Biden’s second Deliver of the Union possible quilt financial system, police reform | USA TODAY

I'm Susan Page and I'm theWashington Bureau chief of USA TODAY. This is in fact the 43rd Stateof the Union address I've covered. It is the president's opportunityto address what is likely to be his biggest audience of the entire year. This'll be a different kind of state ofthe union than the one President Biden gave last year because Congress isno longer under democratic control. He's going to be addressing a House ofRepresentatives now controlled narrowly by the Republicans,.

And they've made it clear they're goingto try to defy him on raising the debt ceiling in a clean way andinvestigate him and his family and his administration. So new challengesthat Joe Biden will face this year. Joe Biden is likely to start by sayingthings are better than they were a year ago when he addressed, uh, the State of the Union.The economy is certainly better. We're sure he is gonna brag about thatand take some credit for the state of the economy. I think he'lltalk about police reform. That is certainly a bigtopic of the moment.

One question we have is ifwill he talk about immigration? This is an issue that ispolitically very potent. It's something he hasn'ttalked much about in the past. Big differences between this year andlast year at the time of the State of the Union, then President Bidentalked a lot about Covid. We were still facing the pandemic. Now the pandemic emergencyis about to be declared over. He also was promoting hisbuild back better plan, that really massive spending planfull of democratic priorities.

It ended up being cut downto smaller size, passed a, a somewhat different version of it. He cannot possibly have ambitions thatbig this time around because of course this time he's got a Congress that isdivided in control between the Democrats and the Republicans.

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