The six-hour queue for seats
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One of the few points at which John Kiriakou reported learning something new from the coverage of the February 2026 State of the Union address concerned the seating.

The queue

CNN had been discussing the seats beforehand, he said. There are far fewer of them than there are people entitled to attend. What he had not realised was the practical consequence: members go to the chamber six hours in advance to stake out a seat, and "they'll bring like lunch and dinner with them. And just hold their food on their lap."

The 2026 arithmetic

That year the crush did not materialise. Kiriakou put the number of absent Democrats at 112, counting House members and senators together. The consequence, in his account, was that the free seats went to everyone else: the Supreme Court, the cabinet, visitors, "even the sub cabinet, all kinds of stuff."

His verdict on the change was brief, "It's just not the way it used to be. At all."

What it illustrates

The detail arrives in the middle of a longer argument about the Democratic caucus's inability to act as a bloc. Kiriakou and Ted Rall had already criticised the leadership for telling members that boycotting the address was optional, on the ground that a party either all shows up and does the same thing or all stays away. Rall had noted that the seats would be filled anyway; Kiriakou's seating arithmetic is what that observation cashes out to. A boycott that is left to individual conscience, in his telling, does not empty a chamber, it simply hands the empty places to the administration's own guests.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Ted Rall
- Get thrown out spicily
