A very unusual State of the Union

One of the first things I noticed last night as I arrived on Capitol Hill to cover President Joe Biden’s fourth State of the Union address was the insane amount of security. Multiple blocks of streets surrounding the Capitol were fenced off by police and cop cars with their flashing lights on were ubiquitous. I hadn’t seen anything like it in downtown DC since the Capitol complex was locked down in the aftermath of the January 6 Capitol riot. Except then, staff and press were allowed to enter the gates with a valid ID badge….

One of the first things I noticed last night as I arrived on Capitol Hill to cover President Joe Biden’s fourth State of the Union address was the insane amount of security. Multiple blocks of streets surrounding the Capitol were fenced off by police and cop cars with their flashing lights on were ubiquitous. I hadn’t seen anything like it in downtown DC since the Capitol complex was locked down in the aftermath of the January 6 Capitol riot. Except then, staff and press were allowed to enter the gates with a valid ID badge. This time, we all had to make the trek around the massive perimeter in the hopes of finding one open door to get into a congressional building and then snake through the tunnels to the Capitol.

The overwhelmingly tight security was hardly the only new aspect of this year’s SOTU. Biden’s speech stood out as decidedly the most partisan among the modern US presidents. No matter what issue he covered, he made sure to lay blame for it at the feet of Republicans and Donald Trump — who he only referred to as his “predecessor”.

“There was no such respectability to be found in Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech last night,” The Spectator editor-at-large Ben Domenech writes in this week’s edition of Thunderdome. “It is without question the most divisive, vindictive and downright vile expression of American partisanship ever given from that honored stage.”

Christopher Bedford, a senior fellow at the Common Sense Society, concurred, “Through the sixty-seven-minute speech, the octogenarian struck an often angry tone, showcasing the whisper-and-yell that has characterized his speaking style since his 2016 return to the national stage.”

It’s not completely out of pocket for a president to urge Congress — or, more specifically, the other party — to pass his political wish-list items that he claims will make the country a better place. It’s quite unusual to give a straight-up campaign speech. It is even more unprecedented to compare the other party to Nazis, accuse them of seeking to take away democracy and freedom and allege that their voters are hate-filled bigots. Alas, that is exactly what Biden — one dubbed the unifier-in-chief — did on Thursday night.

The aggressive speech didn’t play well with the public. According to a CNN poll, it was Biden’s least favorable SOTU address to date. In 2021, 78 percent of Americans reacted positively to Biden’s SOTU — this year, that fell to 65 percent.

It is a speech that will be remembered for all the wrong reasons.

-Amber Duke

On our radar

NO LABELS JUMPS IN No Labels, the political group seeking to elevate third-party candidates, said that they will move forward with a unity ticket to challenge Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. They are still identifying which candidates will appear on the ticket.

TRUMP POSTS BAIL The former president put up a $91 million bond to appeal a jury’s verdict that he defamed advice columnist E. Jean Carroll by denying her claims that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store dressing room.

OUT OF ENERGY American utility companies warned that the power grid is close to tapped as electricity demand skyrockets. “Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country,” the Washington Post reports.

House passes Laken Riley Act

Against a backdrop of high-profile murders committed by illegal immigrants, a broadly bipartisan group of lawmakers passed the Laken Riley Act through the House by a 251-170 margin.

The bill requires federal immigration authorities to detain illegal immigrants who are charged with crimes like theft; it also folded in a separate measure, by Representatives Dan Bishop and Chip Roy, called the SUE for Immigration Enforcement Act, which “ensures that states have standing to sue open-border Executive Branch officials who refuse to enforce our nation’s immigration laws,” per Bishop.

As a sign of how Democrats are starting to shift on the immigration issue, Bishop’s Democratic opponent for attorney general in North Carolina, Representative Jeff Jackson, voted with Bishop.

Another testament to the poignancy of the Laken Riley Act occurred during Biden’s State of the Union address, during which he went off script to botch her name. He did, however, note that Riley was murdered by an “illegal,” prompting furious outrage from progressives in Congress, who responded in unison that he should have used the term “undocumented.”

Representative Mike Collins, who represents the district where Riley was murdered, invited her parents to the SOTU. They declined to come, but Collins left their seats open in honor of their daughter and every other victim of crime committed by an illegal immigrant. Outgoing Independent senator Krysten Sinema, a former Green Party activist, completed her heel-turn on the border by bringing Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council to “remind my colleagues that the chaos at the border continues day in and day out, and states like mine pay the price for Washington’s failure to act.”

Left completely unmentioned, however, was the border crisis’s impact on Democratic-run cities across America. In New York City, for example, gangs of illegal immigrants recently assaulted police officers. The officers were brought as guests by Republican Representatives Anthony D’Esposito, a long-time cop himself, and Nicole Malliotakis.

D’Esposito sees a clear tie-in from his guest to the bill to honor Riley that he voted for.

“From brave NYPD officers being assaulted by migrants in Times Square to the senseless murder of Laken Riley by an illegal immigrant in Georgia, Joe Biden’s open border crisis has brought chaos and terror to communities across this country,” he said.

–Matthew Foldi

Katie Britt’s rebuttal wasn’t all bad

The president’s yearly State of the Union addresses are traditionally followed up by a rebuttal from the opposing political party. Who gets picked to give the rebuttal is usually selected with one thing in mind: elections. This time around, the GOP chose Alabama’s Katie Britt, the youngest woman ever elected to the Senate chamber.

Split by the indictments and dissatisfied with Trump’s rhetoric, white suburban women have become a demographic that the GOP worries about when eyeing the 2024 presidential election. So it seemed logical to have a mother of school-aged children deliver the speech from her kitchen.

Unfortunately for Republicans, Britt’s impassioned speech faced a lot of ridicule; it was criticized for being overtly theatrical and bizarrely ASMR-esque as she half-whispered and quivered through her lines.

For all of the Britt-trashing, though, the contents of the speech were solid. She began by appealing to motherhood and portrayed Biden as a “permanent politician who has actually been in office for longer than I’ve even been alive.” She retold a story that never gets old: the American Dream. Then, she dived into immigration, the top issue on the minds of voters. She did so by sharing striking, personal stories of those most impacted by the crisis, telling Biden that “you only have yourself to blame.”

The other themes of her speech included inflation, crime and foreign policy. Choosing to highlight issues that are winners for the GOP alone is enough to consider her speech a success. The delivery may have served as a bit of a distraction from the larger points, but maybe the senator from Alabama deserves some slack. At least she correctly diagnosed the nation’s problems — and potential solutions — something at which many Republicans often fail.

–Juan P. Villasmil

NBC anchors play with traffic

Spotted: NBC News anchors Chuck Todd and Hallie Jackson furiously waving cars under a parking garage gate after the State of the Union address. Cars started to pile up at a broken pay station before an enthusiastic Jackson, who hosts Hallie Jackson NOW, yelled down the ramp for everyone to line up bumper-to-bumper so they could follow each other out before the gate closed in between cars. “I feel bad,” Jackson lamented as one car missed the cutoff.

–Cockburn