Giving the response to a State of the Union address, a 52-year old tradition, is one of the most fraught and thankless tasks in politics.
This year, there’ll be more responses than ever.
As Democrats announced last week, third-term Rep. Joe Kennedy III, D-Mass., will give their official response to the president’s Tuesday night speech, delivering it from his home state and skipping the pomp in Congress. Virginia Del. Elizabeth Guzman, a member of the Democrats’ 2017 landslide class in the state legislature, will give a Spanish-language response – also official.
There’ll be a response from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., too, differing from the official speeches as the senator, for the second year, will retort to the speech itself. (Typically, responders write their speeches ahead of time, with only vague ideas of the presidential address itself.)
And there’ll be at least two more progressive responses. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., will respond to Trump at the top of a BET news special, and former Maryland congresswoman Donna Edwards, who’s now running for Montgomery County executive, will deliver an address on behalf of the Working Families Party. All of the responders are to Kennedy’s left on a few issues, like marijuana legalization.
“The president is going to want to take credit for a tax scam which, in my view, was the biggest heist we’ve seen in recent history,” said Edwards. “He’ll talk about the latest version of his infrastructure plan; I was on the committee that handled that when I was in Congress, and I know something about it. The problem wasn’t that Republicans and Democrats didn’t come together to agree on projects. We disagreed over funding. And what the president is going to do tomorrow is suggest that Wall Street run our infrastructure.”
The details of the president’s much-discussed, much-delayed infrastructure plan are not yet known, but there’s wide speculation that it will pitch $200 billon of government grants, over a decade, to partially match and guide private investment in public works. Last week, Democratic mayors gathered in Washington for a conference said that the White House’s idea was a non-starter; many mayors, lead by New Orleans’s Mitch Landrieu, skipped a meeting at the White House that was supposed to get into the topic.