Clearly, the headline offers a trick question. What wasn't mightier than Joe Biden's gourd over the past four years?

The latest discovery from the Biden years has made this question particularly acute, however. According to an investigation by Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project, a large number of Biden's signatures on EOs came from the "autopen" rather than Biden's own hand. The suspiciously identical strokes on the published documents looked suspicious, and the problem grew the more investigators looked:

The Oversight Project, a self-described investigative arm of the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation, challenged the legitimacy of orders signed by the Demcorat and claimed that an “autopen signature” was used across almost “every document” it could find.

“We gathered every document we could find with Biden's signature over the course of his presidency,” it posted on X Thursday alongside several screenshots of documents including the signature.

“All used the same autopen signature except for the the [sic] announcement that the former President was dropping out of the race last year.”

The exact number of documents reviewed was not immediately clear.

What might that mean? At least one state Attorney General demanding a Department of Justice probe into whether these orders and other documents -- including pardons and commutations -- have any legal standing at all:

The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project uncovered the situation, prompting Biden detractors such as Republican Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to suggest it could be used to challenge the legitimacy of orders that the 82-year-old former president signed, especially given the concerns about his cognition.

“I am demanding the DOJ investigate whether President Biden’s cognitive decline allowed unelected staff to push through radical policy without his knowing approval,” Bailey said.

“If true, these executive orders, pardons, and all other actions are unconstitutional and legally void.”

The if true part of that formula is doing a lot of heavy lifting. But that load gets even heavier when it gets expressed more accurately: if proven. 

The use of the autopen has hardly been unique to the Biden administration. Barack Obama pioneered the use of the autopen for presidential signatures, although he generally used it for signing less-popular orders and laws. Fox News picked up on some Donald Trump signings from the first term that appear to have used the autopen, again for low-level or low-interest items. And that makes some political sense; popular EOs make for good photo ops, which both Obama and Trump often used to boost their messaging. And when they'd prefer not to draw attention to their actions, the autopen made for a handy -- if questionable -- option. 

We poked fun at that trend beginning in 2011, but the point of legitimacy never gained traction. Should presidents use autopens at all? I'd argue no, but the method of signature matters less than presidential intent. Even if Obama and Trump directed aides to apply the autopen signature, everyone knew that the directive to do so came from Obama and Trump. Both presidents clearly took charge of their own administrations, so the question of legitimacy only mattered in an academic sense. 

That's not the case with Joe Biden, though, and everyone knows it now. It has become clear that Biden was not competent for the job and that the White House and leading Democrats did their level best to cover up his encroaching senility. Biden rarely held signing events even for his more agenda-driven policies, and did even less media engagement unless and until absolutely necessary. All of this raises the question of whether Biden directed the use of the autopen, or whether others were running the executive branch while using Biden as a puppet.

However, that's not really an autopen issue.  Biden could almost as easily have just signed whatever his aides put in front of him if he was struggling with senility. The true issue here is whether Biden had the intellectual and cognitive ability to form enough reliable capacity to make executive decisions. 

We already have testimony from Special Counsel Robert Hur from a year ago that insinuated (without explicitly declaring so) that Biden lacked the cognitive capacity to form a mens rea, which meant he couldn't be prosecuted for crimes discovered in the investigation. Hur did argue specifically that Biden's recall was so faulty that he could not reliably defend himself either, which makes it very difficult to believe that Biden comprehended what happened around him. And further reporting since the June 27 debate makes that even more clear. That certainly deserves an investigation to see whether an American presidency got hijacked, and by whom. 

Reversing these orders and clemency actions will be much more difficult. A court will want evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Biden did not knowingly approve those orders and actions in each instance before taking any action. Reversing such orders would be an extraordinary task for a federal judge -- and might set some very uncomfortable precedents, especially given the expansive view of Article III authority some judges are already demonstrating. I'd rather live with Biden's pardons and commutations than set that precedent, and Trump is already reversing Biden's executive actions as fast as possible using his proper Article II authority. 

Let's keep the focus on the cover-up and the question of who benefited most from it. But while we're at it, we can certainly demand an end to the autopen and require all presidential signatures to be made by hand by the president himself. The autopen makes usurpation of presidential authority too easy, especially when the president is a non compos mentis puppet.