When Should Vice President Act for Mentally Incapacitated President?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns former President Joe Biden, his cognitive deterioration, and the use of the autopen during his presidency. The House Oversight Committee investigated the situation and recently released a major report on its findings. Jarrett Stepman at The Daily Signal shared the following information. 

“In the absence of sufficient contemporaneous documentation indicating that cognitively deteriorating President Biden himself made a given executive decision, such decisions do not carry the force of law and should be considered void.”

That was what a major report released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee concluded about former President Joe Biden’s autopen usage during his presidency. The report on Biden’s mental acuity while in office and his autopen use was spearheaded by Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky.

The committee’s report notes that the Biden administration “left no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him.”

It seems Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and House Republicans agree with the committee’s conclusions.

The conclusions about Biden’s executive decisions being “void” mean there will soon be very serious legal challenge to the orders Biden gave, but didn’t verify, while in office. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X that her office has “already initiated a review” of Biden’s autopen usage and thanked Comer for his detailed report.

To a certain extent, the Oversight Committee has simply confirmed what most Americans already knew. That is, Biden was clearly in severe mental and physical decline from the time he was elected and struggled to handle the basic duties of office. One didn’t need to be a doctor or have insider information to know that. It was obvious nearly every time he made a public appearance.

What the report has done is shine a light on some of the inner workings of the Biden White House. The report pains a damning picture – one could even call it a conspiracy – of how Biden’s aides, both formal and informal, manipulated their position to secure executive orders, pardons, and clemencies that the president may have had no knowledge of.

In one example of how decisions were made in the White House, the report highlighted the process that led to a series of pardons as Biden was leaving office. Among these pardons were Biden family members, including his son, Hunter. Biden had said earlier in his presidency that he wouldn’t pardon his son.

The Oversight Committee report says that no official documentation exists regarding how the pardon judgments were made. Instead, the decision to grant these pardons was handed down by “second hand” to the second in command under Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients, Rosa Po. After receiving the list, Po called Zients, “who verbally authorized the use of the autopen from home.”

The report said that Zients “did not even know who actually used the autopen to apply the signature after his aide, using his email account with his permission, communicated that the autopen was authorized for the clemency actions.” Zients allegedly went ahead with the autopen pardons without confirming anything with the president.

Stepman said, “It couldn’t be clearer now that Biden was simply the figurehead of a deep state presidency.” Most Americans with eyes to see already knew that Biden was not in charge, and that someone else was giving the orders. Biden would be propped up for public appearances, but he was not making the decisions. We know this is true because he made comments about not being allowed to take questions and being in trouble for doing so. Who was ordering the President of the United States around?

After writing “Biden’s final days certainly seemed a lot more like a late-stage monarchy to me” than the object of the complaints of the “No Kings” protests – President Donald Trump, Stepman continued his article:

The Oversight Committee report brings up another potential long-term issue. While it’s unlikely that the United States will soon again experiment with putting a man in steep mental decline in the president’s office, it’s not impossible that a situation of a missing-in-action president might arise again in the future.

Given the immense power the executive branch yields, it would perhaps be wise to regularize the process by which executive actions are verified….

The autopen business remains a big deal because it’s tied to one of the most significant scandals in American presidential history: the cover-up and denial of Biden’s mental decline while in office.

Because of this cover-up, the American people can’t be certain that official acts by the president were his acts at all, so we’ve been thrown into an unprecedented legal situation of deciding what he did that was valid and what was potentially “void.”

I agree that it would “be wise to regularize” the verification of signing of executive orders. With transparent presidents, it is not a big deal. We can watch as President Trump signs and discusses executive orders in front of cabinet members and members of the Press. However, the lack of transparency in the Biden presidency should be a warning to us.

History tells us that Biden is not the first incapacitated President of the United States. This site shares the following information. The First Lady Who Secretly Ran The U.S. Government - History and Headlines

From October 2, 1919 and for some weeks afterwards, First Lady Edith Wilson (October 15, 1872 – December 28, 1961) unofficially ran the U.S. government following her husband’s (then President Woodrow Wilson’s) life-changing stroke….

On that date, Wilson suffered a stroke of such intensity that it incapacitated him, having permanently paralyzed the left side of his body and even blinding his left eye. While he was bedridden for the next two months, only his wife, physicians, and a few other close associates saw him.

In the meantime, the First Lady in effect took over many of the president’s responsibilities, including reviewing various important matters of state. Even after the president was released from his sick bed, he still spent the remainder of the year in a wheelchair. As 1920 came about, his mental health had clearly deteriorated as his mind wandered and he exhibited a diminished memory. Thus, the First Lady continued to play a pivotal role as a sort of unofficial “acting president”. As the First Lady put it, she had taken on a “stewardship” to care for the largely incapacitated president and keep the American government running as smoothly as possible. The situation was so unique in American history and the president’s condition so tragic, that the extent of what the ailing president endured was kept secret from the American public until his death a couple of years after his term ended.

Knowing how both Nancy Reagan and Jill Biden protected their husbands, I can totally understand Edith Wilson doing the same. However, where was the Vice President in all three situations. We know that Vice President George Bush was acting president while Reagan underwent surgery after he was shot. We also know that Kamala Harris was part of the Biden cover-up. What do we know about Wilson’s VP? I did a bit of research to learn the following. Thomas R. Marshall - Wikipedia

Thomas Riley Marshall (March 14, 1854-June 1, 1925) was the 28^th vice president of the United States from 1913 to 1921 under President Woodrow Wilson….

Marshall’s vice presidency is most remembered for a leadership crisis following a stroke that incapacitated Wilson in October 1919. Because of their personal dislike for Marshall, Wilson’s advisers and wife Edith sought to keep him uninformed about the president’s condition to prevent him from assuming presidential powers and duties. Many people, including cabinet officials and congressional leaders, urged Marshall to become acting president, but he refused to forcibly assume Wilson’s powers, not wanting to set a standard of doing so….