Opinion > Opinions - White House The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill Congress was just a backdrop at the State of the Union by Jane Harman, opinion contributor - 02/28/26 2:00 PM ET by Jane Harman, opinion contributor - 02/28/26 2:00 PM ET Share ✕ LinkedIn LinkedIn Email Email President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026, as Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson of La., applaud. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein) I attended many State of the Union addresses as a member of Congress and I know the ritual cold. Normally a president arrives prepared to persuade and engage, to lay out an agenda and make the case for it to the Congress that must enact it and to the broader public. Tuesday night’s address earned better reviews than many expected because the stories worked and the honors bestowed on heroes were genuinely moving. But President Trump did not come to engage Congress. He reduced it to a backdrop, with Republicans as a prop and Democrats as a foil. In Trump’s vision of governing, Congress doesn’t have a seat at the table. It has a seat in the audience. The most revealing moment came when Trump announced that congressional action on tariffs would not be necessary — even though Supreme Court had just struck down his tariff authority just four days earlier. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) predictably stood and applauded. Although Justice Neil Gorsuch was not in the chamber, his searing concurring opinion defending Congress’s core legislative powers did more for Article I that evening than anything its current leaders said or did. Strip away the theater, and the substance was thin. Health care got vague gestures. A proposal to eventually replace the income tax with tariff revenue was more fantasy than policy. Running through all of it was a unifying assumption: Congress would not need to be involved. On national security, the lack of depth was more consequential. Iran received a few sentences and a demand: say the secret words, “we will never have a nuclear weapon.” But Iran has already said those words , repeatedly, in a Supreme Leader fatwa and under commitments made at the negotiating table, which means the bar the president set has already been cleared. The administration has assembled the largest U.S. military force in the Middle East since the Iraq invasion, and Senate Democrats emerged from a classified briefing the same day warning of a “very serious” moment. Members of both parties have called for a War Powers vote before any action is taken. Congress has not been asked to do anything, and most members do not want to “own” the consequences of their actions and so will punt and blame the president if things go wrong. China was not mentioned at all. This is extraordinary. China is the central strategic challenge of this century. It is also the primary target of the administration’s own tariff policy, the country whose military buildup most directly threatens American interests in the Pacific, and the economy most consequentially entangled with our own. Russia was barely present. On the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that country received three sentences and no policy. The silence on both Beijing and Moscow reflects a strategic void, and the reality that both adversaries are navigating their dealings with Washington on their own terms. There was also a dark passage targeting Somali immigrants, offered without elaboration or evidence. The question it raised deserved an answer: Who is next? The real response to Tuesday’s address was not in the chamber. It was outside. The fifty-plus Democrats who chose not to attend were reflecting a public that is not applauding. Six in ten Americans believe the country is worse off than a year ago . Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s (D) rebuttal named what the president had omitted, the economic anxiety, the constitutional shortcuts, the self-dealing, and she was speaking not to the room but to the voters who will determine the next Congress. That election is nine months away. The next Congress will inherit a presidency that has treated Article I as optional and an institution whose Republican leaders applauded while it happened. There are concrete ways the next Congress can reassert its authority: demand authorization before the use of any military force; reclaim tariff authority the Supreme Court just confirmed belongs to Congress; do the hard work of compromise necessary to fully fund the government. The Department of Homeland Security was partially shut down during Tuesday’s address. I believe that is unprecedented. Trump invoked the revolution of 1776, and he was right to. That revolution established the principle that no single branch decides the limits