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Count me as one of the few who actually enjoys watching a presidential address to Congress. Years ago, when I was chief speechwriter for Bill Clinton, I would nervously hover backstage with the uniformed military officer who ran the teleprompter. For the last few minutes of the speech, though, I would slip away to the House floor. I would stand anonymously jammed into a throng of (usually) Republican congressmen. I loved the raw politics of it, the lawmakers cheering or braying or scowling, all the things that annoy most people.
It is a rare, enduring pageant of democracy. Viewership remains high. Citizens want to actually hear from their leaders directly. It is a chance, if nothing else, to see the three branches of government as people, not abstractions — checks and balances in the flesh.
All of which makes tonight’s address even more starkly, jarringly off. It comes days after the president essentially switched sides, aligning the United States with the aims of dictators.
For more than a century, ever since Woodrow Wilson began the practice of speaking to Congress and the country in person instead of in writing, presidents have used that pulpit to speak to our highest ideals. It has been a place, in particular, where presidents spoke to the country’s special role in the world — as a beacon of freedom, imperfect and hypocritical as that status often made us.
That podium is where Wilson set out his Fourteen Points for peace, speaking up against “force and selfish aggression.” Where Ronald Reagan proclaimed that “democracy is everywhere on the move.” Where Clinton called the United States the “indispensable nation” — to bipartisan applause.
Most apropos, Franklin Roosevelt stood there — and, yes, he stood, in 10 pounds of steel braces on his paralyzed legs — to proclaim that the United States stood for Four Freedoms: Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Freedom from want. Freedom from fear. “Everywhere in the world.”
“That is no vision of a distant millennium,” Roosevelt said. “It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”
Roosevelt had surmounted the first “America First” movement, which had combined traditional isolationism with frank admiration for fascism.
Then there is the legislative branch. The Constitution requires the president to report to Congress on “the State of the Union.” This was actually one of many provisions designed to make clear that Congress — the subject of the document’s first article — was to be the preeminent branch of government. The framers emphatically did not want a king. In fact, Thomas Jefferson refused to give the speech in person not only because he was shy but because he thought it too closely resembled a British “speech from the throne.”
Decades of stagecraft have reduced the lawmakers to partisan cheering squads. When Donald Trump brags about supposed billions or trillions in waste found by Elon Musk and his colleagues, we can expect Republicans to roar. But will they be a little nervous? Do they want to cede their power on national television?
What Musk is doing is illegal. Congress has the power of the purse. Agencies such as USAID were created by statutes passed by Congress and signed into law by prior presidents. Chief executives cannot simply refuse to spend the money allocated to an agency or shut it down by firing its entire staff.
Then there is the Supreme Court, sitting berobed in the front row. The justices’ job is to remain silent. But previous addresses have reminded us how sharply politicized the Court has become. When Barack Obama (accurately) warned that the Citizens United decision, delivered only days earlier, would lead to a flood of corporate money in politics, Justice Samuel Alito mouthed (inaccurately) “Not true!” That misbegotten ruling gave us a government by Elon Musk.
Today, the Roberts Court’s credibility teeters. Its ruling last summer in Trump v. U.S. gave presidents vast immunity from accountability for legal wrongdoing. That decision, Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her scathing dissent, “makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.”
This term, the Court will face a test. A flotilla of cases is headed its way. Presumably, the justices will reject measures such as the purported end to birthright citizenship signed by the presidential Sharpie on the first day of Trump’s term. Will they do the harder work of making clear that presidents must follow the law and that Congress cannot be reduced to a mere advisory body? Will they embrace the radical version of a “unitary executive theory,” now pushed by the president’s lawyers, which says that the president has sole personal control over the entire executive branch, unconstrained by law?
By next year, we will know the answers to these questions. And we will know if the democratic experiment reflected in a constitutional requirement to report on the state of the union still stands.
