“Robo-signing” the PATRIOT Act

Chuck Todd tweeted last night:

WH announced that POTUS ordered the Patriot Act renewal to be signed by the “autopen”; so, yes, it was robosigned

Reason given for robosigning via autopen: Patriot Act expires midnight tonight, so as to not have gap, either robosigned or flown to him

Now, Todd was writing in the early hours of morning, French time, while watching hoops (I believe he’s a Heat fan). So this interpretation may be a product of his inattention/fatigue.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting because Todd improperly called signing the PATRIOT Act with an autopen “robosigning.” They’re not actually the same thing. Robosigning as currently used is when a poorly paid live person signs a name to a document (though maybe not the one whose name gets signed), claiming to attest to the accuracy of documents without actually doing so. By ordering that PATRIOT be signed using his autopen, Obama gave the law the full weight of law, yet without actually signing the document.

As I joked last night, they’re going to have to add a couple of lines to Schoolhouse Rock to explain to children the magic of the President’s autopen:

I’m just a bill, yes I’m only a bill, thanks to the President losing his auto-quill.

I’m off to the White House to wait in a line for the President’s autosign.

So Todd was somewhat inaccurate in calling this robosigning. But in a funny way that accorded the PATRIOT signing the same illegitimacy and fraud of foreclosure fraud.

That said, Todd then parroted the Administration fib about why “robosigning” was necessary: because the PATRIOT authorities extended yesterday expired at midnight, so the only way to get the bill signed into law was with Obama’s autopen (or a whole lot of wasted jet fuel, and even that wouldn’t have worked in time).

But that’s not right. Because it ignores the way Congress did nothing with the PATRIOT extensions in the existing extension period, the way those defending the status quo preferred letting time run out to a real debate on these authorities, the way a long-term extension was rammed through at the last moment.

The way to avoid the fraudulent appearance of auto-signing the PATRIOT act, of course, would have been to have an actual debate about it. But Harry Reid and John Boehner and Obama and the other defenders of the status quo couldn’t have that!

Update: Apparently it’s okay to “robo-sign” bills into law because Steven Bradbury said it was:

WH says “auto pen” use authorized by Office of Legal Counsel finding in 2005. Obama phoned auto pen OK to staff secretary last night.

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  1. jo6pac says:

    Yep, I feel safer already now that repugs and demodogs have given away any rights the citizens of this nation might of had.

  2. Kassandra says:

    Things are really flying thru Congress now that El Presidente` doesn’t have a majority in the House, aren’t they?
    Hideous, unconstitutional bills like the defense authorization, which transfers the power to declare war to the president ( any president) are moving like lightning. I can’t keep up. And many are practically secret

    By the time this Congress is done, we may not even be allowed to wipe our butts without a security camera.
    A friend of mine (who doesn’t pay attention) says he is behind Obama 100%.”But,” I ask him, “What is Obama behind?”
    He doesn’t want to talk about it, of course.

    • jo6pac says:

      0 doing the job Rove hired him to do protect the elite and the hell with Main Street. It’s goood to see you haven’t been brain washed at U. Time for the garden.

      • emptywheel says:

        Actually, we want rule of law. You want a world in which corporations woudl be completely free to do all these things to us. Given that the govt already relies on unfettered corporations to do much of this dirty work, it’s really the faux libertarians out there who make this surveillance possible.

        • thatvisionthing says:

          From the youtube:

          The first step in fighting for the rule of law is recognizing that it’s gone.

          (I think — last word kind of cuts off)

          Also…this big government vs big corporations argument kind of seems to be a sleight of hand to me. It’s missing a bigger thing, misdirecting, or maybe my head doesn’t see it in that frame. I’ll ponder.

          Big government and big corporations both have no conscience. They’re also both big boxes determined to continue the box, to not look outside the box. To me, the epiphany I had about what made America different, what would have kept America America, is not only elections but juries that knew their job was to look outside the box, use their conscience, apply their wisdom, reality check and common-sense balance the law being applied. We reasoned together. Now we don’t, and the law is not checked and balanced, much less even applied anymore. See Wall St., see war crimes. Big is its own law(less), its own peerless jury, and we never sit together anymore. Common good, what is that. Common ground, what is that. Commonwealth, what is that. We don’t have a commons anymore.

