If the President of the United States signs something, like an executive order or pardon, without any idea what it is (or thinking it’s something else entirely), is it still legally an binding? Say an unscrupulous White House staffer drafts a document commuting all federal death sentence (or pardoning anyone born a Thursday of any federal crimes they may have committed) a slips it in front of the President who think’s he or she is signing letters of credence for the Ambassador to Burkina Faso. The President wouldn’t had no intention to grant clemency (or knowledge that s/he did so) until after the fact, but constitutionally even matter? Unlike executive orders pardons can’t be rescinded, so would that be considered a valid exercise of executive clemency? Could the staffer that “tricked” the President into signing be brought up on criminal charges for anything?
Sure. Your software licensing agreement it legally binding and you never read those, do you?
If someone snuck it into the document, he could be fired, but unless some crime was shown (e.g., he accepted a bribe to do it), it’s not illegal.
Under normal circumstances, it would be considered such an embarrassment to the President to have signed important executive documents without having read them that the Administration would probably be pretty careful not to reveal that fact.
Note that members of Congress routinely vote for or against bills without reading them. I doubt if most bills are read by a President outside of the summary section before being signed. They all rely on aides and what the leadership within their parties tell them about what’s in the bill.
A budget bill is huuuuge.
I know nothing about American constitutional law, but what you wrote isn’t obvious at all to me. A governmental decision isn’t a contract. There are generally plenty of conditions that need to be fulfilled for it to be valid (in fact, also true for contracts, even though to a lesser extent, and the content of your licensing agreement might not be legally binding).
I’m not sure at all that “there’s the president’s signature on it” is sufficient to make it binding. You probably would need to look up for court cases or scholarly work about executive orders to know (or at least have some clue about) what exactly makes something written on a piece of paper and signed by your president an executive order rather than a fancy autograph.
You make a good point, almost a meta- one, about communication, intentional acts, and literacy of boss, his aid, and the recipient(s).
It is of the essence, as a historical matter, in tracking the administrative “dicta”–a word hovering between metaphor and description–in the cartularies of the 9th and 10th centuries.
There is a suggestion (no evidence) that Bannon drafted the decree putting him on the National Security Council and Trump signed it without reading it or knowing what it said.
Well, some of them, anyway. Others do actually read every piece of legislation they vote for, because it’s part of the job.
Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley signed a handful of bills he had intended to veto. He wasn’t paying attention. They went into effect. A signature is legally binding.
Do y9u think any congressmen know what is in any bill that they vote for, sending it to the president for his signature?
In 2009, the governor of Texas signed into law a legislative bill that banned marriage in the state, and invalidated all prior ones.
Sec. 32. (a) Marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman. (b) This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.
Pretty obviously, nobody knew what it said.
According to Wikipedia, the actual statehood proclamations for North and South Dakota were intentionally shuffled so that no one actually knows which was admitted first. That is, the President signed the bills admitting them without knowing which one he was admitting when doing it. He did, however, know what exactly he had done after signing both of them - just not in what order.
I think this is not exactly what you’re looking for, but the point stands.
glowacks- That is way cool. I did not know that.
That’s a rather hyper literal reading of that statute. It seems clear to me what it means.
It seemed clear to everyone else, too. So clear that when it was brought to their attention, they immediately amended the law.
You may have noticed that sometimes, judges render “hyper critical” readings of what laws say, and not what somebody might think they mean to say.
To answer the question, it’s kind of a Constitutional grey zone.
I think this goes back to the issue of how could it be proved that the President did indeed actually sign the law. (After all, signatures can be forged)
How could it really be proved that any law was actually approved by politicians, for that matter? This is actually a little bit of a complicated subject to delve into, so I’m not going to be able to give you a proper discourse into electoral and legislative procedure. To condense it all down to provide you with a quick answer, basically the devil is in the details. The fact basically is that it ends up being individual government officials who decide what the law is. Actual government power is not quite the same thing as legal power. Look in Myanmar, where the ruling government military so often just ignores the laws passed by their Parliament.
But yes, politicians approve laws all the time without reading through all the details. This is very unfortunate, but it does happen. The “Affordable Care Act” that was passed in 2010 had over 2,700 pages. Supposedly there were only two individuals who had read through the entire thing.
And that was just the actual law itself. In addition to that there was 10,000 to 20,000 pages of regulations that stacked 8-feet high. These types of laws passed by Congress often delegate out power to bureaucrats to pass regulations, and then those regulations automatically take on the force of law.
There’s a substantive difference between “didn’t read every word and know every detail” and “signed a totally unrelated thing”, though. It’s one thing to sign the ACA without knowing exactly what page 2,367 says. It’s another to think you’re signing the ACA and actually sign, say, a declaration of war against France.
I don’t know if it’s a legal difference as far as legislation go, but it would be, for example, in contract law. A contract requires a meeting of minds, so if what you signed is sufficiently different from what you thought you were signing, then there are ways to dispute that the contract is valid.
Unless, of course, page 2,367 was a rider declaring war on France.
It wouldn’t be anything that serious, of course, but riders & amendments are constantly attached to unrelated bills. Just because you know what bill you’re signing doesn’t necessarily mean that you know what you’re signing into law.
If you drop the ball, there’s not really any difference between not knowing what bill you’re signing and not knowing what’s in the bill you’re signing.
Luckily for us, the White House dropping the ball like that is highly unlikely, as there are staffs of people whose sole job is preventing that.
Slight hijack: This is right-wing BS. The PPACA is a bit over 900 pages. That is still long, but not much longer than the longest best-selling novels.