Wild Horses Couldn't Drag Me There

          In four weeks President Obama will appear in the hallway outside of  the House Chamber as members of our Congress and other dignitaries chat and laugh as they wait for the announcement from the Sergeant-at-Arms "Mister Speaker, the President of the United States." Barack Obama will take full advantage of the moment as he slowly walks the isle to raucous applause from the Democrat side of the isle and reserved applause from the Republican side of the isle, shaking hands stretched out to him and giving hugs. At least that is how it normally transpires at the State of the Union Address. It's my hope that this year it will be different but admittedly there's not much evidence that a rebellion is brewing.
         Donald Wolfensberger is a senior scholar of public policy at the Wilson Center, an independent research thinktank. He wrote a few years ago to begin a paper from the Congress Project,  "It is fitting to consider the relationship between the executive and legislative branches," and then focused on the "small but symbolic intersection of the president's annual State of the Union address." After mentioning as I had done in earlier posts that Thomas Jefferson refused to give the required report on the State of the Union as a speech because it "smacked too much of the monarch's Speech from the Throne' at the opening of Parliament," he added this "While I previously dismissed Jefferson's decision as an overreaction, this year, for the first time, it struck me that he may have been right. Perhaps I had been so blinded by the pageantry and entertainment value of this annual state ritual that I never clearly saw how much it diminishes Congress. It really is a vestige of  'the imperial presidency's', so derided by scholars and others in the last century." Donald Wolfensberger agrees with me in part but not in totality and certainly not for the same reasons. He's more opposed to the "stentorian proclamation of the House Sergeant-at-Arms" and the general "fawning" over the President whereas I see a far different and greater problem. Others will point to this annual event as simply being a respectful gesture to our president. I could have agreed with this for maybe this president's first or second year but there has been no respect given our Constitution, our laws or our heritage and not only is there no sign that this will change there is more than abundant evidence that we have only seen the beginning!
         How does one, I'm speaking of a member of Congress here, applaud this president, albeit reservedly, as he systematically erodes the authority of our Constitution, weakens our military and whose policies literally work against our national security while emboldening our enemies and the enemies of our allies? How does one hold in what must be the temptation to challenge the lies and the deceit that will emanate from the podium during the speech? How does one put the unmitigated disaster of Obamacare out of his mind, or Benghazi, or the cavalier attitude that puts him constantly on the golf course or courtside of a basketball game when other presidents pushed their health to the limits in far lesser emergencies, both foreign and domestic, than we have today? And then how does one dispense with the frowns after the television cameras are gone and socialize and shake the hands of those who refuse to put their country over their own political fortunes? I'm asking this here of conservatives for I know very well how the professional class of the Republican Establishment does it for they are all part of the UniParty that Professor Angelo Codevilla identifies four posts previous to this.
          How does the conservative member of Congress do this? Wild horse couldn't drag me there.