WASHINGTON — In remarks pivotal to his reelection this fall, President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address Thursday night portrayed himself as the defender of democracy, touted the bipartisan deals he’s brokered during his first term in office and appealed to Congress to support Ukraine in its battle against the Russian invasion.
“My lifetime has taught me to embrace freedom and democracy,” Biden said. “A future based on the core values that have defined America: honesty, decency, dignity, equality. To respect everyone. To give everyone a fair shot. To give hate no safe harbor. Now some other people my age see a differently: an American story of resentment, revenge, and retribution. That’s not me.”
Without ever uttering his name, Biden rebuked likely Republican opponent Donald Trump by calling him “a former president” and said that Trump’s recent comments at a rally in South Carolina about allowing Russia’s military to attack NATO allies were outrageous, dangerous and unacceptable.
“History is literally watching,” Biden said. “If the United States walks away, it will put Ukraine at risk. Europe is at risk. The free world will be at risk, emboldening others to do what they wish, to do us harm.”
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Biden said that “what makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and overseas, at the very same time.”
The president promised to seek the restoration of reproductive rights — speaking to a chamber full of Democratic women dressed in white, intended to show their support for such rights — and with a heavy emphasis on an economic agenda he vowed to reduce health care costs, impose higher taxes on the wealthy and bring back an expanded child tax credit.
Back-and forth over immigration
Trump has made immigration a main theme of his campaign, and the Republican-led House earlier Thursday passed legislation named for a murdered college student from Georgia, Laken Riley, whose death has been tied by conservatives to White House immigration policies.
As Biden walked down the House aisle before the speech, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was wearing a t-shirt bearing Riley’s name, attempted to hand Biden a button with Riley’s name on it. And when Biden mentioned immigration during his remarks, Greene continued to interrupt the president.
Biden’s address to the joint session of Congress was part campaign speech, part legislative agenda and part victory lap on the laws enacted during his first term. But it was also significant because it was the largest audience he is likely to have to himself all year, both in person and watching on television.
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The speech marked an especially important moment for Biden’s reelection bid after dozens of Republicans questioned his mental faculties following Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on classified documents, which said the president “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Biden will have dozens of opportunities to take the message in his State of the Union speech directly to voters in the months ahead, beginning with a visit to the Philadelphia area on Friday and a trip to Atlanta on Saturday.
On foreign policy, Biden used the address to call for the protection of civilians in Gaza and for Hamas to release the hostages that militants have held since attacking Israel in October.
He pressed Congress to approve aid for Ukraine and Israel as well as the bipartisan border security and immigration bill that senators negotiated earlier this year — and that Republicans then dropped under pressure from Trump.
FDR reference
Biden began his speech referencing one that President Franklin Roosevelt gave in January 1941.
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“President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary time. Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world,” Biden said.
“Tonight I come to the same chamber to address the nation. Now it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union,” Biden added. “And yes, my purpose tonight is to wake up this Congress, and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either.”
Biden assured lawmakers who think that Russian President Vladimir Putin will stop if he successfully overtakes Ukraine that he will not end his military campaign there.
Biden criticized Trump and Republican lawmakers in statehouses throughout the country for restricting or banning access to abortion in the last two years after the Supreme Court’s conservative justices overturned the constitutional right to end a pregnancy that had stood for nearly 50 years.
“My predecessor came into office determined to see Roe v. Wade overturned,” Biden said. “He’s the reason it was overturned and he brags about it. Look at the chaos that has resulted.”
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Biden then called on voters to flip the U.S. House back to Democratic control while keeping the Senate blue during November’s elections.
“Clearly those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women in America,” Biden said. “But they found out when reproductive freedom was on the ballot and won in 2022, 2023, and they will find out again in 2024.”
“If Americans send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you: I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again,” Biden added.
Popular policy issues
Biden’s address touched on many of the policy issues that Americans view as important areas for lawmakers to address, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.
About 73% of Americans view the economy as a top policy priority for the Biden administration, followed by defending against terrorism at 63% and reducing the influence of money in politics at 62%.
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Reducing health care costs, improving education and making Social Security financially sound all tied at 60% in the poll.
Dealing with immigration received 57% while reducing the availability of illegal drugs got 55% in the survey.
Biden also called on Congress to pass a so-called Unity Agenda that includes issues he believes Republicans and Democrats can agree on.
