Russ Feingold: “I think we are all very much looking forward to hearing the President's State of the Union Address tonight. It is a…”

“I think we are all very much looking forward to hearing the President's State of the Union Address tonight. It is a great honor to be a Member of this body and a great honor to be able to sit in the room with our national leader and hear his thoughts about the future for this country. I recall just a year ago, when the President gave his first State of the Union Address, under the rule of a different political party in the Congress, that some of the pundits said one of the questions was whether President Clinton would be irrelevant to the process; he had to establish his relevance. That was an absurd proposition. Of course we found, during the past year, it is pretty tough to make any President irrelevant, given his powers and given the willingness of this President to use those powers this year to try to represent the reality of our Government. The reality of our Government in 1995, and now in 1996, is we have a split Government.”