R.I.P. Scout26
Isn't the State of the Union a constitutional requirement?
But, the date, time, and manner of it is not. It could be a simple report emailed to congress. No speech necessary.
The Washington Post is reporting that Pelosi has invited Trump to deliver his SOTU in the House on February 5th.
In the absence of firm constraints, this little bit of our institutional order has—like almost all of the others—mutated into something bigger, dumber, and more dysfunctional than the Framers ever could have imagined; a spectacle with bloated, forgettable prose, guest galleries full of tokens and totems, and a full hour of competitive hand clapping....One of the few fringe benefits of this presidency has been the withering of certain institutions built on professional Washington’s enormous self-regard. Absent a “cool” president, or at least one who’ll play along, we’ve seen the end of the celebrity-studded Kennedy Center galas and the auto-destruction of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi canceled her initial invitation to deliver the State of the Union in light of the government shutdown, I nurtured hope that the president would respond by deflating its importance, as well.Absent that, I thought he might at least replace the event with a kind of “Taco Bell Presents SOTU Fest 2019: Live From the Rose Garden and With a Special Performance by Nickelback.”