Those bills, he said, should increase penalties for people who traffic fentanyl, provide protections for children online, bolster artificial intelligence while protecting people from “its peril” and find new ways of treating cancer.
Israel-Hamas war
Biden also discussed the war in Gaza, saying that Hamas’ attack on Israel was the “deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.”
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Biden added that more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, “many of whom are not Hamas.”
“Israel has an added burden because Hamas hides and operates among the civilian population, like cowards – under hospitals, daycare centers and all the like,” Biden said. “But Israel also has a fundamental responsibility to protect innocent civilians in Gaza.”
Biden said the United States would lead an effort to get more humanitarian assistance through a temporary pier installed off the coast, but he called on Israel to “do its part” and allow more aid into Gaza.
“To the leadership of Israel I say this: Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip,” Biden said. “Protecting and saving innocent lives has to be a priority.”
“As we look to the future, the only real solution to the situation is a two-state solution over time,” Biden said.
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Democratic Reps. Cori Bush of Missouri, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan held up small posters that called for an immediate ceasefire.
Hours before the president’s address, pro-Palestinian activists blocked roads leading to the U.S. Capitol, according to media reports.
Many activists have pushed for Biden to call for a permanent ceasefire, as Israel’s assault on Gaza since October. Voters across numerous primary states in this week’s Democratic 2024 Super Tuesday cast “uncommitted” ballots as a protest of Biden’s continued support of Israel’s bombardment in Gaza.
GOP response
Republican Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama delivered the traditional Republican response to Biden after he spoke, blasting his handling of immigration, the economy, crime and foreign policy, while questioning if the 81-year-old is up to the challenge of leading the country.
“The American people are scraping by while the President proudly proclaims Bidenomics is working,” she said, seated at a kitchen table. “Goodness, y’all. Bless his heart. We know better.”
A 20-year-old Massachusetts man died Saturday after suffering a medical emergency while hiking at Monadnock State Park.
New Hampshire Fish and Game conservation officers were notified at about 4:11 p.m. that a hiker on the Cascade Link Trail, about three-quarters of a mile from park headquarters on Poole Road, was experiencing a medical crisis. Good Samaritans who came upon the hiker called 911 and began CPR as his condition worsened.
Conservation officers and multiple emergency agencies responded to the scene, including mountain patrol rangers, area fire departments, ambulance services, law enforcement and Massachusetts Life Flight.
Despite extensive rescue efforts, the hiker, identified as Joshua Luth, 20, of Lancaster, Mass., was pronounced dead.
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The cause of death remains under investigation by the New Hampshire Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
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Ryann Brooks is the Ledger-Transcript editor. She was the 2023 Kansas Press Association Journalist of the Year. You can contact her at rbrooks@ledgertranscript.com.
More by Ryann Brooks
Courts have always been the last resort for protecting people’s rights.
When lawmakers and the administration failed you, you could turn to the courts for an unbiased opinion.
Unfortunately, that unbiased opinion is currently thought to be more than slightly tainted judging by some of the decisions made by courts, particularly the US Supreme Court with the potential for tarnishing New Hampshire’s.
However, if you believe courts are inherently nonpolitical, you are either naive or do not know how judges arrived at their lifetime appointments.
In New Hampshire, judges are nominated by the governor and approved by the Executive Council, much like in Washington where the president nominates and the US Senate approves.
Think back to recent nominees from the Trump administration who all came pre-approved by the Federalist Society, an oligarchy-funded Libertarian leaning organization with access to more money than any of us will ever see in our lifetimes to ram their golden boys and girls through the Senate.
And if you do not believe the US Supreme Court is openly partisan then why is gerrymandering fine in Republican Alabama and Louisiana, but not in Democratic Virginia?
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The US Supreme Court has been partisan since the Republican majority stopped the vote counting in Florida after the 2000 election.
In New Hampshire, the nominees often come from the ranks of superior court justices, but lately have also come from the governor’s office or administration or the attorney general’s office.
And their partisan leanings do tend to closely follow those of the individual nominating them although there once was an unwritten rule at least one supreme court justice has to be from the minority party — usually a Democrat — but since judge Gary Hicks left the bench with his 70th birthday in November 2023, there has been no Democrat on the state’s high court.
The court is set to decide the Rand education funding case with the state’s brief due next month, and oral arguments before the end of the year.
