Dem
47
GOP
53
Donald Trump seems to have forgotten that he, not Joe Biden, is president now, as he continues to attack Biden all the time. Maybe this is an attempt to distract people from Epstein Mobilier. His latest attempt is to announce that he is canceling all of Joe Biden's XOs that were signed with an autopen. Trump claims that 92% of them were signed with an autopen. He is making all this up out of thin air. It is all performative.
To start with, an XO is not a law. It is a directive to the bureaucracy of how members should interpret some law or instructions about what their priorities should be. For example, Trump could instruct the IRS to focus on auditing people making under $100K and not audit anyone making over $10M because he believes they are all honest (or are his cronies).
The problem with governing by XO is that the next president can issue new XOs that instruct departments and agencies to do the exact opposite of what the previous president ordered them to do. It makes no difference whether the previous XO was signed by hand or by autopen. The new one overrides it in all cases. This talk about autopens is just noise to somehow convince people that Biden wasn't really president and Edith Wilson (or someone else) was.
Interestingly, the Office of Legal Counsel in George W. Bush's White House conducted a thorough review of the use of autopens and concluded that the president has the authority to instruct the bureaucracy to follow his interpretations of the law and exactly how this is conveyed to them doesn't matter.
Trump has made a special case about pardons Biden signed with an autopen. He somehow thinks that autopen-signed pardons aren't valid. However, a 1929 memo from the solicitor general noted that the Constitution doesn't specify how pardons are to be granted. So if the president tells his secretary to call Peter Pardonee and inform him that he is henceforth pardoned, it is a done deal. However, as a practical matter the person pardoned might want it in writing to show his warden or judge.
Trump has said that Biden wasn't mentally competent, so the pardons he issued don't count. Trump should be REAL careful about that because once that precedent has been set, a future Democratic president might declare that Trump was mentally incompetent his entire second term, so every person he pardoned is now officially unpardoned. The only case where that could be an issue is if the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is formally invoked and the veep and majority of the cabinet have declared that POTUS is non compos mentis. Then, that Democratic president might have a case. But maybe not, since the Constitution does not place "the president must be mentally whole" as a condition for granting pardons. (V)