Congress was just a backdrop at the State of the Union |
Congress was just a backdrop at the State of the Union
I attended many State of the Union addresses as a member of Congress and I know the ritual cold. Normally a president arrives prepared to persuade and engage, to lay out an agenda and make the case for it to the Congress that must enact it and to the broader public.
Tuesday night’s address earned better reviews than many expected because the stories worked and the honors bestowed on heroes were genuinely moving. But President Trump did not come to engage Congress. He reduced it to a backdrop, with Republicans as a prop and Democrats as a foil. In Trump’s vision of governing, Congress doesn’t have a seat at the table. It has a seat in the audience.
The most revealing moment came when Trump announced that congressional action on tariffs would not be necessary — even though Supreme Court had just struck down his tariff authority just four days earlier. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) predictably stood and applauded. Although Justice Neil Gorsuch was not in the chamber, his searing concurring opinion defending Congress’s core legislative powers did more for Article I that evening than anything its current leaders said or did.
Strip away the theater, and the substance was thin. Health care got vague gestures. A proposal to eventually replace the income tax with tariff revenue was more fantasy than policy. Running through all of it was a unifying assumption: Congress would not need to be involved.
On national security, the lack of depth was more consequential. Iran received a few sentences and a demand: say the secret words, “we will never have a nuclear weapon.” But........