The court just recently ruled on a very similar education funding case decided by the same judge who wrote the Rand decision, Superior Court judge David Ruoff, that the state has failed to meet its constitutional obligation to provide and fund an adequate education for the state’s children.
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The Rand case went a step further saying the state education funding system using local property taxes to cover the vast gap between what the state pays for an adequate education and its costs, is unconstitutional because local property taxes have widely varying rates when the state’s constitution calls for proportional and reasonable taxation.
For more than 30 years, the foundation of the state’s education system and its funding has been the two Claremont decisions first finding public education is the state’s responsibility to provide and fund, and then that the state’s funding system was unconstitutional.
The state has already stated it will ask the court to overturn the two Claremont decisions in its repeal of the Rand case.
The Attorney General’s Office would not ask for the Claremont decisions to be overturned without the consent of Gov. Kelly Ayotte, and if it did, the attorney general would be unemployed and that is not the case.
The attorneys for the Rand plaintiffs, a group of commercial and residential property owners, hence property taxpayers, asked four of the five Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from the case and they all refused.
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Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald was the Attorney General when the state fought the ConVal education lawsuit and a key player in developing the state’s strategy and execution.
He recused himself from that case because he was the attorney general when it was fought in superior court, but not in the Rand case saying the two cases are different, he has a constitutional duty to sit, he has no association with the Rand case, and he swore to be unbiased and therefore should be assumed to be unbiased.
But the court’s rules on recusal are fairly clear when a judge should step aside.
“A judge shall disqualify himself or herself in any proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, including but not limited to the following circumstances:” the rule reads and goes on to list a number of instances when recusal should be the practice.
The key here is “not limited to” which makes it more expansive, not narrower.
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In his order dismissing the recusal motion, MacDonald took the opportunity to slap the hands of the plaintiffs’ attorneys.
“In this case, it is perfectly appropriate for plaintiffs’ counsel to argue the facts and law surrounding whether this is the same ‘matter in controversy’ or that I should not be sitting on a matter involving the potential overruling of a case from which I was just disqualified.
“However, it is not appropriate to suggest, as plaintiffs’ counsel do, that if the outcome they seek — my disqualification — is not achieved, then the integrity of the court, public confidence in the judiciary, and the rule of law itself will be undermined. It has been a highly unfortunate development in our recent national history for public officials to attack judges and courts based on outcomes in cases. Here, the plaintiffs’ arguments are of a similar ilk: if their motion is denied, the court will necessarily lack integrity.
“Such attacks by public officials are not appropriate. Among other consequences, they threaten judicial independence. Because lawyers occupy a special place in our legal system, they should guard against such illegitimate attacks, rather than take a page from the same playbook,” MacDonald wrote.
His potential bias in the Rand case does not disrupt the integrity of the court, but questioning his potential bias does evidently.
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Using MacDonald’s logic, how does the integrity of the court not be questioned when Gov. Ayotte blasts the same Supreme Court when it made a ruling she did not like in the ConVal case?
“The court reached the wrong decision today. The fact is, New Hampshire is top 10 in the country when it comes to funding our children’s education,” Ayotte said in a statement about the supreme court’s 3-2 decision affirming Ruoff’s ConVal decision.
And the other thing about her statement, the state may be in the top 10 for spending on public education, but most of that money is from local property taxes, whereas the state is dead last in the percentage of money it spends on education which is why there were the Claremont, Londonderry, ConVal and Rand lawsuits over the years.
On the Legislative side, Senate President Sharon Carson and House Speaker Sherman Packard – the Legislature’s two top Republicans – issued a joint statement criticizing the ConVal decision calling it judicial overreach.
“We are disappointed that the Court continues to insert itself into the Legislature’s role in determining state aid to local school districts,” they said.
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The integrity of the court may have taken a bigger hit from the controversy over the dismissal, short-term layoff, and rehiring of Dianne Martin, the former administrative director of the judicial branch, who has been aligned with MacDonald.
A whistleblower raised the issue of the quick turnaround that allowed her to collect nearly $50,000 in severance and owed benefits.
And former associate justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi did the court’s reputation no favors when she went to then Gov. Chris Sununu concerning the attorney general’s investigation into her husband Geno Marconi, who was the director of NH Port Authority.
