Rude Republicans? C’mon, man: The SOTU has become every president’s campaign rally

Once a year a president holds a campaign rally his opponents are expected to attend. It’s called the State of the Union Address.

Three years ago, the Democratic speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, had enough. She tore up a copy of President Donald Trump’s speech on stage, right after he delivered it.

The new Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, didn’t go that far Tuesday.

But GOP backbenchers made their displeasure known by shouting back at the president whenever he framed them as stooges of the rich or worse — which he frequently did in the latter half of his speech.

Do the rules of civility require that the people’s elected representatives accept whatever invective the president cares to hurl their way?

The very fact the Constitution instructs the president to “give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union” shows which branch holds the higher sovereignty. Congress does not report to the president.

For most of our history, the State of the Union was delivered to Congress as a written document, not a speech.

George Washington gave his message to Congress verbally. But Washington, like British monarchs then and now, was seen as being above party. Thomas Jefferson discontinued the practice of making a speech of it. The precedent he set survived until the time of Woodrow Wilson.

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Wilson, the president who led America into the maelstrom of World War I, had a grand vision of the president as the spokesman for the nation.

He was also one of the architects of the modern federal administrative state. But Wilson’s technocratic mindset, expansive though it was, still eschewed mere partisanship.

Today the State of the Union is an intensely partisan spectacle. Yet it conscripts Supreme Court justices, the Joint Chiefs of Staff bedecked with their medals and even the opposition in Congress to lend an air of supreme authority to the president’s self-serving pitch.

If Nancy Pelosi and Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of President Joe Biden’s hecklers, are disrespectful, the sycophantic behavior of other representatives is even less dignified.

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They stretch out their arms and jostle with one another for a chance to shake the president’s hand and get photographed with him as he enters the House chamber, like fans tussling for a celebrity’s autograph.

Those pictures are currency for impressing donors and creating the appearance the president is close to a legislator who might have a challenging primary at home or ambitions to higher office.

The State of the Union is a campaign event for more than just the president.

The jeering is rude. The cheering the president’s party indulges in, however, is nothing short of humiliating.

Men and women elected to represent their own states and districts snap to their feet on cue to shower the president with ovation after ovation, like a Soviet Union party congress applauding Brezhnev.

With Biden the comparison is especially striking. He’s 80, and he shows it.

He slurred words and occasionally seemed lost in his own remarks. To convey conviction he’s now reduced to shouting at the top of his lungs.

He’s older than Brezhnev ever lived to be.

But his speechwriters knew what they were doing. They set the Republicans up for a fall, with the early part of the address focusing on bipartisan achievements, only to pivot midway through to attacks on oil companies and the Trump administration and to claims that Republicans threaten Social Security and Medicare.

Biden’s speechwriters can have him say whatever they want at a campaign rally. But they don’t get to script the Republicans, too. They can’t make them stay silent while Biden demonizes their colleagues.

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A president who was true to the standards of George Washington would keep partisan baiting out of the State of the Union. And one who had the respect for Congress that Jefferson had would forgo an in-person delivery altogether.

But that’s not going to happen in our age of image, when public relations, not the public interest, dictates that presidents play to the cameras. The State of the Union address is part of the pageantry of the modern presidency.

Yet it is also absurd — a hyper-partisan affair in which the opposition is expected to meekly play along while the president’s party acts like a high-school cheer squad.

The president is not a king, he’s a partisan as much as any leader of Britain’s House of Commons. So it’s no surprise if the State of the Union evolves into as raucous an occasion as a Commons debate. Better that than a Soviet-style party congress.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.