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Judge Andrew Napolitano told viewers on Wake Up America that the Constitution gives the president an almost absolute pardon power, and that the fight over Joe Biden’s last-minute clemency actions will boil down to one simple, decisive question: did Biden personally authorize each pardon. Napolitano made clear that technicalities like whether a mechanical autopen applied the signature are beside the point if the orders came from the president himself.
This is more than legal theory — it is a safeguard against petty, vindictive lawfare by political enemies who would turn paperwork into a backdoor to retribution. Napolitano stressed that pardons need not even be in writing to be valid and that a sitting president cannot retroactively rescind a predecessor’s clemency, a constitutional truth that should frighten the left as much as it comforts patriots.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden has pushed back, insisting he “consciously made all those decisions,” and admitting he personally hand-signed only certain high-profile grants like the one for his son. That admission feeds the debate: if Biden approved policy standards and delegated the mechanics, conservatives rightly demand transparency about who actually chose names and why.
President Trump has predictably seized the moment, declaring autopen-signed documents void and trying to rally outrage against what he calls a brazen abuse of power. Legal experts and long-standing precedent, however, make clear that a successor has no unilateral authority to cancel a predecessor’s pardons — a reality that should temper fevered rhetoric while the real legal test focuses on proof, not posturing.
Internal emails and reporting show the autopen’s use was authorized inside the West Wing, with staffers and the chief of staff involved in the last-minute push, which only deepens the need for a full accounting. Conservatives are right to ask hard questions about process and motive; this is not about clerical minutiae, it is about who wields power in the final hours of an administration and whether the public can trust those decisions.
Patriotic Americans should demand that Congress and conservative legal teams press for clear answers, not let the swamp hide behind bureaucratic excuses. We defend the pardon power because it protects the presidency from political extinction, but we also insist that power be exercised openly and by the man in the Oval Office — no shadow signatures, no backdoor deals, and no special favors for the connected.