When she came back onto the court after her administrative leave, she had the good sense to recuse herself from all cases involving the attorney general’s office.
Two of the four attorneys the plaintiffs asked to recuse themselves were at the attorney general’s office and involved in the Claremont and ConVal cases.
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Associate Justice Patrick Donovan was one of the attorneys fighting the original Claremont lawsuit, the court is now being asked to overturn by the state.
Associate Justice Daniel Will was the solicitor general working with MacDonald in developing the strategy of and oversaw the state’s legal fight and worked with two of the attorneys who will argue the state’s case in the Rand case before the Supreme Court.
Bryan Gould was a long time attorney for the state Republican Party and Republican causes including issues raised over the original Claremont decisions.
He called the plaintiffs’ contentions “innuendo” in his dismissal of the recusal motion, while the plaintiffs noted in their request for reconsideration, “the public statements and expressions of concern that Plaintiffs documented are not ‘innuendo.’ They are legitimate, on-the-record evidence that reasonable members of the public have, in fact, questioned Justice Gould’s impartiality.”
With four of the five justices on the court associated with cases if not issues that will be front and center in the Rand appeal, no matter which way they rule, there is bound to be concern how unbiased any human being can be in such a controversial situation.
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That certainly appears to comply with “A judge shall disqualify himself or herself in any proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”
Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.
Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn and their two rescue dogs.
HUDSON, N.H. — A 70‑year‑old Hudson man is behind bars after police say he rammed another vehicle in a road‑rage attack on Thursday afternoon, tried to pull open the driver’s door and later registered twice the legal limit on a breath test.
Richard Feener was arrested at his home about 30 minutes after the confrontation at Library and Central streets, where a Litchfield, New Hampshire, couple — a 66‑year‑old man and 67‑year‑old woman — told police their SUV was struck multiple times by a white Ford Escape that had been tailgating them since Lowell Road, according to the Hudson Police Department.
The couple told police that at about 3:45 p.m. Feener threw what they described as a “temper tantrum” before intentionally crashing into the rear of their vehicle three times. Police said he then got out, approached the driver’s side door and tried to pull it open while yelling, before returning to his SUV and sideswiping their vehicle as he fled.
No injuries were reported.
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A third‑party witness allegedly confirmed the tailgating, the confrontation at the door and the intentional sideswipe.
Police said they traced the Ford’s veteran license plate to Feener’s home on Barbara Lane about 30 minutes after the reported incident. There they found the SUV with a warm hood and fresh damage consistent with the victims’ account.
According to police, Feener told officers from his doorway that he had been home for about four hours and admitted to drinking but claimed he had not driven recently.
When officers pointed out the fresh damage on his vehicle, he allegedly said it had been there for a while. Police said that they could smell the odor of alcohol on his breath, and when asked what time it was, Feener said it was 8 p.m. despite it being hours earlier.
In addition to appearing intoxicated, and giving inconsistent statements, he struggled to complete field sobriety tests. A breath test later registered a blood‑alcohol concentration of 0.16, according to police.
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Feener was charged with three counts of reckless conduct with a deadly weapon, a Class B felony; aggravated driving while intoxicated, a Class A misdemeanor; driving under the influence, a Class B misdemeanor; conduct after an accident, a Class A misdemeanor; and disorderly conduct, a violation.
At his arraignment Friday in Nashua District Court, Judge Amy Manchester entered no plea on the felony charges and not guilty pleas on the misdemeanors and violations.
Prosecutors acknowledged the seriousness of the allegations but noted Feener has “little to absolutely no criminal or vehicle history,” citing only a 2002 Massachusetts assault‑and‑battery case that was continued without a finding — a disposition in which a defendant admits the facts but avoids a conviction if they complete probation.
The prosecution described Wednesday’s incident as a “one‑off” and requested $500 cash bail with conditions including no driving, no contact with the victims and mandatory drug and alcohol treatment. The defense agreed, saying the episode stemmed from a substance‑abuse issue.
Manchester rejected the joint recommendation.
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“Despite your agreement, I can’t accept this,” she told the attorneys.
Turning to Feener, she added, “I find you to be a danger to the community, and I am going to detain you without bail.”
Feener is scheduled to return to court for a probable cause hearing at 10 a.m. on June 22.
Follow Aaron Curtis on X @aselahcurtis, or on Bluesky @aaronscurtis.bsky.social.
