What Went Down During President Biden’s Speech To Congress

In his first address to a joint session of Congress, Biden largely played by the book, spending the bulk of his time focusing on three proposals that have quickly become centerpieces of his agenda: a $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus package, a $2 trillion infrastructure bill and $1.8 trillion for child care, universal pre-K and more.

Biden also addressed how he would tackle the climate crisis and racial injustice in the U.S., along with voting rights and a host of other topics, but they did not receive the same amount of attention as the three centerpieces of his administration. Interestingly, in some ways the GOP rebuttal to Biden’s speech, delivered by Scott, touched on these issues more.

But as my colleagues say below, in many ways, Biden’s speech was just what we’ve come to expect from presidential addresses to Congress — ambitious, hopeful, a little boring and perhaps not entirely practical, either. To relieve the live blog in all its chronological glory, scroll on through. But if that’s too much work, here are the team’s headlines:

Perry: President Biden Focuses Heavily On An Economic Agenda That Will Really Be Determined by Manchin

Nathaniel: Biden Prioritizes Three Massive Spending Packages In What Was Effectively His First State Of The Union Address

Alex: Jabs And Jobs: The New Democratic Agenda

Geoffrey: Biden Gives Humdrum Presidential Address, Continues Push For Return To Normalcy

Kaleigh: Biden’s Speech, Like His First 100 Days, Adequate

Julia: Tim Scott Responds To The Fiery Speech On Race That Biden Didn’t Give

Galen: Biden Focused On The Economy. Scott Focused On Race. Americans Focused On All The Other Things There Are To Do Besides Watching TV, Now That The Pandemic Is Receding.

Lee: Biden Promises To Transform The Economy, And Ted Cruz Pretends To Fall Asleep

Hakeem: Biden Reminds The Country That He’s Just Trying To Get Stuff Done. Oh, And Don’t Worry: He’s Definitely Not Joining ‘The Woke Left’ Anytime Soon.

I think both Biden’s and Scott’s rhetorical strategies on race just summed up contemporary American politics. White people’s views on race are a hugely powerful force, and Republicans are trying to tap into it, while Democrats are trying to tiptoe around it.

My 2024 thoughts are complicated. But if there’s a “less-Trumpy” lane, perhaps Scott will make a bid for it.

I think he did quite well, Galen. He sounded a bit tense at first but really loosened up as he went along, and it felt a little more “in the moment” than Biden’s speech, acknowledging the current tension in the country, though, of course, with a Republican framing of it.

Well Galen, he has said his reelection bid in 2022 will be his last Senate campaign, so that might be it. Then again, maybe he’ll be a presidential or vice presidential contender in 2024.

It’s an enduring trope that the rising star who gets to give rebuttal to the State of the Union ends up floundering. Do people think Scott’s future in the GOP or national politics is bright?

The Scott speech was more of a rebuttal to the discourse about the Georgia voting law than anything Biden said.

Political scientist Tasha Philpot notes in her book, Race, Republicans, and the Return of the Party of Lincoln, that it’s not enough to have Black faces in the party to garner support from Black voters. The party needs to adopt a different policy agenda that meets the needs and concerns of Black folks. Even if Scott is at the top of the ticket, Black voters aren’t swayed that much by descriptive representation from the GOP.

For a guy who said “my friends across the aisle seemed to want the [race] issue more than they wanted the solution,” Scott spent a lot of time attacking his political opponents on race.

I continue to think that Biden talking about unity repeatedly in his inaugural address was politically stupid and provided four years of Republican talking points. They could deny him unity, and it was entirely predictable that they would. Scott attacked him on that unity issue several times.

Scott cites the fact he’s been pulled over for no reason, and then claims America is not a racist country.

Someone already mentioned it, but this really reminds me of the RNC, in which the party not only sought to have a diverse array of speakers but also to position itself as the more racially liberal party in some ways. Scott just said that Republicans support making it easier to vote, and the speech has focused on race in a way that is quite different from the “color blind” rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s.

Scott also talks more about voting rights that Biden did, correctly noting that large majorities of Americans support both early voting and voter ID. But then he disingenuously claims that the Georgia voting law actually expands voting opportunities just because it standardizes early-voting hours (ignoring the many other provisions of the bill, such as banning giving food and water to voters standing in line and preempting the authority of local election officials).

Well, I think it goes back, Lee, to what we were talking about earlier on “cancel culture” and how the GOP is using that as a strategy to attack Democrats for being too liberal. Scott seems to be focusing on that in his rebuttal.

