January 30, 2018

Abolish the state of the union address

Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine -We are often reminded that nothing in the Constitution actually requires an annual personal speech by the president to a joint session of Congress, and that our third president, Thomas Jefferson, deliberately abandoned the precedent of annual speeches set by Washington and Adams because he disliked its monarchical pretensions. More than a century later, Woodrow Wilson revived the older practice, which was more or less followed by his successors until it became a highly stylized infomercial for presidents who had no need of such a spectacle to communicate either with Congress or with the public.

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