It’s time for SOTU to go solo 

Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle wrote on Feb. 5 that the time has come to pull the plug on the president’s live State of the Union addresses (SOTU) before joint sessions of Congress. And that was two days before the latest spectacle unfolded in the House chamber.   

After watching that most recent boisterous dust-up play-out last Tuesday evening, I have been converted to the Von Drehle solution: it is time for SOTU to go solo from the Oval Office, with written copies sent to the Hill by courier. That’s how it was done for the entirety of the 19th century and into the second decade of the 20th century. The old ways are sometimes rediscovered as being the better approach after all. 

The state of the Union message is rooted in Article II, section 3 of the Constitution which mandates that the president “shall, from time to time, give the Congress information of the state of the Union and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” Our first two presidents, George Washington and John Adams, appeared in person before Congress to deliver their messages. President Thomas Jefferson discontinued that practice in 1801 and submitted his messages to Congress in writing. The change was prompted by Jefferson’s anti-royalist bias that in-person appearances before Congress smacked too much of the British sovereign’s “speech from the throne” at the opening of Parliament, laying-out the government’s program for the coming year. 

The personal appearances resumed in 1913 with President Woodrow Wilson, himself a bit of an anglophile, and have continued to this day with the exception of President Herbert Hoover (1929-1932). His predecessor, President “Silent Cal” Coolidge did not remain silent: he delivered the first live SOTU address over the radio. President Harry Truman was the first president to deliver his SOTU message on live television in 1947; and President Lyndon Johnson was the first to move his speech to prime-time TV in 1965. With the advent of “the imperial presidency,” presidents have ever since had captive audiences for their SOTU addresses, both in Congress and across the nation.   

For most of those years, Congress served as a convenient, still-life backdrop for the event, coming to life only when the president’s partisans were prompted to frequently pop-up, like so many jacks-in-the-box, and wildly applaud some golden rhetorical nugget or another. That pattern was noticeably broken in 2009 when Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) shouted, “You lie,” at something President Barack Obama had said. 

House Republican leaders reminded their conference members, just hours before this year’s address, that the eyes of the country would be on them throughout the speech, ergo, behave yourselves. Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) underscored that by telling reporters that his members would avoid playing “childish games,” citing as an example then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) tearing-up President Donald Trump’s written message on camera at the end his address in 2020.  Nevertheless, GOP members this year could not resist shouting at President Joe Biden whenever he taunted them in a perceived partisan vein.   

As Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote on Feb. 8, if he hadn’t known better he would have thought he was watching the British House of Commons heckling the prime minister during “Prime Minister’s Questions.” I had exactly the same reaction: the evening had devolved into a lively and rude interactive shouting match, with President Biden clearly prepared to respond to his detractors with cleverly “adlibbed” zingers. It was evident he had planned to draw-out the boo-birds in a bait-and-switch game in which they went for the bait, and he then took the switch to them.  

It would be one thing if the U.S. adopted a question period like the British Parliament, but presidents have scrupulously avoided that practice to preserve their dignity and separation of powers status. Instead, they have appeared for questioning by the media at White House news conferences. The SOTU insult-exchange is no substitute. Even congressional committee hearings in which administration officials are called to testify have become highly contentious and testy this year with the opposition party wielding the gavels.   

All this brings us back to the civilized alternative of allowing the president to deliver his SOTU remarks from the Oval Office and sending his written message to the Hill. Congress would still reserve the right to designate someone to respond to the president’s remarks on prime-time TV. 

I know there are many who enjoy the pomp and pageantry of the SOTU. It has become an American tradition over the last 110-years — a natural lead-in to Super Bowl Sunday for the sheer patriotic spectacle of it all. I would appeal to these die-hard SOTU-huggers to consider the bright side of going solo: the president’s 72-minute speech his year would take about half that time after eliminating all the “pause-for-applause”  interruptions and introductions of distinguished guests of the first lady in the visitors’ gallery.   

While the audience for a half-hour Oval Office address would not begin to match that of the “live, from Capitol Hill” extravaganza, it may have the salutary effect of shrinking the archaic “imperial presidency” and begin to restore the intended balance between the branches.   

Don Wolfensberger is a Congress Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, former staff director of the House Rules Committee, and author of “Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays.” The views expressed are solely his own.