President Biden’s State of the Union 2023: Full coverage and highlights

There were boos, heckles, and jeers on Tuesday in Washington. It wasn’t an open mic night at a comedy club. It was the State of the Union.

Joe Biden’s second formal State of the Union address to Congress was a pugnacious and, at times, partisan speech that met with a heated response from Republicans.

Joe Biden mentioned hamburgers in his 2023 State of the Union address.

Specifically, the president wondered why the person who rings up your burger order may have signed a noncompete agreement preventing them from working at a nearby burger restaurant that pays better — the kind of agreement that 30 million workers in the US are also beholden to. Biden vowed that these agreements will soon be banned.

President Joe Biden avoided any overt mention of a potential 2024 reelection campaign in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, but nevertheless clearly set the stakes for the upcoming election, conveying a message of optimism while arguing that America needs to choose “stability over chaos.”

There is a lot of reason for optimism: Democrats just had one of the best midterm elections ever for the party of the incumbent president, a recent jobs report suggests that the US economy may actually be good, inflation is falling, and the end of the Covid-19 national emergency is nigh.

One year after President Joe Biden made vocal calls to “fund the police” in his State of the Union speech, police reform advocates in and outside of Congress are closely watching Tuesday night’s remarks to see if he offers a different message that centers on fixing a system they say is still broken.

Advocates hope attention on recent deaths, like that of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old who was fatally beaten by Memphis police in January, will help break Congress’s impasse and compel lawmakers — including Biden — to be more aggressive about reforms. Nichols’s mother and stepfather, RowVaughn and Rodney Wells, will be in attendance Tuesday night as guests of Congressional Black Caucus Chair Steven Horsford (D-NV), one of the lawmakers who have urged Biden to address the issue in his remarks.

The State of the Union address feels like a very old American ritual, and it is. Yet many of its features that we take for granted today were in fact added by innovative presidents who decided to shake things up — sometimes for very idiosyncratic reasons.

There was Thomas Jefferson, who delivered the speech only in writing— perhaps because he was a terrible public speaker. There was Woodrow Wilson, who put his political science theories on presidential rhetoric into practice by reviving the in-person speech. And there was Ronald Reagan, who took advantage of television to show off special guests sitting in the crowd.