On a Sunday morning talk show in July 2020, Bernie Sanders said the quiet part out loud. Joe Biden, he told CBS’s Face the Nation, had been “a more conservative senator than he is as president.” Sideburns flaring, as if he were talking about Vermont winters.
But he wasn’t wrong.
Back in Delaware from 1973 to 2009, Joe Biden could pass for a moderate Republican. He was the architect of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act — earning him an endorsement from the NRA. He co-authored the 1999–2000 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, repealing parts of Glass-Steagall that separated commercial and investment banking. He championed NAFTA in 1993, even as unions warned of factories fleeing south.
It’s commonly believed that a job can change people, right? Presidents evolve under the Oval Office’s gravity. Lincoln’s 1862 pivot — from his August 22, 1862 letter to Horace Greeley (“my paramount object… is to save the Union”) to the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation a month later. Nixon’s 1971–72 opening to China, despite a Cold War hawk résumé. Those were strategic reversals tied to war, balance-of-power, survival. Big things merit big changes. But what if Biden didn’t suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Lincoln and Nixon faced? What if he didn’t really change — what if the bureaucrats changed him?
That’s the puzzle piece America and the Trump administration are examining right now. Biden’s hard turn left after taking office arrived without an external shock. Which invites a different reading, one that might sound cynical in any other era. Maybe the shift that began with a stack of pardon certificates wasn’t evolution. Maybe it was a revolution by the people who held the pen.
Picture a gorgeous sunny day at Rehoboth Beach, August 2023. Aviators. Binder. Surf. Meanwhile, in a locked room beneath the West Wing, a PSD-7 autopen draws a perfect “Joseph R. Biden Jr.” on a student-loan order drafted after the Supreme Court had already swatted down the plan. No one calls the president. The upload travels from a staff terminal. The country tilts and the signature is flawless. It looks like leadership from a distance, but it reads like delegation without the decider.
That’s the mystery of the hour. The allegation isn’t that a president used an autopen — every modern administration has, and in 2011 Barack Obama directed one for a Patriot Act extension from Deauville, France. The problem is one of scale: that during Biden’s four years, the autopen became a convenience — a way to work around an AWOL commander in chief.
The timestamps tell a story the White House tried its best to conceal. On January 27, 2021, Executive Order 13988 — the sweeping gender-identity directive — carried a 2:14 a.m. stamp in its public PDF. Biden was in Delaware. The upload traced to EOB Room 276, the office of Ron Klain, chief of staff. Klain would eventually log 1,214 autopen accesses during his tenure from 2021 to 2023. The line staff quoted back at each other: “If Joe can’t sign, we sign for him.”
Two months later, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan signing statement followed the same nocturnal pattern: very late-night West Wing upload, the president not in residence. By September 9, 2021, the OSHA vaccine memo cleared through EOB 276 again.
By December 2022, the rail-strike letter went out at 2:11 a.m. over Residence Wi-Fi. By August 2023, the student-loan forgiveness draft — pushed forward even after the Supreme Court had swatted down the plan — routed through Susan Rice’s terminal. Rice, Domestic Policy Advisor from 2021 to 2023, logged 312 autopen uses. She drove the loan-forgiveness push even as OLC lawyers fidgeted.
Anita Dunn, senior advisor from 2021 to 2024, logged 189 uses. One midnight text, later surfaced in a staffer’s deposition, read simply: “Autopen the rail letter tonight. He’s asleep.” Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, logged 97 uses — a dozen Yemen waivers cleared while the principal was at Camp David.
Then there is October 31, 2024: the Hunter Biden commutation filing. A 3:03 a.m. network trace to Anita Dunn’s residence. The principal logged in nowhere.
A Senate freshman with a prosecutor’s eye pulls a run of pardon certificates — eleven in one batch. Each bears the same looping “Joseph R. Biden Jr.” down to the pressure marks. Forensics point to Template C, digitized from a 2019 Christmas card. The names no speechwriter would pick: an armored-car hijacker; a cocaine trafficker who laundered through a church; a coyote who moved children like freight. No DOJ petitions attached. A single timestamp: 3:47 p.m., March 3, 2024.
And Joe Biden’s own logins after July 2022? Zero.
After July 2022, Biden logged no live signatures. The Treaty Room, the traditional signing site, recorded no presidential entries after November of that year. Meanwhile, a Walter Reed neurologist, Dr. Kevin Cannard, began appearing at the White House with metronomic regularity. The leaked clinical instruction that staff treated as gospel: “Limit live signatures to ceremonial.”
That’s when the optics began to harden. As of September 2024, public tallies put the president at roughly 532 days away from the White House across Rehoboth, Wilmington, Camp David, and other retreats — a larger share than any of his recent predecessors. Staff turned the gallows humor into a refrain: “The farther the beach, the faster the pen.”
And also this: “The president is always working wherever he goes,” said White House spokesperson Saloni Sharma. And this: “He never stops being President and he never stops working. Just ask the first lady,” said Michael LaRosa, press secretary to first lady Dr. Jill Biden (2021–2022).
Here’s the comparator that clarifies the outlier.
Lyndon Johnson used the autopen ≈40 times for substantive documents — under 1% of his total output. Ronald Reagan, ≈120 (≈2%). George H. W. Bush, ≈80 (≈1.5%). Barack Obama, 2011–2014, ≈300 (≈3%), including the Deauville Patriot Act episode — with his explicit direction.
Joseph R. Biden, 2021–2024: more than 1,400 substantive autopen executions, constituting ~60% after July 2022 — and zero presidential logins thereafter. In a courtroom, that’s not ceremony. It looks like usurpation.
Which brings us back to Sanders’s throwaway line. Maybe the presidency did look “more progressive” than the Senate years. Or maybe the government was routed through a gang of four staff accounts and a machine that never sleeps, while the man whose name it traced slept often and far from the Resolute Desk.
Coda — The Signers
On March 4, 1789, the new government opened under a Constitution born of pens. The framers were called signers for a reason: men who tied their names to acts so the public could associate the will to sign with the law. “Meet the signers” isn’t a brunch line. The Declaration closes with a pledge — “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” — and those inked names made each man personally liable for treason. John Hancock didn’t scrawl for vanity; he made himself legible to the hangman. Eleven years later, the Constitution’s attestation — “Done in Convention… in witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our Names” — wasn’t boilerplate. Washington signed first so accountability would flow downhill; Franklin watched the sun on the chair and judged it rising because of the stature of the signatures. That’s why we still say “the signers.”
Which is what makes a basement machine tracing a sleeping man’s name feel like betrayal. The Founders put their necks behind their ink. We’re asked, in this episode, to accept ink without a neck — or at best, one that was sunburned.
