Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jewish Congresswoman To Skip State Of The Union

President Trump’s first State of the Union address on Tuesday will be missing at least one important audience member: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Ginsburg has a previously-scheduled speaking engagement in Rhode Island on Tuesday and so will not be attending the speech in Washington, the Associated Press reported Saturday.

Ginsburg attended all eight of former President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speeches — including in 2015 when she fell asleep because, as she admitted, she “wasn’t 100% sober.”

But it’s not unheard of for Supreme Court justices to skip out on presidential speeches — Ginsburg, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas skipped out on Trump’s address to Congress last year, and the late Antonin Scalia stopped attending State of the Union ceremonies between 1997 and his death in 2016.

More unusually, a few Democratic members of Congress will be formally boycotting the speech, including Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois. She told the Chicago Sun-Times on Sunday that she was not going in protest of Trump’s Muslim ban, failure to condemn white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia and using obscene language to refer to African countries.

Trump has “disrespected millions and millions of Americans and the presidency itself,” Schakowsky said. She added that members of Congress should not attend his speech “just for the sake of politeness.”

Other members of Congress who have announced they are skipping Trump’s speech are Reps. John Lewis, Maxine Waters, Frederica Wilson and Earl Blumenauer.

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected]

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.