The State of the State of the Union

The big news across America this morning is that Nancy Pelosi appears to have pulled off the cancellation of the State of the Union - by refusing the President an invite to "the people's house". I have mixed feelings about this, as longtime readers will know - first, because ersatz monarchism does not become a republic:

Strange how the monarchical urge persists even in a republic two-and-a-third centuries old. Many commentators have pointed out that the modern State of the Union is in fairly obvious mimicry of the Speech from the Throne that precedes a new legislative session in British Commonwealth countries and continental monarchies, but this is to miss the key difference. When the Queen or her viceroy reads a Throne Speech in Westminster, Ottawa, or Canberra, it's usually the work of a government with a parliamentary majority: In other words, the stuff she's announcing is actually going to happen. That's why, lest any enthusiasm for this or that legislative proposal be detected, the apolitical monarch overcompensates by reading everything in as flat and unexpressive a monotone as possible. Such excitement as can be found in the event lies elsewhere — the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod getting the door of the House of Commons slammed in his face three times. After the ancient rituals, the speech itself is actually a very workmanlike affair.

The State of the Union is the opposite. The president gives a performance, extremely animatedly, head swiveling from left-side prompter to right-side prompter, continually urging action now: 'Let's start right away. We can get this done. . . . We can fix this. . . . Now is the time to do it. Now is the time to get it done.' And at the end of the speech, nothing gets done, and nothing gets fixed, and, after a few days' shadowboxing between admirers and detractors willing to pretend it's some sort of serious legislative agenda, every single word of it is forgotten until the next one.

In that sense, like Beyoncé lip-synching the National Anthem at the inauguration, the State of the Union embodies the decay of America's political institutions into a simulacrum of responsible government rather than the real thing, and a simulacrum ever more divorced from the real issues facing the country.

If all that sounds familiar, it's because I wrote it six years ago, and recycled it exactly a year later. A third-rate hack such as yours truly should be able to file his State of the Union column a month early and confidently go to the Bahamas and work on his tan. But five years ago the alleged citizen-representative in the Oval Office managed to make things even worse:

The monarchical fripperies are no longer mere appurtenances but embody the cold, corrupt reality of Obama's governing philosophy. If you believe, as Republican House members purport to, that the President does not have the legal authority to perform his one-man rewrite of America's immigration laws, why offer him the people's legislature as a dais for his throne? His amnesty-by-memo is not a small thing: ultimately it strikes at the integrity of American citizenship, and thus at the very heart of the nation.

Democrat House members now feel just as strongly (albeit with less constitutional authority) about President Trump, but unlike milksop pantywaist Congressional Republicans they're willing to do something about it. So Nancy has now acted and nixed the photo-op. I wouldn't like to claim I gave her the idea or anything, but I did propose something similar a couple of weeks after the 2014 midterms:

It has been suggested that Boehner should tell America's new ConLawProf-in-Chief to go give his State of the Union somewhere else. It would be a symbolic gesture, but symbols are important. In a contemporary North American context, it is not unknown for parliament to assert itself against the head of state: the chippy separatists of Quebec's "National Assembly", as part of their make-believe nation-building, have denied the Queen's viceroy the customary right to give the Speech from the Throne (the Westminster equivalent to the State of the Union) for four decades now. Down the road in Ottawa, in a particularly petulant outburst, Jean Chrétien, the Canadian Prime Minister, denied the Queen herself the opportunity to give the 2002 Speech from the Throne in the federal parliament for no other reason than that he felt she hadn't given him a good enough seat at her mother's funeral earlier that year. In actual monarchies, the subjects flip the finger at the sovereign all the time. Yet in a supposed republic of citizen-legislators for the people's house to assert its authority to the head of state by telling him to take a hike on the State of the Union would be an act of lèse-majesté too appalling even to consider.

Obviously it would be too much to expect American Republicans to have the cojones of Canadian Liberals or Quebec socialists, wouldn't it? Also from my November 2014 post-mortem:

Obama has made a bet that in the end a Republican Congress will have no more get-up-and-go than a chronic invalid dependent on armies of undocumented bedpan-cleaners.

And, as usual, that bet paid off. Thanks to John Boehner, the President got to bury his lawlessness in an orgy of the usual gladhanding and schmoozing. Just to rub Republican faces in it, he invited along "undocumented immigrants" so he could give 'em a shout-out from the throne ...because America's ruling class prefers undocumented subjects to freeborn citizens. Last year, Democrat legislators brought along more illegal immigrants to sit in the people's house and cock a snook at a chief magistrate who thinks a government's principal duty is to its own citizenry.

As he demonstrated at his first appearance in Congress, President Trump has an ease in this format that many Republicans do not. But I retain my queasiness about the whole ghastly ritual, and I have a general preference for the non-house-trained Trump - the Trump that demolished Jeb! & co by not playing by their rules, or the media's, or the Democrats'.

Last year, I renewed the suggestion I first made with respect to the inauguration: hold it at the southern border, deliver a brisk, business-like, fact-packed speech, and then ceremonially lay the first brick in the wall. The state of the Union begins at the border. Indeed, the state of the border is the state of the Union a generation hence: no border, no union.

What's at stake is real: Don't let the third-rate Beltway dinner theatre get in the way.

~Members of The Mark Steyn Club are welcome to deliver their own formal responses to Steyn's State of the State of the Union in the comments section. For more on The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and anybody looking for the perfect State of the Union Day gift is reminded to check out our special Steyn Club Gift Membership. Or, for an even nicer gift, how about two on the aisle for the first ever Dennis Miller/Mark Steyn tour? Next month they're hitting Reading, Pennsylvania and Syracuse, New York, followed by Rochester and Wilkes-Barre. And, with VIP tickets, you get to meet Dennis and Mark after the show, which is surely competitive with meeting Nancy and Mitch after the SOTU.

Steyn will see you on the telly with Tucker, live across America tonight, Thursday, at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific - with a rerun at midnight Eastern.