Tea at Trianon: Biden’s Autopen Scandal

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, September 14, 2025

Biden’s Autopen Scandal

From The New York Post:

“There was a mad dash to find groups of people that he could then pardon — and then they largely didn’t run it by the Justice Department to vet them,” a source told the DC insider publication Axios.

While Biden claimed the last-minute blizzard of pardons and commutations was for “nonviolent” drug offenders, a trove of administration emails obtained by the Oversight Project and first reported on by the New York Post’s Josh Christenson tell a different story.

“I think you should stop saying that because it is untrue or at least misleading,” Associate Deputy Attorney General Brad Weinsheimer warned in a Jan. 18 email.
Among those receiving presidential clemency, Weinsheimer noted, “We identified violent offenders, including those who committed acts of violence during the offense of conviction, or who otherwise have a history of violence.”

Subsequent reporting has brought to light extensive correspondence between the West Wing and Justice Department as officials struggled to interpret just what it was the president was doing — or whether he was even aware of what was being done.

After all, it wasn’t his hand signing the papers; it was the autopen.

Four years earlier, when Biden was first taking office, his incoming staff secretary had told him his hand signature should be used for pardons, according to Axios.

But if, by the end, Joe Biden wasn’t running the Biden administration, it doesn’t matter what he’d been told.

It’s happened before: A little more than a hundred years earlier, a stroke had left President Woodrow Wilson unable to discharge the duties of his office.

But instead of a constitutional succession taking place, the president’s wife and staff ran the administration in Wilson’s place, with the president reduced to little more than a figurehead. (Read more.)