          I like the idea of commons. I like wikis. I like caring and wondering about everyone, feeling part of a bigger whole. That puts me in the Not Libertarian category. I also like it when one one says no. Civil disobedience, I heart. New songs, I heart. Art, I heart. Yes, show me. I never want to disable that. So that puts me outside the Big Government category, yes? Except… if the rule of law still included juries using their consciences, due process would enable the box to enlarge itself, and the body could self-correct and heal. Grow. If all original authority rests with the people, and a nation of people can found itself on self-evident truth, that is just the biggest Duh in the world, or it should be. But it isn’t anymore, not in juryrigged, oxygen-starved America.

          I’m sick of teh stupid. I’m sick of the wars and injustice. Sick. Ill. Shamed. Freaked. Meanwhile the planet is failing and all the lives we should urgently be caring about — plankton, polar bears, trees — have no rights and no voice, while those who poison and kill and frankenfood do. Look outside the window. Big government and big corporations are big mothernaturefuckers. They can’t help themselves. Look inside the window:

          Goldman isn’t a pudgy housewife who broke her diet with a few Nilla Wafers between meals — it’s an advanced-stage, 1,100-pound medical emergency who hasn’t left his apartment in six years, and is found by paramedics buried up to his eyes in cupcake wrappers and pizza boxes. If the evidence in the Levin report is ignored, then Goldman will have achieved a kind of corrupt-enterprise nirvana. Caught, but still free: above the law. — Rolling Stone

          One other thought about big government is that in a way it’s really smaller and smaller government — more and more power, less and less powerholders. Leaves more and more of us out. It’s unjust, stupid and painful. It inherently makes its own opposition. People make governments to serve their communal needs, not the other way around; America came from someplace; this isn’t even chicken and egg. Them the govt-business is a fail in progress, or seen from the other side of the shrinking tent, we the people are… growing.

          (btw, I am Bradley Manning.)

          • Gitcheegumee says:

            Isn’t the rule of law,and our ability to not only verbalize-,but memorialize it in writing ,the VERY capacities that elevate us above the beasts of the field?

            • thatvisionthing says:

              Beasts and illiterate are just all right with me, they have a bigger wisdom that we can’t touch anymore. (No drones they!) Hope so anyway, because what goes round comes round, empires collapse, the high shall be made low, and here we come: E pleb neesta

              http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipe5EjcchvY

  3. pdaly says:

    Well, now that Congress has renewed the Patriot Act, and now that the lame excuse that ‘time is running out’ is no longer in play, when is Congress going to start debating it? Is today too soon?

    I attended the Massachusetts ACLU annual dinner last night. Listened to Glenn Greenwald as well the other guest speakers. Great talk as expected. At my table, I talked up FDL to people who had not yet heard of it. Hoping we have additional lurkers/commenters after last night.

  4. wagthedog says:

    Why did we spend about $ 10 trillion to assassinate Bin Laden if we aren’t safer?

  5. Bluetoe2 says:

    Obama no more believes in the Constitution than Condi Rice believed in communism because she was a Soviet “scholar.”

  6. Sinestar says:

    Could it just possibly be that the POTUS was just too embarrassed to put his physical signature on a law that makes us effectively East Germany circa 1980? The STASI didn’t disband when the wall fell, they emigrated here.

  7. juliania says:

    Over and above the huge illegality of the Patriot Act itself, this action on Obama’s part says “l’etat c’est moi” in no uncertain terms. Not only can jobs be shipped overseas with impunity, but so can the presidency. Personally I feel strongly that this makes the entire shebang, PA from start to finish, null and void, just as the megacorporations which rule the world by operating from overseas tax havens and paying dirt wages to peons should be.

    Live it up in France, Mr. Obama. At home, your former constituancy is just plain livid.

  8. tjbs says:

    Count article five in the constitution among the dead.

    Were the founding fathers that stupid to include an unnecessary article when it’s plain to see that we can amend the constitution with an “act”.

    FISAct

    Patriot ACT

    AUMF ACT

  9. Stephen says:

    Considering how important this issue is, I took a spin through C&L’s website and reviewed the posts back to May 23/11 and there seems to be no evidence of concern about the Patriot Act. Has Amato possibly gone down the same road as D Kos and decided that no ill of the great one shall be written?

    • emptywheel says:

      I’m not going to criticize people for not covering this. Until we find some way to wake people up on this stuff, nothing will change.

      Being able to demonstrate the geolocation stuff? That might wake people up. But monitoring another vote to extend PATRIOT? That gets really frustrating after a while.