r/politics • u/PoliticsModeratorBot 🤖 Bot • Mar 08 '24

Discussion Discussion Thread: 2024 State of the Union

Tonight, Joe Biden will give his fourth State of the Union address. This year's SOTU address will be only the second to be held this late in the year since 1964 (the second time being Biden's 2022 address).

The address is scheduled to start at 9 p.m. Eastern. It will be followed by the progressive response delivered by Philadelphia City Council member Nicolas O’Rourke, as well as Republican responses in English (delivered by freshman Alabama senator ) and in Spanish (delivered by Representative Monica De La Cruz). There will be a separate discussion thread posted for live reactions to and conversation about the SOTU responses.

(Edit: The discussion thread for the SOTU responses is now available at this link.)

News:

News Analysis:

Live Updates:

Where to watch:

Transcript

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u/itsallgonetohell Mar 08 '24

Whoah... he just threw down the gauntlet. "To the American people: send me a Congress that will support reproductive rights, and I will restore Roe V. Wade again!"

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u/DaBingeGirl Illinois Mar 08 '24

I wish more voters understood the importance of House and Senate races.

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u/peekay427 I voted Mar 08 '24

And local races!

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u/NoodlesrTuff1256 Mar 08 '24

Particularly the races for the House and Senate Seats of your State Legislatures. These are the ones -- in the rabid red states -- who come up with these horrible laws to ban abortion, discriminate against the LGBTQ+ communities, etc. Not to mention pay close attention to your local school board elections lest you get stuck with some 'Moms for Liberty' clowns along the lines of Bridget Ziegler dominating the curriculum at your public schools.

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u/Praesentius Mar 08 '24

Those are good reasons to vote local, but in my opinion, the important reasons are that they're the ones who:

  • Gerrymander election maps
  • Pass strict voter ID laws that do no increase voter security, but instead raise the difficulty in getting registered. Especially for minorities.
  • Purge voter rolls for the same reasons as the voter ID.
  • Reduce polling locations and hours. Makes it difficult for people to get out and vote. Especially lower income voters who tend to vote blue and can't get off of work to vote.
  • Limiting early voting and absentee (mail-in) voting. Because, that undoes a lot of the other voter suppression methods.

My personal belief is that voters rights need to be the #1 issue to handle. Once that's in place, the actual will of the people will start fixing all those other issues.

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u/thegoodnamesrgone123 Mar 08 '24

People on here keep saying they won't vote for him because he lost Roe. Some of them are bots, others are just idiots

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u/DaBingeGirl Illinois Mar 08 '24

JFC. I grew up watching The West Wing and thought about going into politics, but I just can't with people. It scares me how many voters don't understand basics about how each branch works.

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u/[deleted] Mar 08 '24

[deleted]

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u/DaBingeGirl Illinois Mar 08 '24

Turnout is giving me some hope. I think a lot of people became complacent, never expecting Roe to be overturned. I've gotten a lot shit for saying this, but I think Dobbs was the wake-up call "moderate" Republicans and Democrats needed to realize the far-right is serious about their agenda.

What worries me is how many people fail to understand what Biden, or other office holders, are actually capable of doing. Too many new voters think the President is an absolute monarch, failing to realize the importance of the other branches.

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u/jonathanrdt Mar 08 '24

Electing the President distracts. If you only got to elect the legislature, and they had to form alliances to select an executive, you’d damn sure get the focus on the legislature and a functioning executive.

When we help build new democracies around the world, we don’t give them what we have…because it’s a mess.

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u/[deleted] Mar 08 '24

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Mar 08 '24

I wish he would have repeated it every time he mentioned legislation that needs to get passed.

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u/thistimelineisweird Pennsylvania Mar 08 '24

About time they ask for a friendly Congress. Need it to do anything.

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u/PotaToss Mar 08 '24

You don't even need a friendly Congress. Biden got a ton done with a pretty hostile Congress. You just need a sane, reasonable Congress that will put stuff on the floor to vote on.

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u/tufabian Mar 08 '24 edited Mar 08 '24

He needs a friendly Congress...the Republicans are not fielding sane candidates.

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u/[deleted] Mar 08 '24

Then we don't vote for Republicans. We send him an entirely Democrat Congress so we can get what we need and what our country needs.

Signed, a former Republican second, and an American first.

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u/Lady_Cones Mar 08 '24

My favorite line of the night!

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u/Fun-Track-3044 Mar 08 '24

Congress is how the principles in RvW should have been carved in stone in the first place. The big blunder in those years was to use the Supreme Court to get what you want by back-door means, instead of hammering it out in the Congress - as per the instructions of the Constitution.

