Presidential AutosigningFollow

If the president doesn't sign or veto a bill for ten days while Congress is in session, it becomes law automatically. Since Congress hasn't officially adjourned at all since early May, there's no question about whether this bill is legally law or not.

I'm not really up to speed on the issue, but it may have been that allowing the bill to sit long enough for this to happen may have resulted in lapses in services or policy provisioned by the bill itself, hence the urgency to sign.

The question here isn't really about the use of an autopen specifically, but more "What is the appropriate way for the PotUS to sign a bill when he's physically unable to do so within the time frame deemed necessary?"

Personally, in a case like this, I think it's pretty cut and dry that the auto-signing was a well documented extension of his authority and not at all questionable. The slippery slope argument is legitimate however.

Yup. This is also where some concern could come in though. Let's say that intelligence gathering authorized during that 10 day time frame results down the line in someone being arrested for something. That person could potentially challenge his arrest on the grounds that the bill wasn't legally in effect because of the auto-signer, resulting in that information and all intelligence gathered as a result of it being invalid legally.

Not that there's much choice, of course. The alternative is to not sign it until he gets back and allow the program to lapse. But that might be less than the full 10 days. If some future court decides that the auto-signer isn't sufficient to sign a bill into law, then anything done during that 10 days is illegal and/or invalid. I suppose there's an uncovered edge case potential there as well. Not a huge deal, but I do kinda feel like the practice is a bad idea and should be avoided in terms of signing bills as much as possible.