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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   29659 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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Trump announced in a post last night that he was considering voiding the last minute preemptive Biden pardons of Fauci, members of January 6 House committee, and others, because an "autopen" was used to sign the pardons. Presidential authority to grant pardons is very broad, and apparently autopen has been used by prior presidents; looks like a losing case if it goes before the Supreme Court.

The version I heard was that the EOs and pardons are being voided on the basis that Biden wasn't aware of them. As in, someone else wrote the pardons and EOs and signed them with Biden's signature without any involvement from the President himself. If true, the autopen is not the source of the issue.

I've been seeing that style of argument pop up a few times lately, and it never fails to annoy me.

The general form is:

  • Alice: I believe X because [strong argument A], [strong argument B], [strong argument C], and [supporting/trivial argument D].

  • Bob: Why does Alice think argument D is sufficient on its own? It's clearly trivial.

See also: "Why doesn't Pierre Poilievre get his security clearance?" (because the government has tied a gag order to the briefing. If he accepted under the current terms, he couldn't be an effective leader of the opposition.)

Would you mind expanding on that? If Poilievre gets the security briefing and couldn't share what's in it, how does that make him less effective than not getting the security briefing in the first place? Either way, he can't talk about it. What am I missing?

Currently, he can talk about anything he knows or suspects. After the gag order, he wouldn't be able to talk about the entire topic. This is because lawyers are smart enough to not fall for this trick from SSC:

Your best bet is to call every psychiatric hospital that they could plausibly be in and ask “Is [PERSON’S NAME] there?” Sometimes, all except one of them will say “No”, and one of them will say “Due to medical privacy laws, we can’t tell you”. I know this sounds ridiculous, but it really works.

See this editorial for a more in-depth explanation:

But the reasoning was hardly nefarious. It was because receiving such briefings would have circumscribed what Poilievre could say about Chinese interference, a point on which everyone agrees. As the leader of the Opposition, Poilievre believed, reasonably I would say, that any briefing offered would be used as a way for the government to get him to stop criticizing it over its lax attitude to election security.

It's a very old rethorical trick to always respond to the weakest argument your opponent makes in a debate, and to not argue too broadly lest you open yourself to attack and tie yourself down into a position that can be beat down.

Slippery and annoying though it is, it is effective, which is why all good politicians do it.

It occurs to me that I still don't know any trustworthy media organizations which cover matters in-depth enough to satisfy someone who wants to understand a situation.

How would one actually investigate this in a factual sense? Biden can't be made to come back and testify (it's clearly under executive privilege) about how he did them.

It seems like a claim that can never be answered in any kind of satisfactory manner.

The issue as i understand it is that someone in the White House allegedly logged in to a work-station using the president's credentials at a time when Biden was demontrably not in DC, and started issuing orders as the president.

In a sane organization comprised of reasonable and competent people the resolution would be a simple matter of asking Mr Biden, who else had access to his username/passwords etc... and if he had specifically authorized any of them to issue this order on or about that date.

If Biden's response is anything other than "Oh yes that was so-and-so, we discussed the order over the phone and I approved it" the order is invalid and someone is clearly guilty of falsifying an official document.

I think the burden of proof is gonna go the other way around, if this came up in a prosecution, the department of justice would face the burden approving that the pardon was not authorized by the president.

My understanding, is if Biden just wouldn’t say anything at all

Biden doesn't have to say anything, but it could prevent a witch hunt that involves subjecting Biden's entire staff to hours of grueling interrogation. It's a criminal investigation and the staff don't have any privilege, so Trump can certainly make their lives a heck of a lot more difficult even if it's over nothing.

Executive staff have privilege with respect to any communication with the President about policy. This is what Trump himself claimed w.r.t McGahn!

We will see

Assuming that Biden truly was unaware of the pardons when they were signed - something that seems depressingly likely to be true - to what extent could the pardons still be valid if Biden was briefed on the pardons after-the-fact and gave a verbal or written OK as having his approval? I'm not a lawyer or constitutional scholar, and I wonder if there's anything even similar to a precedent for something like this.

This is the version i heard as well.

That is my understanding of the issue as well. As usual, Trump is using some highly "gotcha" wording that the media will pounce on (calling it now- "autopen" will word of the year 2025) and dissect the many reaspns why he's technically wrong, only to miss the larger point entirely- namely Biden was not the person issuing the orders/pardons, ergo none of them have any legal basis.

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