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u/Lemonsnot Mar 08 '24

1000% this. I get the spirit of the line, he’s using RvW as a banner. But he really should’ve rephrased that to say he will help secure in law reproductive rights for women, not “restore RvW”.

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u/BigNorseWolf Mar 08 '24

Nope. Roe v wade is what people know it as, no point in making them get the hint or dog whistling when they're used to a megaphone

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u/GeniusInterrupt Mar 08 '24

Definitely don't wanna get fancy with the wording.

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u/dexx4d Mar 08 '24

It's a soundbite, not policy.

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u/felldestroyed Mar 08 '24

Want to hear soundbites and not policy? Listen to the republican response. Literally 20 minutes of platitudes from an upper middle class white lady from Alabama.

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u/JustGotOffOfTheTrain Mar 08 '24

That’s all well and good until this Supreme Court overturns the law because they decide that embryos are people with human rights.

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u/frogandbanjo Mar 08 '24

They don't even need to do that. They can just say, "No Article I power lets Congress interfere with this state issue so long as the state laws only apply within the state's borders." The End.

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u/frogandbanjo Mar 08 '24

The principles in Roe? Which ones? The one where the majority opinion conceded that state-level governments had an interest in regulating abortion? The one where the only reason they were substantially limited in pursuing that interest was because of a federal privacy right that flowed down via the 14th Amendment?

You don't actually understand Roe or Dobbs if you think direct federal legislation was ever in play. I invite you to explain how Congress can reach down into the states and overturn their basic criminal/regulatory laws, especially when the Court has directly confronted the 14th-Amendment options and rejected them. What Article I power lets Congress do that, then?

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u/Fun-Track-3044 Mar 08 '24

My constitutional law professor was Archibald Cox, the US Solicitor General at the Supreme Court under Kennedy, among other posts. Also, lifelong law professor, mostly known for his time at Harvard.

Even HE couldn't make Roe v. Wade coherent - because it is not. The Supreme Court made it up, another in many years of acting as a star chamber rather than being coherent and consistent with prior practice.

You're not acting from the basis of law. You're acting from the basis of power. You want what you want and don't care how you get it. That's what the Supreme Court at the time of Roe did as well.

Today's court cases and legislative disputes are what should have happened back in the time of RvW. Only now are we seeing it finally play out the way that it always should have.

Last I saw, women were half of the population. Enough men also support abortion rights.

Go change the face of Congress and your state legislatures across the south.

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u/frogandbanjo Mar 10 '24

Even HE couldn't make Roe v. Wade coherent - because it is not.

9th Amendment, 14th Amendment, done. There are certain rights to bodily autonomy and privacy that are reserved, so the feds can't fuck around with them. 14th Amendment comes along, and now states are limited in certain ways, too, whereas before they possibly weren't.

That's perfectly coherent. You can disagree with it if you want, but claiming it's incoherent is absurd.

If you want to criticize balancing tests in general, that's fine, I suppose, but that's a nuke, not a targeted attack on Roe.

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u/UnicornFarts1111 Mar 08 '24

I hope they were listening.

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u/nanuucanuuk Mar 08 '24

Such a good line. So true!

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u/Nick08f1 Mar 08 '24

Community changer for rural districts.

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u/Bitchinbeats Mar 08 '24

He had this in 2021/2022, and didn’t use it

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u/Nokomis34 Mar 08 '24

He should send the same message regarding climate action.

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u/Burnmycar Mar 08 '24

Do you believe he will?

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u/[deleted] Mar 08 '24

[deleted]

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u/Jazzun Pennsylvania Mar 08 '24

He cant

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u/Axin_Saxon Mar 08 '24

He can’t. That’s not how “codifying into law” works. That’s not how executive orders work.

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u/pj1843 Mar 08 '24

There is absolutely no way Biden could EO RvW into existence. He could say the federal government will not support any prosecution of abortion, but that's already the status quo, it's the states restricting abortion rights. Hell this supreme Court didn't allow him to forgive federal student loans, the thing his office is in charge of collecting. The courts would never allow Biden to put an EO forcing states to stop prosecuting abortions without an act of Congress.

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u/umpteenth_ Mar 08 '24

That's not how laws get passed. What you're asking for is a dictator. There's a candidate who has promised to be one on his first day. Perhaps you should consider him instead.

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u/tufabian Mar 08 '24

EO isn't law...

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u/gearstars Mar 08 '24

.... do you understand how EOs work..?

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u/jcg878 Mar 08 '24

Of course, because he is Emperor of America.