The GOP is at this interesting crossroads. As they give face time to Republicans of a racial minority group like Scott, they are also having to appeal to a base of supporters motivated by white racial grievance. And, unsurprisingly, Scott leans into a kind of racial rhetoric that sounds much more like Clarence Thomas than Thurgood Marshall: “America is not a racist country.”

This isn’t the first time Scott has told his personal story of the racism he’s experienced as a Black man. Last summer, he showed his Republican colleagues hateful voicemails he’s received.

It looks like Scott is going to talk more about race than Biden. Judging from tonight’s speeches, Republicans want to make this more of an issue, and Democrats want to talk less about it.

Scott opened with the issue of school choice. There’s no question that this issue has gained steam because of the COVID-19 crisis. Although, like most issues, partisanship explained support for reopening schools during lockdowns, and the coronavirus crisis made issues around school choice more salient. So I think it’ll be an issue at the top of Republicans’ agenda for a while.

We’re covering the Republican response, of course, but it’s worth noting that these tend to only be remembered if something weird happens. I suspect people might remember Sen. Rubio’s response to Obama in 2013, but not because of what he said, but because he stopped it the middle to drink water. And people might remember former Gov. Steve Beshear’s response to Trump in 2017, but mainly because it was with the weird backdrop of a diner in Kentucky.

The only thing I can think about as I watch this rebuttal is past years when there were a whole bunch of competing rebuttals. It wasn’t just Republicans — Democrats also got into rebuttal-mania.

Now we are hearing Scott give his rebuttal to Biden’s address. As we saw with Biden, when most politicians address a primetime audience, they avoid hyping their bases with controversial topics. For example, as we mentioned, Biden emphasized the economy over racial inequality. Scott is the only Black Republican in the Senate, and part of his role is to talk to a nation, the majority of which, according to polls, thought the last Republican president was racist. His presence in prime time aims to undercut that view of the Republican Party.

I wonder if Scott will mention police reform, especially since he’s carrying the GOP’s version of a policing bill.

Scott is hitting on a pretty standard Republican talking point — that schools should fully reopen. And he used it to connect to school-choice plans, which Republicans strongly support.

This is from 2019, but I thought this was a smart story from Bloomberg on how the rebuttal to the State of the Union is not necessarily the best way to launch one’s political career. Scott has publicly said he won’t run for the Senate again, and there is some speculation that he might be a 2024 contender. But if he does run, it might not be because of tonight’s speech.

Scott says Biden’s policies and plans are pulling Americans apart. This is on par with what I predicted earlier: Republicans are going to paint Biden — and Democrats — as too far to the left, regardless of how much they tout bipartisanship.

It is interesting to have Scott, a Black Republican from South Carolina, give the response to Biden’s address. Some new research shows that “some Black candidates — most notably, Republicans with an individualist message — benefit electorally from higher levels of racial resentment in the electorate.”

Scott quickly pivots to his personal story. It’s a good one — and is part of why I picked him in the second round of our way-too-early 2024 presidential primary draft.

I generally agree with what other people have said here about the content of the speech. But I think Biden’s general tendency to push for a “return to normalcy” in his rhetoric shined through tonight. He was pushing some very big proposals, some of which may never pass Congress. But he tried to sound unifying and avoided demonizing or taking shots at people. At the end of the day, this kind of approach echoed his 2020 campaign, so it’s not surprising. But following Trump, this was quite a change.

Scott is now delivering the GOP rebuttal to Biden’s address.

I agree with Nathaniel — this was a standard, meaty address to a joint session of Congress. Biden hit on early accomplishments and also didn’t give his opponents in conservative media too much ammunition (although it will be interesting to see how they cover this on Fox, Newsmax, etc).

Biden came to this address with many successes that he and his administration are proud of. He discussed a range of policy proposals that are clearly progressive in nature. It’s clear, though, that Biden, like every Democratic president before him, has to walk a tightrope when it comes to race. When race and racial inequality were mentioned, the topics seemed to be mentioned as a way of checking boxes, but it’s a reminder that Biden, even as he and his administration work to advance some racially progressive policies, is a pragmatic politician who thinks that the middle is preferred to the poles. It’ll be interesting to see how Black activists respond to this address.

This was a speech that focused on economics. If passed, Biden’s economic agenda would be genuinely transformative. The juxtaposition of transformative policy with dull speech-making, though, is really something. It’s almost as if Biden’s team wanted to keep the speech relatively low-key so that the worst his fiercest opponents on the political right can say is that it made them fall asleep.

