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Republican leading inquiry into Biden’s autopen use has digitally signed letters
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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So I had to look up what an "autopen" is.
The US president not only has basically dictatorial powers to create laws (call them executive orders or whatever, they're still laws), he can delegate the actual signing to someone else by a device that imitates signatures. So basically the idea of the president can create laws.
How was that ever a functional country ....
It's just a digital signature from what I am understanding. The same thing accepted by the federal governments executive branch for every IRS tax form I've submitted since 2006 when I started working.
If they believe a digital signature doesn't count, the executive branch should return all taxes paid with digital signatures immediately and ask we resubmit them come April when taxes are do again.
Edit: oh, also near all student loans are signed digitally, so they need to void those all as well.
You know every time I've had any medical work done I've digitally signed my consent for them to treat me and to bill me...
Can we also wipe out all medical debt and then sue the hospitals for treating without consent?
The funny thing what The Guardian and others do not get is the crucial difference between a “signature machine” and a digital signature. They treat both equally fake, even though a digital signature is a cryptographic secure way to proof someone’s identity, where the signature machine just puts ink on a paper.
But that’s how laws work in a lot of countries. Ink on the paper is accepted, digital signatures not. Now have fun proving if a signature was drawn by hand or machine.
The whole purpose of a digital signature is to provide a legally verigiable signature. It's still being defined in some countries, but in US and Canada its very specifically defined. Autopen seems to available to rich people as needed, but if the wikipedia article is accurate, a form of autopen has been available to US presidents dating back to Thomas Jefferson. I'd be surprised if the legal minds haven't defined the legal use of autopen somewhere.
I don't think The Guardian is wrong here, see this passage from the article:
He did not use cryptographic signatures, but images of his written signature, which I think is pretty similar to using an autopen (albeit probably much easier to detect)
Executive orders cannot create laws. They're limited to changing enforcement of existing laws and setting priorities and stuff for agencies that were already delegated power by congress