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Fencing is in place around the U.S. Capitol as part of the enhanced security for Tuesday night’s State of the Union address by President Joe Biden.
President Biden has a ready-made frame for discussing the state of the union—and, inescapably, the state of the world—in his address to Congress and the nation tonight. Indeed, he made that frame himself.
Beginning in his presidential campaign of 2019–2020, he included in his stump speeches his characterization of the historic moment as increasingly one pitting democracy against autocracy and authoritarianism. Those passages became more prominent after the January 6 insurrection, Trump’s refusal to accept the 2020 voters’ verdict, and Chinese President Xi’s promotion of autocracy as a more efficient system.
So tonight, Biden will surely place the Russian invasion of Ukraine into that frame, certain that on this one issue, he’ll get bipartisan applause for his defense of democracy. But that defense also opens the door to him to defend democracy at home as well as abroad. It provides a nice segue into an attack on the Republican moves to limit the electorate, and even substitute the vote of state legislatures for the vote of the citizenry.
The dynamics of the war also opens a door for Biden to highlight the world’s vulnerability to any thug who controls the supply of fossil fuel—that is, to make the case anew for something like a Green New Deal.
And by addressing, as he must and surely will, the current bout of inflation, he also has at least a partial chance to turn a political lemon into the lemonade of attacking corporate power over markets and pricing. That includes, as my colleague David Dayen wrote today, measures to break up monopolies and boost American manufacturing—two causes that poll well across the political spectrum. He can also address the hit to Americans’ pocketbooks by calling for measures that would give the government the power to bring drug prices down and make child care affordable (which also includes establishing universal pre-K). He may yet try to resurrect, at least rhetorically, the Child Tax Credit. And this would be a splendid time for him to announce the forgiveness of some amount of student debt, though I have no indication whatsoever that he plans to do that.
If Manchin, Sinema, and the Republicans say we can’t afford to do those things, there’s a way to fund them right now that could win broad public support: an excess profits tax, of the kind the government levied during World Wars I and II. As with student debt reduction, I have no indication that this is under even perfunctory consideration, but if ever a measure like this were to win broad public support, this would be the time. As a sop to the GOP, not to mention Manchin and Sinema, a share of the proceeds from such a tax could even be targeted to debt reduction.
Just sayin’.
