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UCM Professor: Pelosi refusal of State of the Union unprecedented

(Missourinet) Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to let President Trump deliver the annual State of the Union speech in the House on Tuesday night. That speech was re-scheduled for Feb. 5.

Trump and Pelosi have been battling for more than five weeks over Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion to build additional wall at the southern border. The gridlock led to the federal government shutdown.

University of Central Missouri political scientist Robynn Kuhlmann thinks Pelosi’s move is unprecedented.

“This is definitely an example of how tense things are in Washington right now,” she says. “It’s been tradition in our modern presidency to move forward with a resolution to invite the president to have, it used to be called the annual report, but to have a State of the Union or a message about the State of the Union for Congress.”

She goes on to say that Pelosi’s act shows how much the parties are polarized.

“It also illustrates the amount of cohesion that both parties have within the parties,” Kuhlmann says.

Kuhlmann says President George Washington began the in-person State of the Union tradition. Thomas Jefferson later put the brakes on the annual event because he said he considered the message as too much of a monarch style. The presidents who served between John Adams and Woodrow Wilson delivered a written State of the Union note to Congress.

President Wilson revived the personal address in 1913. Kuhlmann says the president’s in-person State of the Union speech to Congress has been a common staple since Franklin Roosevelt.

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