House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) privately told Republicans to behave at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech on Thursday, The Hill reported.
The request comes after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) made a spectacles herself at last year’s address.
“Decorum is the order of the day,” Johnson said, The Hill reported, citing a lawmaker present at Wednesday’s closed-door GOP meeting. “He said we should carry ourselves with good decorum,” another lawmaker told The Hill.
A third GOP lawmaker who talked to the outlet got into more detail about Johnson’s request: “We don’t need to be shrill, you know, we got to avoid that. We need to base things upon policy, upon facts, upon reality of situations. Let them do the gaslighting, let them do the blaming.”
In Biden’s Feb. 2023 address, Republicans heckled the president. Greene was the most prominent, yelling that he was a “liar.” Then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) appeared to shush her at times. The president was loudly confronted by Republicans on his claim that they wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare. A lively exchange ended with both sides appearing to mostly agreethere would not be any.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) wasn’t optimistic that fellow Republicans will dial it down this time around. He pretty much predicted they will heckle.
“Of course they will because [Biden’s] gonna say some very offensive things, he’s gonna attack us,” he said, per The Hill.
Burchett pointed to Democratic acting-out when Trump was president but did not mention examples.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) theatrically tore up Trump’s State of the Union speech in 2020 and several Democratic House members walked out.