This was a pretty typical speech in, as Sarah mentioned, a still very abnormal time in our country. I’m not sure Americans have a lot of mental capacity for a laundry list of policies on everything from climate change to gun reform. The pandemic (and its economic impacts) and the continued ramifications of systemic racism loom so large at this moment that a “normal” speech felt kind of … abnormal.

It was a standard, meaty State of the Union address (even if pedants will insist it wasn’t technically a State of the Union!), with particular emphasis on Biden’s three big spending packages. That’s unsurprising, as they all poll very well. But, of course, as with every State of the Union, it probably won’t persuade Congress to pass any bills that weren’t already on track to pass. I’ll personally be curious to see if any of the bills outside Biden’s “big three” — such as the For the People Act or immigration reform — get anywhere close to passage.

That speech was well to the left of Obama on economics — the list of plans, the spending, etc. It was probably to the left of Obama on racial issues, too. It was very “Biden,” with some economic populism for the Warren/Sanders crowd and the broadest base of voters, hitting core Democratic issues for the base and an emphasis on American democracy that appeals to the “Never Trump” Democrats/Republicans.

The big question going forward is how much of the stuff in the first 45 minutes and the economic plan actually passes. Most of the stuff in the second half of the speech has no chance of passing, as long as the filibuster remains in place.

It was a focused speech, and Biden touched on a lot of hot-button issues: guns, immigration, raising the minimum wage, voting rights, COVID-19, vaccine distribution, the economy, etc. But I can’t help but come back to the fact that Biden’s remarks about race and police reform were relegated to the tail end of his speech.

My takeaway is pretty similar to Galen’s. You could imagine a situation in which this was a different kind of speech, which emphasized more systemic issues or the threats to democracy. This was a very standard format. But the content of the economic agenda was stunning: a strong defense of unions and a straightforward attack on inequality.

My takeaway is that Biden gave a relatively subdued speech that actually described a quite aggressive policy agenda. But that’s Biden in a nutshell, isn’t it?

Biden gave the usual optimism about the “state of the union” that presidents give. Many Americans don’t feel this optimism, but it’s literally the job to sound optimistic — even Trump was, most of the time.

The mention of the For the People Act at the end of this very long speech is quite a juxtaposition with congressional Democrats labeling it “HR 1” — as in, their top priority — for two congresses running. I wonder if that reflects diminished hope that they’re going to pass it.

Biden has proven time and again that he knows how politics works, but I guess I came expecting a bit of something else. Perhaps that’s just classic Biden, though.

I feel like this is consistent with where Biden has been for a while. He focused on the economy and COVID-19, but also talks about the Democratic priorities (climate change, immigration, guns, race) and democracy preservation.

They didn’t give Glenn an Oscar, they had to give her a bit.

Yeah, Sarah, that may have been a strategic choice. Polls suggest that the coronavirus stimulus package and infrastructure bill are very popular, even enjoying some crossover support among Republicans; racial issues like immigration reform, reparations and police reform are a lot more divisive. Plus, there is the study Alex cited earlier that emphasizing racial issues is not good politics. Biden may feel like the safest ground to tread is one that deemphasizes cultural conflict and plays up economic populism.

I agree with what Meredith said earlier, about the “both sides” rhetoric we’ve seen in Biden’s speech tonight on racial equality and policing. A lot of 2021 has focused on “cancel culture” and how the GOP is using that as a strategy to attack Democrats for being too liberal. And as we mentioned earlier on the live blog, Biden has acted far more liberal than some of his predecessors, but that wasn’t really reflected in his remarks tonight. He mainly focused on an economic messaging. Does that reflect that Democrats are really concerned about this messaging?

For what it’s worth, I think Cruz “falling asleep” was 100 percent a bit. It was about as authentic as Glenn Close’s “Da Butt” moment at the Oscars.

Julia, it’s just another way Biden is leaning into a “return to normalcy.” Even if that’s not necessarily true, it might be how some people interpret it, and it was essentially one of the appeals Biden made during the 2020 campaign.

The camera just panned to Ted Cruz, who was either actually falling asleep or pretending to. We’re debating on slack which one it was. Obviously, the tweet writes itself. “That speech put me to sleep, etc, etc.”

This is much more like a standard State of the Union with a policy laundry list — with some 100 days stuff mixed in — than a speech that digs into systemic issues.

As Hakeem mentioned, it’s typical for presidents to play both sides about racial equality and supporting law enforcement in speeches like these. But as Perry and I wrote last summer, Democrats are increasingly willing to acknowledge racial discrimination, including in policing. So Biden’s remarks today about these issues might be typical, but the Democratic Party has changed. I was surprised to see his rhetoric not match those changes.