It was a shock, in 2009, when Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., stood up during President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address and yelled, “You lie!”
Ah, those were the good old days.
That’s because Wilson later apologized to the president, in a press release and in a phone call to the White House. Obama accepted.
During Joe Biden’s State of the Union, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., dressed in camera-catching white fur, repeatedly heckled the president. She called him a liar.
There was no apology. Indeed, the shock would be if she were to apologize.
Greene wasn’t alone. During the speech, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., blamed Biden, via tweet, for COVID-19-related school closings in 2020.
The problem, of course, is that closings were handled by state and local officials, not the president. More to the point, Biden wasn’t president in 2020. He was a private citizen, with no power to influence school closings, much less mandate them.
Time was, that would have been considered quite the gaffe. No more.
And yet, neither of those widely covered breaches of decorum was the worst case of incivility that evening. That dishonor belongs to Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who gave the official Republican response to the president’s State of the Union.
Here’s an excerpt:
“From out-of-control inflation and violent crime to the dangerous border crisis and threat from China, Biden and the Democrats have failed you.”
That’s harsh, but politics is a tough business. That’s not what I’m talking about (though it would have been nice if she had offered ideas for addressing our nation’s problems).
Here’s where Huckabee Sanders crossed the line:
She said that Biden was “unfit to serve as commander in chief.” She said that he had “surrender(ed) his presidency to a woke mob.”
She said that the Democrats in the last two years had “destroyed” the economy, the U.S. military and a world that was “stable and at peace.”
And, finally, she said, “The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.”
Where do you go from there? You can’t negotiate with a “crazy” mob bent on destroying America. You must defeat it by any means necessary. Her speech stopped just short of calling for insurrection.
Compare that to Biden’s address. He congratulated Rep. Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, on being elected speaker of the House. He honored Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, another Republican, on being the Senate’s longest-serving leader. And he maintained his equanimity, even as Republicans reacted with behavior that would have shamed a third grader.
Compare Huckabee Sanders’ speech as well with the Republican response to President Obama’s 2009 State of the Union. That year, then-Gov. Bobby Jindal began by recognizing a “great moment in the history of our republic,” the election of the first African American in our history.
He noted where Republicans differed from Democrats — mainly about the size and role of government — but made clear that his party was ready “to work with the new president” to find solutions to the problems facing our nation.
You won’t find a glimmer of that spirit in Huckabee Sanders’ response.
Biden came into office with the country confronting the most serious public health care crisis in over a century. That was combined with the worst financial crisis since the Depression.
Add to that the sacking of our Capitol and continuing Republican support for the “Big Lie” about supposed election fraud, and you have the most dangerous threat to our democracy since the Civil War.
That’s the enormity of the challenge facing Biden. He’s working not merely to restore America’s public and economic health. He’s working to restore American democracy itself.
The U.S. Constitution outlines how our government works, but not why it has worked for over 200 years. Ultimately, the fate of our democracy rests not on written words but on our willingness to work with those whose vision of America differs from our own.
We don’t have to agree, but we must respect other opinions — as long as they are not advocating fraud and insurrection. To avoid a virtual, but still democracy-killing civil war, we must — as Biden did in his State of the Union address — retain our civility.
Don Flood
Lewes
