"Nobody should be signing bills for the president, not even when the president orders them to do so."

Interesting piece; the versions that I've seen have have cited a kind of "remote" pen rather than an "automatic" pen, if that makes sense. But either way, my response is the same. I just don't understand why this is in any way necessary; autopen of any kind is an old technology workaround to a problem that modern technology has abolished. The internet has, for all practical purposes, eliminated the time it takes to move documents; no matter where the President is, a bill can be anywhere on the planet in seconds. There can surely be no gainsaying that if a bill was passed at midnight DC time and a PDF of the enrolled bill emailed to the President (who is for sake of inconvenience visiting Indonesia) and printed, the President's signature on the printout would not constitute a valid act of signing the bill.

And if a bill was so long as to not be amenable to such a solution? Well, you don't have to go as far as Herman Cain to agree that that bill might warrant a veto.

So this is an old technology solution in search of a problem. It creates a number of problems in service of accomplishing absolutely nothing of value. No imaginable bill has ever or will ever be so important that it cannot wait the time it take to print out to be signed, and even if such a bill came into existence, it would still have to be printed before for the Autopen route was taken! So what is gained? Not much, I should think.

Well, he really couldn't wait a few more days since the law was set to expire in a matter of hours. There has to be some intelligent process to handle this in the rare situations that present themselves. This is a quirk of modern times versus when the Constitution was written. Fax, email and electronic signatures were not even considered. Truthfully, I think faxing, sign and refaxing would have been acceptable until the President could get back to sign the original. I actually did not like the use of the autopen but I guess the fax issue is considered less acceptable in some weird way.