US president believes he has an economic success story to tell although polls indicate voters are skeptical
In his State of the Union address tonight, Joe Biden will appeal to Republicans and argue that Americans will benefit only if the two parties work together.
“To my Republican friends, if we could work together in the last Congress, there is no reason we can’t work together in this new Congress,” the president will say, according to excerpts released by the White House. “The people sent us a clear message. Fighting for the sake of fighting, power for the sake of power, conflict for the sake of conflict, gets us nowhere. And that’s always been my vision for the country: to restore the soul of the nation, to rebuild the backbone of America: the middle class, to unite the country. We’ve been sent here to finish the job!”
Conservatives on the supreme court accomplished a goal they’d been working towards for decades by overturning Roe v Wade and allowing states to ban abortion entirely. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 12 states have now banned procedure outright or with very limited exceptions, while abortion is unavailable in two others. The Republican-appointed justices responsible for the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision may be in the room when Biden speaks tonight.
Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives after the midterm elections, but only by four seats, defying predictions of a “red wave” of Republican victories that would sweep decisively them out of power. Biden’s allies meanwhile gained a seat in the Senate, allowing them to exercise complete control over the chamber and ending the narrow 50-50 majority they navigated for the past two years. The president will be speaking to this new configuration tonight.
Biden gave last year’s speech at a time when his legislative agenda appeared deadlocked by his inability to win the votes of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, two Democratic senators who had refused to go along with many of his demands. Months later, the lawmakers signed on to the Inflation Reduction Action, a more limited piece of legislation than the White House wanted but which nonetheless represents Washington’s first major legislation against climate change. This blog will eat its hat if Biden doesn’t mention the bill in his speech.
Seated behind Biden tonight will be Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House elected after a history-making 15 rounds of balloting by his fractious Republican majority. He replaced Nancy Pelosi, who as Democratic speaker made all kinds of news during her two stints as the second-in-line to the presidency. Here’s one relevant to today: that time in 2020 when she tore up Donald Trump’s State of the Union address shortly after he finished giving it.
