Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here| Email Eli | Email Lauren Typically, you can pack light when flying somewhere warm. But that was not exactly the case for one White House staffer who jetted off to the U.S. Virgin Islands last week. The staffer, whose identity remains unknown, was carrying the official printout of the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill so that President JOE BIDEN, vacationing in St. Croix, could sign it into law. Amounting to 1,653 pages, the legislation filled three carry-on bags. The staffer and others on the ground then had to reassemble all the paper before presenting it to the president to sign. And it could have been worse: the House and Senate versions were more than 4,000 pages, but the final enrolled bill was — to the great relief of the staffer — printed in smaller text and on larger paper. It was actually a less arduous journey than what took place last May, when an aide flew to Seoul — enduring the indignity of a flight attendant spilling milk on them — to hand deliver the president a bill authorizing $40 billion in aid for Ukraine to sign after it cleared Congress (upside there: a lot more frequent flier miles). Travelers aboard the flight last week couldn’t have known that one passenger’s cargo authorized spending worth far more than the aircraft itself and probably the entire airline. And some who heard about this strange errand afterward might have wondered why, in an age of unmanned drones, wireless money transfers, real estate transactions conducted via DocuSign and heightened concern about carbon footprints, such an onerous, antiquated process was even necessary. We were among those wondering. Especially because Biden’s old boss, President BARACK OBAMA, used the autopen, a device that can produce their signature without holding an actual pen, to sign bills several times over his eight years in office. He used it twice in 2011 — to enact an extension of the Patriot Act when he was attending the G-8 summit in France and also to authorize an emergency bill to avoid a government shutdown while traveling in Indonesia. And in 2013, Obama authorized an autopen signature on a tax bill while vacationing in Hawaii rather than having a staffer fly it across the Pacific. Faced with questions about the legality of the practice, Obama justified his autopen usage on a 2005 legal opinion from President GEORGE W. BUSH’s office of legal counsel, which said the president’s presence was not required for a proxy signature as long as the president “specifically authorizes” its use. Despite that opinion, Bush never utilized the autopen and Obama’s doing so drew criticism. Inside the Biden White House, there has been little to no discussion about following Obama’s precedent, according to multiple officials who spoke to West Wing Playbook. “The normal process is for the president to sign the full, original copy of legislation sent to his desk, and certainly we followed that process in the signing of this omnibus,” a Biden administration official said. Indeed, presidents including RONALD REAGAN and DONALD TRUMP, known for Sharpie annotations of everything from photos and news clippings to maps of potential hurricane impact zones, both eschewed the autopen and instead had legislation flown to them to sign while out of town. The process is straightforward but can be arduous. While someone from the staff secretary NEERA TANDEN ’s office is always with the president when he travels, getting Biden paper after he’s left town requires coordination across the administration. Once aides at the Office of Legislative Affairs get word from clerks at the Capitol as to when the enrolled bill will be headed over to the White House, they alert Tanden’s team. If air travel is required, someone in the staff secretary’s office has to book a ticket through the Concur system used by advance staffers and other officials flying commercially to conduct government business. When they’re going international, as was the case with St. Croix, the State Department oversees the process. “It’s anything but simple,” said one person familiar with the process. “But it’s just how this is supposed to be done.” MESSAGE US —Are you a member of the staff secretary’s office tasked with delivering bills to sign? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com.
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