Friday, February 7, 2020

Analysis: Congress should put an end to the State of the Union. For good.

President Trump during the State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)


Congress, in the name of self-respect, should put an end to the State of the Union address.
It’s a made-up tradition steadily warped over time from an exercise in communication between equal branches of the government to a political sideshow in which Congress is a mere prop. It has become an annual measure of our dangerous decline from a nation that governs itself into a nation dependent on its chief executive. It feeds the cult of presidential personality, which is a bad thing regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.
Article II of the Constitution requires that the president “from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” That’s exactly what presidents did, usually in the form of a written report — typically as dull as dishwater — for most of the nation’s history.
This year’s address was the logical endpoint of the long-gathering trend. President Trump made no pretense of communicating information to Congress. He used the time to unveil his reelection message. He repurposed his fellow elected Republicans as campaign rally acolytes (chanting, before he even began, “Four more years!”). He poked and prodded the Democrats into one indecorous breach after another: televised eyerolls, face-palms, counter-chants and walkouts, culminating in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s theatrical ripping of her copy of the speech. Trump’s reality-TV-style giveaways — a scholarship, a medal, a family reunion — had me wondering if, a la Oprah, he would dish out new cars at the end.”
See more of this Analysis in the Washington Post HERE; 

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