Angus King

speaker

123 appearances 9 recordings 7 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 26 Jan

Angus King’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 4.

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Pablo Torre Finds Out · This (Independent) Senator Has a Warning. Who Will Listen? · 22 Apr 2025 podcast

I'm a year younger than Mick Jagger.

The moves, all the moves. And I went to see the Eagles at the Sphere a couple of weeks ago. I took a couple of my kids. I'm a big Eagles fan.

Not those Eagles. No, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let's be clear. We're talking about the Music Eagles, Hotel California, not the Philadelphia Eagles. Oh, no.

Good trouble, I hope, as John Lewis would say.

Good evening and welcome to the inaugural edition of Maine Watch. I'm Angus King. I was a PBS TV talk show host in Maine for 15 years. And Pablo, that goes to people say, well, why did you decide to run for office? And I'll bet you this has crossed your mind because it finally occurred to me after interviewing politicians for 15 years that my questions were better than their answers.

I said, hell, I can do this.

I've been an independent for 35 or 40 years from the time I ran for governor of Maine in 1994. I served eight years as an independent governor. By the way, I found it was a big advantage because I could appoint people, whoever I thought was best for the job, rather than a member of one or the other of the parties.

And then I had 10 years of teaching and business and a whole bunch of other things, then sort of, somewhat to my surprise, ended up running for the U.S. Senate in 2012.

What I try to do is whatever I think is right. If I had to put my philosophy on a bumper sticker, it would be I call them as I see them. In recent years, full disclosure, I voted more often with the Democrats because in recent years, the Republicans haven't given me a hell of a lot that I felt like voting for.

One of the points I tried to make in this course was that leadership isn't just a general on a white horse or a senator or a president. In fact, when I first was approached by the president of Bowdoin to teach there, he said, well, of course, you'll be teaching political science, right? I said, no, I'd like to teach about leadership because I think it's so important.

I don't really fully understand it. And I think teaching it may help me to understand it better. And so Belichick and Parcells, I mean, the NFL is a perfect example. of teams that win consistently, usually based on leadership and on some change in leadership. You know, it helps to have Tom Brady or Jaden Daniels or Marshall and Lattimore, but the key thing is how is the institution led?

The Washington Commanders this year are a perfect example of that. They had terrible leadership for 25 years with Dan Snyder. He sold the franchise two years ago. New owners came in. New general manager, new coach. Now, it was genius to have drafted Jaden Daniels and they held on to Terry McLaurin, but they changed the whole culture. The leadership changed the culture.

And that's why in that class, I was talking about Belichick and Parcells, who were certainly major innovators and leaders in the NFL. By the way, I played high school football. I could have played in the NFL. I only lack two. We saw the photo. We saw the photo. I only lack two qualities. I would have been in the NFL, but I lack two qualities, speed and athletic ability.

Everybody in Maine two weeks ago was suddenly a Duke fan, which was really amazing.

Pablo, this is a really, really dangerous moment. And I don't like a lot of these policies, the deportations, the tariffs, all of that. But there's a deeper... danger going on here, which is essentially the collapse of the constitutional structure. The framers divided power on purpose. They put power into the Congress, into the executive, into the judiciary, because they understood human nature.

And human nature is that if all power is in one set of hands, abuse is inevitable. Madison in the 47th Federalist put it most bluntly. He said, if legislative, judicial, and executive power is concentrated in one set of hands, that is a perfect definition of tyranny. I want to sort of vouch for myself a little bit. I've been giving this talk about the Constitution for 20 years, at least.

I even gave it one day at the NSA, National Security Administration. General Nakasone asked me to come and lecture on the Constitution to their employees. And one of the things that I like to do is to demonstrate how the Constitution works. Okay, you ready for this? Here's a cucumber. And the cucumber represents concentrated power, all right?

This is George III, all power, legislative, judicial, executive in one place. Okay, here's the Constitution.

The Constitution is the Vegematic of power. Okay, so here's the constitution and you put the concentrated power in the Vegematic and then you do this.

What's happened is, see, here's the Senate. Here's the House. Here's the Supreme Court. Here's the veto. Two-thirds override. Here are treaties. Here's the state law. See, it divided power up into all these little pieces. He's throwing it over his shoulder, every piece. That's the whole way the Constitution is supposed to work. And the problem is now the lever is jammed.

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