There's a oft-memed scene from the animated series 'The Simpsons' featuring Bart's erstwhile nemesis, Sideshow Bob, continually stepping on rakes. That meme is on my mind this morning, as I watch Democrats and media (but I repeat myself) lose their minds over President Donald Trump's declaration that pardons issued by President Joe Biden in the waning days of his presidency are 'void...and of no further force or effect.'
My colleague Aaron broke the news this morning, and has provided some pretty thoughtful insight into why President Trump may actually have an argument here.
I'll revisit what Aaron wrote in December 2024, after Ana Navarro face planted over Woodrow Wilson pardoning his 'brother' Hunter DeButts:
what if Joe Biden was no longer competent, mentally, to issue such a pardon, either in general or just at the specific moment he signed it? The 25th Amendment sets up one method of dealing with incompetent presidents but the law might organically develop another.
For instance, imagine this outlandish scenario. Imagine someone slipped an unusually potent dose of LSD into the president’s drink and while under the influence, the president issued all kinds of crazy new regulations. When the president was him or herself again, surely the President can say that the regulations were not properly issued because he was not competent to do so, right? So why can’t someone say that at some point in the presidency, Biden became unable to issue pardons? Thus the Trump administration could investigate the pardon on that basis: To see if Biden was competent to issue it. And if he wasn’t, perhaps it could be rescinded.
It's not an outlandish question to ask, and given that there's really no precedent for it, it's probably one the courts should address.
Earlier I mentioned Jake Tapper insists Trump has no Constitutional authority to do this:
At 12:35 am ET, the president decreed that he was nullifying President Biden’s preemptive pardons of members of the January 6 committee, an assertion of a power the Constitution does not bestow. pic.twitter.com/S7ObJorpKx
— Jake Tapper 🦅 (@jaketapper) March 17, 2025
And while I wish Trump hadn't issued the post on Truth Social, and instead pursued more normal legal challenges to address the pardon concerns, the fact remains the same: he has a point.
While it was clear to me -- a woman with an English and a Nursing degree -- that Joe Biden was mentally unwell during the 2020 campaign, Democrats and the media opted to ignore our concerns. They accused us of spreading 'cheap fakes' whenever we shared video of Biden looking lost, or rambling, or wandering off at events.
It wasn't until after the June 2024 presidential debate that the Left realized they could no longer hide reality: for Joe Biden, the lights were on, but no one was home.
They ousted him from the presidential race. Not because he was cognitively unwell, but because they realized he was going to lose to Donald Trump.
They did not, however, oust him from office.
And therein lies the rub.
On December 19, I shared with you that The Wall Street Journal finally exposed what really went on at the Biden White House as staffers 'worked around' Joe's cognitive issues. As I wrote at the time:
Biden's on the way out of the White House, Kamala Harris lost the election, and now the media are trying to salvage the scraps of their reputation. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday how, from 2021 onward, White House staff had to work around Biden's obvious mental decline.
This includes being unable to participate in phone calls leading up to the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal that saw thirteen Marines killed at Abby Gate and making the families of the fallen wait hours for the dignified transfer while he napped on Air Force One.
If you'll recall, both of those incidents happened in the summer of 2021, just months after Biden was inaugurated. So -- and I cannot emphasize this enough -- for nearly his entire presidency, Joe Biden was mentally and physically incapable of performing the duties of his office.
Shortly before the inauguration, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson recalled how Joe Biden couldn't recall signing an executive order pausing exports of liquified natural gas to Europe, a move that helped Putin. That event took place in January 2024; the executive order was signed less than a month earlier.
Jake Tapper himself was aware of the issues and co-wrote a book with Alex Thompson from Axios. The same Alex Thompson who told us in June of last year that Joe Biden was 'reliably engaged' as POTUS between the hours of 10 am to 4 pm.
All of this could have been avoided if the Democratic Party had invoked the 25th Amendment to remove Joe Biden from office.
I'm not sure why they didn't do that. Was it because they hoped to keep Kamala Harris away from the levers of power to help her electoral chances? Maybe. But it's more likely that the Democrats were fine with having unelected bureaucrats and White House staff running the show with Joe Biden as a figurehead.
Except, that's not how it works.
The power of the pardon lies with the President and the President alone. If Joe Biden was unaware of or unable to authorize those pardons, it's not wrong for Trump to call the validity of them into question because someone who was not the president made those decisions.
That's an actual Constitutional crisis.
I have no idea how this is going to play out. It's entirely uncharted Constitutional waters. My best guess is this goes all the way to the Supreme Court and -- while they rule against Trump -- they set in place a prohibition on using the autopen to sign pardons. Republicans, if they're smart, will also take the advice I gave them on inauguration day:
The pardons Biden issued today also strip them of Fifth Amendment protections if they are called to testify about those past crimes. You can no longer plead the Fifth if asked about crimes for which you can no longer be charged.
This means Congress should start hearings tomorrow, and everyone who received a pardon today should be compelled to testify. Crimes were committed: Joe Biden's pardons just admitted that. The American people need to know what those crimes were. And if those testifying happen to commit process crimes, like perjury, then they can still be held criminally accountable. Anthony Fauci has said he's grateful for the pardon, but that he's done nothing wrong. So let him testify to that under oath and nail him to the wall if he perjures himself.
The same applies to members of the January 6 Committee. Make them testify. Under oath.
Should any of the witnesses then provide evidence to suggest that they are in fact guilty of crimes, Congress should remove their sovereign immunity protections. This would open the door for civil suits. Because Donald Trump isn't the only victim here either of Anthony Fauci and the January 6 Committee. Mire them all in lawsuits for damages.
Will Republicans have the intestinal fortitude to do this? Again, I don't know.
But I do know one thing for certain: we wouldn't be in this mess if the Democrats had done their Constitutional duties.
