The House Oversight Committee has released a damning (but hardly surprising, given what we already knew) report concluding that senior aides to President Joe Biden exercised his Presidential powers without his knowledge or consent, including his signing of executive actions and deciding and directing national policy.

The 90-page report is titled “The Biden Autopen Presidency: Decline, Delusion, and Deception in the White House.” (Might have tried to be a bit more restrained there, partisan-wise…) The report documents how Biden’s inner circle ran the government when he could not, while concealing his cognitive deterioration, strictly staging his appearances and controlling Biden’s decision-making. Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) said the findings raise “constitutional and criminal concerns” about the validity of executive actions taken between 2021 and the end of his term in office.

Yes, that seems like a fair assessment. As is usual in such matters, the Democrats on the committee released the obligatory “this is a partisan witch hunt” rebuttal, but the evidence throughout the report seems beyond reasonable dispute. The evidence does not prove Biden’s staff acted without authority, the Democrats say, because it is always nearly impossible to prove a negative. Right. That’s the best they have?

To save us both time, read the Washington Examiner’s extensive report on the report, here. My considered, measured analysis: Holy crap!

So the question is, “Now what?” At the bare minimum, the Department of Justice must revise its guidance on the use of the autopen on Presidential Executive Orders. A 2005 DOJ memo held that Presidents can use the autopen for official documents, but it wasn’t until President Barack Obama used it to sign legislation in 2011 while he was abroad that the gates were opened for the Biden team’s abuse.

A lot needs to happen in light of this confirmation of our worst fears. I’ll post about that in a follow-up, but reader suggestions are welcome.

My major concern is the very beginning of the interview, in which Attia, whose specialty is human longevity, says, “At 75, both men and women fall off a cliff…. At the population level, it’s unmistakable what happens at the age of 75.” The statement has special resonance for me, as my birthday is December 1 (known locally as “Jack Finding His Father Dead in a Chair Day”). I don’t look forward to falling off any cliffs.

To frame the discussion with the threshold question to begin most ethics inquiries, “What’s going on here?”

1. The doctor is irresponsible and lying. He doesn’t say that statistically, there is a definite, measurable decline in human health as a result of aging if one is looking at the human population as a whole. He says “At 75, both men and women fall off a cliff,” which will be heard as “At 75, all men and women fall off a cliff.” That is quite simply not true. It certainly isn’t true for my family, as my mother, father, and grandmother all were lively, productive, engaged and active well into their late 80’s. I just got a Facebook post from Pat Boone showing him training in a gym; he also does a weekly radio show on the Sirius ’50s channel in which he is witty, erudite, funny and except for a little hoarseness, immediately recognizable as the same guy who sang “April Love.” Pat’s 91. My next door neighbors are a decade older than me, and as far as I can see and hear, they are as active and lucid as ever, and I’ve known them for almost 45 years.

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As a professional stage director of some success and the artistic director of a D.C. area professional theater dedicated to producing important American stage works that had fallen out of favor, this is a topic that I have both thought about a great deal and also dealt with directly. My primary rule in such matters is “if it works, the show is successful, and the audiences are entertained, then the alteration of a classic show is artistically and ethically defensible.” There are, as always, exceptions. I think the current production of the classic musical “Damn Yankees” at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage may be one of them.

The show is a 1955 musical comedy (that’s the excellent 1958 film version above), with a book by George Abbott and Douglass Wallop, based on Wallop’s 1954 novel “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.” The real stars of the show were rising young musical comedy writers Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, twenty-somethings who were boldly invading the domain of Rogers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter with a whole new style of the genre, full of energy and satire. “Damn Yankees” was their second smash collaboration (“Pajama Game” was the first), and the pair looked poised to bring a long string of hit musicals to the Broadway stage. Then, while “Damn Yankees” was still running on the way to 1,019 performances, Ross, just 29-years-old, died. Because the pair wrote both lyrics and music together, Adler never had another success on Broadway after his creative partnership was shattered.

“Damn Yankees” is set during the 1950s in Washington, D.C., when the Yankees had dominated baseball and the World Series since the 1920s and the Washington Senators had been perennial losers for almost as long. The joke was “Washington, D.C.: first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.” The novel and the musical took the amusing proposition that only a deal with the Devil could elevate the hapless Senators over the Yankees and get them into the Series….and that’s what happens.

