House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a keen sense of history. By demanding that President Donald Trump wither postpone the State of the Union address until the government shutdown ends or deliver a written statement, she has raised the possibility that we might finally get rid of a ritual that has devolved into empty political theater.
The speech takes its name from the clause in the Constitution stipulating that the president "shall 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."
Like much of the Constitution, this language left the particulars up for grabs. How often, for example, was the president supposed to brief Congress? George Washington delivered the first such speech on Jan. 8, 1790. It was short and sweet: a mere 1,089 words. A year later he reprised the act, which set the precedent of an annual address, with Congress expected to send a written reply.
John Adams continued the practice, but by this time, the growing divisions between the nation's first political parties — the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans — cast a growing shadow. For Thomas Jefferson, who served as vice president during Adams's second term, the rite, like so many pretensions of the Federalists, had a distasteful monarchical flavor.
The pomp reminded the Democratic Republicans of a longstanding British practice: the "speech from the throne" that the monarch delivered before Parliament that set out his (or her) directions for the course of lawmaking.
And so, when Jefferson narrowly secured the presidency after the contested election of 1800, this self-styled advocate for the common man abandoned the ritual altogether.
Instead, Jefferson sent a written message that his personal secretary read to the assembled House and Senate. By way of explanation, his missive simply noted that it was "inconvenient" to require that everyone be present for a speech and that he wished to recognize "the economy" of the legislators' time and offer them "relief from the embarrassment of immediate answers on subjects not yet fully before them."
How thoughtful! But this move, which appeared to reflect the president's simplicity and practicality, was likely motivated by entirely different considerations. One, Jefferson was a notoriously bad public speaker, and likely suffered from acute stage fright. The man he defeated for the presidency, John Adams, once recalled: "during the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together." Likewise, Jefferson delivered his inaugural addresses in so soft and low a voice that people standing very close to him could not make out the words.