Millions of Americans, including many congressional Republicans, have alleged that former President Joe Biden, because of his undeniably deteriorating physical and mental health, was not fully in charge of his own administration for some or even the entirety of his four years in the White House.

On Wednesday, the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to expose the increasingly evident cover-up of Biden's declining capabilities and determine who, in fact, was actually running things while he was nominally in charge, Fox News reported.

Undoubtedly of paramount concern is determining who had access to and control of the autopen device that was reportedly utilized frequently to mimic Biden's signature on official documents ranging from his executive orders, presidential memos and directives, and pardons, among other things.

Who was running the Biden administration?

Wednesday's hearing, which was first announced last month amid a deluge of new books and media reports detailing how President Biden was not truly in charge of his administration, was titled, "Unfit to Serve: How the Biden Cover-Up Endangered America and Undermined the Constitution."

Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) opened with prepared remarks and said, "Today’s hearing is about competency, corruption, and cover-up within the Biden administration. Simply put, the last administration was rudderless. From one crisis to another, the Biden administration failed and faltered. The partisan media did their best to cover up those failures, but that can only be done for so long."

After listing off several issues and failures from the prior administration that he had concerns about, the Iowa senator asserted, "The Biden administration had a responsibility to do right by the American people. By any metric, they failed."

"The question is what did the president actually know or even understand, and who was actually running the government?" Grassley added. "But regardless, the buck stops with the president, and President Biden will have to answer to history for what happened the last four years."

Biden was "simply not up to the task" of being president

Though Sen. Grassley is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he agreed to hand over control of Wednesday's hearing to a pair of his Republican colleagues on the panel, Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Eric Schmitt (R-MO).

In remarks on the Senate floor ahead of the hearing, per Fox News, Cornyn explained that he hoped the proceeding would further expose "what exactly went on" in the Biden White House, who was responsible for things like the "Biden border crisis" and the "disastrous" withdrawal from Afghanistan, and why the 25th Amendment was never invoked by Biden's Cabinet and vice president to remove him from office.

"And it's now clear that for many months -- no one knows exactly how long -- the president was simply not up to the task," Cornyn said. "Whoever happened to be making those decisions and carrying out the duties of the Office of President was not somebody who was authorized by the Constitution or by a vote of the American people."

Biden health cover-up a "betrayal" of the American people

Sen. Schmitt, in a thread of X posts on Tuesday, wrote, "Tomorrow, I'll be chairing a Senate hearing on one of the most damning scandals in U.S. history. For years, Biden's 'politburo' knew he was mentally unfit to govern our country. They lied to you about it and used it to their advantage. We're going to expose how it happened."

"We're only just beginning to get a detailed picture of the full extent of this betrayal. Biden didn't meet with his own Cabinet for months. Senior officials went weeks without seeing him. Public appearances were staged. Answers were scripted. Orders were signed by autopen," he continued. "But you didn't need special insider knowledge to see what was happening. Biden forgot his own Defense Secretary's name. He asked where a deceased congresswoman was in the crowd during a speech. By the end of his term, he could barely walk."

Schmitt also called out the media for its role in covering up Biden's decline, and said, "These journalists and pundits saw the exact same images, videos and reports that we saw. They saw Robert Hur's report that Biden was so mentally diminished they couldn't prosecute him. They actively chose to ignore or run cover for it, because of their own partisan allegiances."

He further chastised the former VP and Cabinet officials for failing to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the "diminished" president. "The people around Joe Biden were willing to do anything to hold onto political power -- even if it came at the nation's expense," the senator concluded. "That's what this cover-up was about: Power. But they lost. President Trump won. And now, it's time for elected leaders to make sure that something like this will never happen again."