The new production at The Arena couldn’t leave a classic alone, apparently feeling that today’s audiences can’t enjoy looking through a window at a time and a culture long past. D.C.’s baseball team is no longer the Senators (the city lost two of those) and the current team, the Nationals, play in the National League, well removed from the Yankees. The new adapted plot takes place in 1999-2000, the last time the Yankees had a brief dynasty and won two straight World Series. But the team was no longer the presumptive champion year after year, so the whole premise is forced. (The Boston Red Sox have won more World Series than the Yankees in the 21st Century). In 1955, the Yankees were indeed in the Series, facing the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 2025, they were eliminated in the play-offs. Worse still, the desperate losing franchise in the show is no longer the Senators, but the Baltimore Orioles, who, although they have been going through a rough patch lately, have never been perennial cellar dwellers, and they didn’t finish last in 1999 and 2000 either.

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Another week, another wave of hypocritical, “Yikes, Trump is President!” freakouts. In addition to the weekend’s “No Kings” children’s theater, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley (Guess which party!) grabbed the Senate floor on Tuesday to “ring the alarm” on President Donald Trump’s “tightening authoritarian grip on the country.” Then he blabbed on for 23 hours, the second-longest speech in Senate history, and said absolutely nothing new, original, that didn’t ape old, old Axis talking points, or the wasn’t pure projection.

Let’s see: Merkley accused the Trump administration of undermining checks and balances, attacking free speech (funny, coming from a Democrat), attacking the press (they aren’t attacked enough), “politicizing the Justice Department,” (VERY funny coming from a Democrat) and using the military to suppress dissent, which only makes sense if you define defying federal law and attacking law enforcement officers as “dissent.” He made the familiar, apparently opinion research-tested claim that this President isn’t “normal” (having studied all of these guys rather extensively, I have no idea what a normal President is or would be. Every one is absolutely unique.)

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I’ve been getting snarky emails and proposed comments chiding me for frequently misspelling “Charlie,” as in Charlie Kirk, as “Charley.” “Why do you keep doing that?” asks one.

Why? I do it because…

1. I write the blog in my “spare time,” of which I have none, and try to cover as much of the ethics landscape as I can to advance the mission of this blog and my profession as an ethicist…

2. I am often rushed and pressed for time, as this pursuit takes me conservatively 3-4 hours every day for which I am not compensated, at least monetarily….

3. I’ve always made a lot of typos because I can’t type, though I do a better job proofing than I used to…

4. I grew up with an Uncle Charley, who not only spelled his name that way but who also objected to the “-ie” version, so “Charlie” has always looked wrong to me…

5. Names with multiple spellings bedevil me and always have. Don’t get me started on “Stephen/Steven,” “Sara/Sarah” or “Madeline/Madeleine/Madelyn/Madalyn/Madelynn/Madilyn” (if that’s your name and I spell it right, I assure you that it’s an accident).

I want to get these details right, but readers who nit-pick on the irrelevant “gotchas” are not being constructive, and as in the case of the #1 Ethics Alarms troll, often are simply assholes. When they try writing 2000-2500 words a day of original commentary for 15 years while trying to keep a challenging business running with a dead partner, no staff and an often troubled family healthy and happy, I’ll take their critiques of my typing more seriously.

Until then, my response is a vociferous “Bite me.”

I know I keep complaining about this, but I continue to be depressed and shocked at how many people I admire and respect are taking to social media to virtue-signal—as if sounding like an ignorant fool is ever virtuous—about participating in the weekend’s beyond moronic No Kings rallies. The ones who most disappoint me are the lawyers. If you boil down what little of substance there is in the bill of particulars offered by these lobotomized citizens, the residue at the bottom of the pan is “we think law enforcement is cruel.” Really? Gee, my definition of “cruel” is letting poor, desperate, ignorant people over the border in defiance of our laws while giving them the impression that it’s okay and there will never be any negative consequences as long as they keep their heads down, work for pathetic wages at menial jobs and don’t rape anyone (and heck, maybe even if they do.) These people were lied to when Joe Biden and the Democrats said, “Come on over! You’re welcome!” The Democrats really thought that with their weaponizing of the justice system against political opponents and undermining election integrity, there would never again be an administration that didn’t want the country flooded with illegals. They also thought, with some justification, that the gates had been flung open for so long that an illegal immigration crackdown and reckoning would be logistically and politically impossible. As for that miscalculation, I call on Nelson Muntz to say…

Assholes.

I did love the White House comment when asked about the demonstrations. “Who cares?” But I do care. I care that so many of my friends are leaking IQ points out their ears….

Meanwhile…

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