Ann Althouse summary:
How does he know he made every decision? We’re not liars if we simply doubt that he had the mental capacity to know what was going on. What sort of decision-making was it? Am I a liar if I presume he did nothing more than rubber-stamp whatever was recommended by the staff? In that light, the autopen is irrelevant. It was “a whole lot of people” who were given clemency, and that’s a reason to spare him the effort of wielding the pen, but it’s also a reason to wonder if he knew much or anything about what he was doing.
At least we can say that he takes ownership now of the decisions that were made. And yet the reasons to take ownership after the fact are completely different from the reasons to make the decision in the first place.
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“Biden did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons…Rather than ask Biden to keep signing revised versions, his staff waited and then ran the final version thru the autopen, which they saw as…routine”