Another dreary, partisan State of the Union address has come and gone, not to mention hundreds of previews and after-the-fact analyses parsing the president's every word. You can find examples in this paper and every other; turn on the television and you'll find talking heads debating whether Donald Trump was "presidential."
Why must we put up with this every January?
Conservatives have long hated the State of the Union address. We prefer a small, modest government, and to us the State of the Union has too many trappings of monarchy. The president stands above the Congress and the Supreme Court, telling everybody what to do. That is hardly a fit model for a republic.
Many liberals, who now must endure being lectured for an hour by Trump, have also come around to the view that this annual event should cease to exist.
The Constitution, it's true, requires that the president "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."
But the Founding Fathers never had in mind the ridiculous spectacle that the State of the Union has become. It has evolved over the centuries in ways that track the changes in the government itself.
For most of the 19th century, presidents simply summarized data from the diplomatic corps, the land offices, the Treasury and other executive departments in a written letter to Congress. This was in keeping with the founding view that the Congress was the main branch of government; the job of the president was to help it draft better laws.
That was basically how the government worked: Congress as the supreme branch, and the executive and courts in a secondary role. There were exceptions, no doubt, like the presidencies of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. Still, the first 125 years or so of our government really had Congress at the center.