Obama can’t be bothered with trivial legislation.

Via USA Today:

White House aides have used a mechanical device known as the “autopen” to sign a two-week extension of highway funding while President Obama is in Malaysia, marking at least the seventh time Obama has used the controversial device to sign a bill into law.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the president authorized his signature to be placed on the bill, the Surface Transportation Extension Act of 2015, Part II.

“For those who may have been concerned about a potential lapse in the highway program, given the need for this extension and given the fact that the President is on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, I wanted to assure you that we’ve got a process in place to make sure that that doesn’t happen,” Earnest told reporters aboard Air Force One on a flight from Manila, the Philippines to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Without the president’s signature, authorization for taxing and spending to pay for transportation projects would expire Friday. The House and Senate have passed different versions of a six-year highway bill, but haven’t been able to reconcile differences between the $325 billion House plan and the $355 billion Senate version. Congress passed a short-term extension Thursday, but the president isn’t due to return to Washington until Monday.

Presidents have used autopens for personal and official correspondence for decades, but Obama is the first president to use it to sign bills into law. In 2011, Obama’s autopen signed a Patriot Act extension that was set to expire while he was visiting France, and in 2013 he used the same device to sign an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts while vacationing in Hawaii.

Those are the bills the White House has publicly acknowledged. But according to CBS Radio White House correspondent Mark Knoller, who keeps detailed records of Obama’s travel schedule, at least seven bills have been signed where it would have been physically impossible for Obama to do so.

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Possible Dem 2016 ticket: Autopen/Teleprompter.

All hail Autopen-in-Chief!

(CNN) — President Barack Obama has signed into law a bill to avert the fiscal cliff, a day after the House and Senate approved the much-debated legislation.

Obama, who returned to his family vacation in Hawaii after Tuesday’s House vote, signed the bill via autopen on Wednesday.

But new battles over taxes and spending await Washington in the next few weeks.

Priorities. If he doesn’t use the autopen the bill will have to be flown to Hawaii costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.

The White House has yet to say whether the bill would be flown to Hawaii for signing by Pres Obama or the ‘autopen’ be used at the WH.

— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) January 2, 2013

Since taking office, Pres Obama has twice authorized use of the ‘autopen’ to sign urgent bills into law when he was out of town.

— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) January 2, 2013

If we have TOTUS and APOTUS, why do we need POTUS?

(ABC News) — A group of House Republicans are calling on President Obama to re-sign the Patriot Act extension, this time with his own hand, and to vow never to use the machine to sign bills into law again. A letter from 21 lawmakers to the president today reignites the debate over the constitutionality of using the autopen to sign legislation.

“Mr. President, it is clear that assigning a surrogate the responsibility of signing bills passed by Congress is a debatable issue, and could be challenged in court. That being the case, our request is that, out of an abundance of caution, you affix your signature to S. 990 by personally re-signing the enrolled bill,” the letter reads. “Furthermore, we ask that you commit to ending the practice of using an autopen to sign bills passed by Congress.”

Congress passed the four-year extension of the Patriot Act in May. The only problem was the president was in France, meeting with G8 leaders, and the bill’s provisions were set to expire at midnight.

The White House decided that the president would use the autopen, a machine that holds a pen and signs his actual signature, which is only used with proper authorization from the president.

Silly man, everyone knows laws don’t apply to Barack Obama.

Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.) is questioning President Obama’s use of an autopen in signing an extension of the Patriot Act.

In a letter Friday, Graves asks Obama to confirm that he saw the law prior to its autopen signing.

“Mr. President, I write to request your confirmation that S. 990, as passed by Congress, was presented to you prior to the autopen signing, as well as a detailed, written explanation of your Constitutional authority to assign a surrogate the responsibility of signing bills passed into law,” Graves wrote.

Obama signed the bill into law late Thursday night. The autopen was used because the president was in France, meeting with G8 leaders, and the bill’s provisions expired at midnight.

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Plausible deniability?

(Daily Mail) — President Obama, or rather a machine impersonating his signature, signed the controversial Patriot Act only minutes before the midnight deadline, extending anti-terrorism measures enacted in the wake of 9/11.

Mr Obama did not sign the act personally as he was 3,725 miles and six time zones away in France at a meeting of G8 world leaders, so a presidential autopen was used instead.

The White House said the President had approved use of the autopen, a machine which holds a pen and signs his actual signature.

Mr Obama was awoken at 5:45am in his hotel room in Deauville, France, so that he could review and approve the bill and authorise his signature, with only minutes to go before the deadline passed in the U.S.

I think these types of typos are actually kind of humanizing. It shows someone bothered to write it. Not a machine.

Via Newsweek:

Not six months ago, there were fears that the United States was descending into authoritarianism. “Donald Trump is actually a fascist,” opined Michael Kinsley in The Washington Post.

The linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky did him one better, making a comparison to Adolf Hitler that would become liberal cliché long before Trump took the oath of the presidency. People were going to move to Canada. Some had said so when George W. Bush was elected, and then elected again—but they were serious this time.

President Trump answered those worries shortly after midnight with a single word: “covfefe”

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Who cares what the judge says? Have to get Hillary elected!

Via Daily Caller:

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has granted voting rights to as many as 60,000 convicted felons just in time for them to register to vote, nearly five times more than previously reported and enough to win the state for his long-time friend, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

McAuliffe sought to allow all of Virginia’s estimated 200,000 felons to vote, but state courts said each individual felon’s circumstances must be weighed. To get around that, McAuliffe used a mechanical autopen to rapidly sign thousands of letters, as if he had personally reviewed them, even as his office was saying the total was 13,000.

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And guess who gets stuck with the bill?

He usually uses the auto-pen while away, why they felt the need to milk the taxpayers for a propaganda pic is beyond me.

Is the ink from the autopen even dry yet?

Via Newsbusters’ Jack Coleman:

ED SCHULTZ: All right, who’s got the leverage in two months? (alluding to another looming battle over the debt ceiling)

MAXINE WATERS: Well, you know, the Republicans are talking about, what all they’re going to do with these tax cuts. The president has said we cannot cut our way out of a deficit and he’s absolutely correct. The first thing that we’ve got to do is look at where we still have unfairness in the tax system and make sure that the people of influence, the billionaires and the millionaires and the corporate interests are paying their fair share. And I believe that whether we’re talking about the financial speculation tax or the elimination of the carried interest or defense spending, we’ve got areas that we could look at to get fair share so that we’re able to take care of the basic needs of this country rather than going to Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and focusing on those areas as the only place that we can get more revenue.

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