chartseer...so the teleprompter controls obama and now the teleprompter controls president's signature. Wonder if that is even legal..course legal don't matter to a democrat.
Autopen, not Obama, signs Patriot Act extension into law
By Rachel Rose Hartman
Fri May 27,
news.yahoo.com
Last night, President Obama signed an extension of the Patriot Act into law. And yet President Obama wasn't actually there to do it.
Magic, you say? A sign that hidden forces are in fact running the U.S. government?
Well, no. The president used an autopen--a machine devised to assist celebrities and lawmakers in generating mass facsimiles of their actual signatures. The president resorted to its use in this case since he was traveling in Europe, and the provisions of the Patriot Act would have otherwise expired at midnight, as White House spokesman Nick Shapiro told ABC's politics blog The Note prior to the bill's passage Thursday.
"Failure to sign this legislation poses a significant risk to U.S. national security. As long as Congress approves the extension, the president will direct the use of the autopen to sign it," Shapiro said in a statement.
Some lawmakers, who knew Obama was already en route to the G-8 summit of eight major world economies, didn't appear to know about the White House plan to employ the autopen.
"There is no conceivable way this thing can get passed and signed by the president anyway [before the provisions expire]," Sen. Patrick Leahy (I-Vt.) told reporters before the vote, Politico reported.
The first autopen was developed in the early 19th century, and Thomas Jefferson was an early adopter--though he doesn't appear to have signed any legislation with it. The modern electronic version of the gadget found favor with Harry S Truman, who used it for signing checks and autographing books--but again, not for endorsing legislation.
Given that earlier chief executives shunned the autopen for law-signing purposes, the question naturally arises: Even though the gadget is a wonder of time-saving efficiency, can a mechanical device really serve as a stand-in for the president's legal authority under the Constitution?
Apparently so. The White House on Thursday reportedly released a 2005 opinion verifying the legality of autopen usage.
Jay Wexler, Boston University law professor and author of "The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution Through Ten of Its Most Curious Provisions," told The Note yesterday that the White House Office of Legal Counsel thoroughly reviewed the constitutionality of the practice for the Bush White House in 2005. Then-Deputy Attorney General Howard C. Nielson rendered this opinion:
We examine the legal understanding of the word 'sign' at the time the Constitution was drafted and ratified and during the early years of the Republic. We find that, pursuant to this understanding, a person may sign a document by directing that his signature be affixed to it by another . . . . Reading the constitutional text in light of this established legal understanding, we conclude that the President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill to sign it within the meaning of Article I, Section 7 [of the Constitution.]
However, it was not stipulated whether Nielson's opinion was itself signed by an autopen--if so, that could have been the little-noticed moment when the machines finally took over. |
