How Do We Avoid the Next President Autopen?

We have a problem with a mentally incompetent president — no, not the last one.

The next one.

Not that having Presidentish Joe Biden kinda-sorta serving in office while unknown persons worked the presidential autopen in overtime is something we should just forget. In a recent Fox News interview, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) dropped a bombshell: Biden never spoke to him once in four years. "Who was actually making the decisions? Damned if I know. And I don’t know anyone who does, either."

The executive branch employs about 2.4 million civilian workers, but exactly one elected official holds constitutional decision-making authority over that bloated behemoth.

We, the voters, have both the right and the need to know who that is. And it had better be the person we elected.

"What else is going to happen is you're going to find that Joe Biden didn't know who all was running the autopen," Rep. Andy Biggs said Monday on the John Solomon Reports podcast. "I think you're going to find out that people were doing some things with the autopen that they absolutely had no authority to do."

We’ll never know what Biden intended, what decisions he made, or which ones unelected staffers usurped. All because, as Biggs put it, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment "incentivizes Cabinet members to protect and hide a debilitated president."

The cabal surrounding Biden shirked their moral duty to report to Congress that Biden was incapacitated. Why bother doing the right thing when it’s so much more fun running the country with zero accountability?

And Another Thing: I'm reasonably certain there was no single figure pulling Biden's strings — that would present a degree of discipline we never did see during "his" administration. I always figured the Biden White House was more like an episode of "Veep," with various staffers or even cabinet officers racing to get their hands on the autopen first, anytime something came up. Sometimes, Barack Obama would phone in and issue a command or two, but mostly the West Wing was probably just chaos.

It might be a bit unfair to say that the 25th Amendment was written in a rush — but only a bit. JFK's assassination made all too clear that the Constitution wasn't explicit enough about presidential succession and had nothing to say about an incapacitated president. In the nuclear age, when split-second, world-ending decision-making might be required at any moment, something had to be done.

Those were more innocent years, however, and the 25th's authors seemed to have assumed good faith on the part of the vice president and cabinet members responsible for telling Congress that the president is incompetent to fulfill his duties.

Maybe the 25th needs revisiting.

But the thing about the Biden years is that the damage is done. There's no one with standing to sue over the validity of a few thousand questionable pardons. The Supreme Court is not about to step in and undo four years' worth of executive orders and the like. So my advice is to save your energy for fights that can be won.

That doesn't mean, however, that we can't demand a little accountability — something Congress and the DOJ are working on. With it, we might just prevent another Biden stumbling through the White House, so lost that staffers have to mark the hallways with colored tape to guide him.

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