The autopen evidence takes Biden’s general oblivion to oblivion in these specific cases. Further evidence that it was Biden’s staff, and not Biden, exercising the presidential pardon is that this champion of the death penalty — who spent years bragging about personally writing a crime bill that added 60 new capital sentences to the U.S. Code — overturned capital sentences for 37 of 40 federal prisoners.

In the 1990s, Biden never shut up about his gusto for capital punishment, sarcastically noting that “the liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties,” and boasting that the crime bill did “everything but hang people for jaywalking.”

This death penalty enthusiast decided death was too harsh for a sadistic serial killer and child rapist like Jorge Avila-Torrez? And that it was so vital that Avila-Torrez cheat death that Biden was willing to ignore Congress and the courts to spare him?

The pardon power doesn’t reside with the entire White House staff. It is the president’s alone. Similarly, the press secretary can’t order an aircraft carrier into the Mediterranean Sea.

When the president is a dementia patient, being fed pudding as he stares vacantly into the void, of course it’s valid to ask who really issued those pardons. (By the end of his term, Biden thought “blanket pardons” meant quilts that don’t go to jail.)…