The topic of this episode is, What is the State of the Union Address, and Why Does Congress Host It?

Once per year, the President of the United States comes to the U.S. Capitol to deliver a speech known as the State of the Union Address. Usually this happens in late January or early February, but it has occurred as late as March 1.

Both members of the House of Representatives and Senators assemble for this speech, along with nearly all members of the president’s cabinet. Justices of the Supreme Court also are there, as are some other individuals. In modern times it has become quite a spectacle—with television cameras beaming the event to millions of homes.

To discuss this grand affair, I have with me Matt Glassman. He is a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute, where he studies Congress. Prior to joining the Institute, Matt worked with me at the Congressional  Research Service for ten years. There he wrote about congressional operations, separation of powers, appropriations, judicial administration, agency design, and congressional history.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C.

Matt, welcome to the podcast.

Matt Glassman:

Thanks for having me.

Kevin Kosar:

Let’s start with the why. Why does Congress host a state of the union address? Does the U.S. Constitution require it?

Matt Glassman:

The Constitution doesn't require, per se, the State of the Union Address as we know it now, but Article 2, Section 3 does sort of contemplate the idea of a State of the Union message. It says the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

So this idea of the president reporting back to Congress on what's going on in the administration and what he would like to see happen in the legislature is contemplated in the Constitution. So, yes, it is there. It's not required to happen every year; it says from time to time. That's been interpreted as annually, but we don't have a State of the Union message every year.

Sometimes presidents don't do it in their last year in office. Sometimes presidents don't do it right after they're inaugurated—they just deliver a different message to Congress. But the idea is rooted in the Constitution and in Anglo-American tradition. It was very traditional for the monarchy to go speak to Parliament as it opened in English history as well.

Kevin Kosar:

So it's discretionary, which means Congress could—if it chooses—refuse to hold a State of the Union address. One could imagine— in these high partisanship times—a House with a Democratic majority that might have refused to allow President Trump to appear or a Republican majority of the House could refuse President Biden's wish to come and speak.

And for president to actually show up for a State of the Union, there's got to be an actual resolution passed, right?

Matt Glassman:

Yes, in theory. Certainly, for the president to come stand on the House floor and talk, he is going to need either the rules of the House and Senate or a specific resolution from the House and Senate to approve that. The President of the United States does not have any right to be in the House of Representatives or in the Senate giving a speech under the House rules. In the Senate rules, the president currently has floor privileges to the chamber, but it is a function of the rules. There is nothing in the Constitution that would allow the president to come give this message in person.

So first, they work out behind the scenes when the president has a date available that works for everybody. Then the Speaker of the House formally sends a letter to the president inviting him to come over. Then a concurrent resolution is passed by the two chambers setting up the joint session where they'll hear the president's address.

It's absolutely correct that, that you could imagine animosity between Congress and the president getting so high that there wasn't a State of the Union as we know it. The president could still send over a letter—that was traditionally how it was done for 19th century. During the Trump administration, people saw the possibility of Nancy Pelosi saying, “You're not coming over. Send a letter and tell us what you think, but we're not giving you a stage in our chamber to do it.”

Now, of course that didn't happen and there's lots of reasons both politically and normatively that you don't want that sort of partisan animosity to upend the State of the Union, but it's totally plausible and you could imagine a situation where it happened.

Kevin Kosar:

And I guess with the chambers being presently divided—Democratic control in the Senate, Republican control in the House—if both chambers don't agree, then it doesn't happen. The president doesn't get to come over, right?

Matt Glassman:

Doesn't get to come over to speak at a joint session that the current resolutions and practice contemplate. But imagine—for instance—that the House Republicans decided for whatever reason that they didn't want Biden to come over for a State of the Union message this year. I think it's totally plausible that Biden might come over to the Senate and deliver his State of the Union address there. Again, that could be filibustered too, in theory—you can imagine situations. But just because you can't get a joint session going in Congress doesn't mean the president can't come over and give an address in one of the chambers. All sorts of combinations are possible.

And this is a level of partisan animosity that even Trump versus the House Democrats didn't create, so it would have to be something sort of even more extraordinary than anything we've seen over the last decade in order to break this tradition.

Now, could you imagine a president of the United States deciding he was done with these in person things, and just sending a letter instead and having someone in his party read it on the floor the way they did in the 19th century? That's also plausible. That would require less partisan animosity. It would just require a president who saw things differently.

I don't think that's likely either. I think most of the time the president believes the state of the Union address is a politically advantageous moment for him and the administration if they do it in person. The letter would sort of downplay it a lot, so I don't see that happening either anytime soon.

Kevin Kosar:

I suppose one could imagine this trend line where thanks to technological advancements over the last 120 years, it's been easier and easier for a president to “go public.” You could have a president who just decides to sit in the White House, do a speech to the nation that way, and basically call up the State of the Union and send over a piece of paper and be like, “Okay, I'm just not putting up with you people.”

Matt Glassman:

Yeah, I think that’s totally plausible. I think the trappings of the State of the Union address give it a little more sort of public influence—a little more. Sometimes in Washington, you get a sense that everybody is watching something like this when in reality, very few people are watching—the Monday Night Football game will vastly outdo the Union address in ratings. But I do think the State of the Union address will get a higher audience than a typical presidential address from the Oval Office or from wherever, so the president see that as somewhat advantageous to getting their message out.

But you can imagine lots of different ways to deal with the State of the Union address, where the climate in the country around a particular issue makes a president decide to completely upend what we expect from a State of the Union Address and just give an address on one topic. We've seen that on occasion in presidential addresses during moments of crisis. Buchanan's address in December of 1860 at the opening of Congress was almost entirely about the slave crisis. Lincoln's First Inaugural was almost entirely about secession. If the moment was more of a crisis situation, you can imagine presidents giving a very different type of address.

Kevin Kosar:

Yeah. So p