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Comment by finnthehuman | Hacker News Reader

I've always been sus of the autopen. It's just authorized forgery.

The times I've heard about it has been the president traveling, but in the age of printers and scanners, the autopen seems strictly worse. Coming home with the original wet-ink signature a week after sending a digital copy seems preferable to the "just trust me bro" method of delegating a signature there is no legal will to legislate a real delegation process for.

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If it's authorized it can't be forgery.

Can a senile old man authorize anything in a legal sense?

Until they exercise the 25th amendment, the president can authorize things. That’s why Trump has been careful to select devout loyalists he can rely on not to question his actions.

Is that how a senile old man was allowed to keep auto-penning documents drafted by said devout loyalists?

That’s supposition on your part, and while I’m sure that the people who tell you what you believe sound confident that Biden is senile, wishing really hard isn’t a diagnosis and we have no evidence that this is contrary to his desires. Presidents are allowed to delegate, just as we’re seeing with Trump signing EOs written by a team of Heritage Foundation lawyers: nothing says he has to do more than approve of the goal.

Ridiculous. Good night.

What’s ridiculous is believing the cover story. This isn’t just some random joke about the previous guy, it’s a trial balloon to see if they can ignore the Constitution by pretending Biden didn’t really sign something. This is at the level of the “sovereign citizen” nuts who claim that they don’t need to pay child support because the courtroom had the wrong color flag, except that it’s in service of prosecuting political opponents.

This is an extremely dangerous road to go down. If you accept Trump's argument here, then Trump can overturn any law passed in the last 4 years. This would not stop with Trump - future presidents will start revoking everything that happened under their predecessors, using similarly scurrilous arguments.

Right, but what if unauthorized happens? How do you distinguish authorized from unauthorized?

Obviously, you can ask Biden: did he authorize such and such a document or not.

This suspicion would only be a problem in the case of someone deceased.

What do auto pens have to do with this?

People have been forging signatures for centuries.

The whole thing from Trump is bullshit. “Plausible justification” for those that want to believe.

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