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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

I mean, you can't put it more directly than that. And it's based on human nature. Ancient Romans understood this. They had a question that summed up this. I believe it sums up all the political science. Quis custodiat ipso custodes. Who will guard the guardians? And the question is, how do you control the government from then abusing that power against you?

And the Constitution is this brilliant divider of power that was designed to keep from happening what's happening right now before our eyes, which is the executive partially usurping, but it's also Congress abdicating its power and concentrating power into the hands of the president. Whoever is the president, I don't care if the Archangel Gabriel is the president, it's just dangerous.

I think it's the most direct assault on the Constitution in the history of this country. I think we're in grave danger. And the problem is those who are cheering on this president because they like what he's doing, but they're ignoring the way he's doing it, can themselves later become the target. I said the other day, you know, you feel pretty good until the eye of Sauron turns on you.

And that's the danger. The president once said, I think it was in his first term, I have the powerful Article II, you know, which is the part of the Constitution that defines the presidency. By the way, Article I is the Congress, the legislative power. Article II is the presidency.

I went back and reread article two the other day. Oh yeah, what's in it? It gives the president practically no power. He only has one and a half unilateral powers. The one is pardoned. That's a unilateral power. He can do it. No checks, no balances, nothing. He can do it. I grant you that. It also says he's the commander in chief for the armed forces in times of war.

But even that power is circumscribed by the Constitution giving the power to declare war to the Congress. And if you go back to the debates at the convention in 1787, August 23rd, they debated the war power. And some people said, well, a committee like Congress can't run a war. And others said, yeah, but look what these princes in Europe do, dragging their countries into war for foolish reasons.

And the compromise was to split it. Congress has the power to declare war. The president is the commander in chief. After that, here's what it says about the president's job. I'm going to give you an exact quote. The president's responsibility is to, quote, take care that the laws be faithfully executed. That's the exact language. Take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

It doesn't give him the power to decide which laws he likes or to make his own law. A perfect example is the tariffs.

The Constitution in Article I, Section 8 expressly delegates to Congress the power to regulate trade among nations. That's the term, regulate trade among nations. So they delegated that to the president years ago with a caveat that it could only be used unilaterally by the president in an emergency.

And the thinking was, you know, in a time of war when there was really some crisis that you had to resolve, I hate to tell you, man, there's no emergency with Canada. There's no emergency with Denmark or South Korea or Japan or our allies. Now, maybe you can argue that we have a serious situation. maybe an emergency with China, given the difficulties of that piece of trade.

But to use this for this worldwide tariff regime, which really threatens our economy and the world economy, again, it's exactly what the framers didn't want.

It's sort of like a nice little state you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it. And the issue is not trans athletes. That's a legitimate issue for debate. My question is, should that be decided on the local level or the federal level? Does that really rise to the level of being a federal law?

Or is this something states and school boards and sports bigs should decide on their own? By the way, there was a very telling moment in that exchange, a very crucial telling moment where at one point he said, we are the law. Well, we are the federal law. He started to say, I am the law.

I am the law. I hate to say this, but he's not the law. Congress makes the laws. And we had a bill about trans athletes, and that's the way this should proceed. He doesn't get to write a law, call it an executive order. An executive order is not a law. And the governor's position is, look, I'm just obeying Maine law. And she ended her comment by saying, see you in court.

which, by the way, they got a temporary restraining order last Friday night from a federal district judge of like a 40-page opinion saying why the president was not correct. So the dispute really wasn't about trans athletes. It was about the president's ability to impose his view of what the law ought to be on a state. And this could happen to any state.

And also part of it, we all know, was sort of personal pique He took umbrage that this governor dared to stand up to him. And then later on, to underline that, he said a week or so ago, if she apologizes, if she gives a heartfelt apology We'll give him all the money.

To me, that tells you this was all about personal, not legal or policy. But in the meantime, Pablo, we're losing money for kids' lunches, for programs that pay farmers to grow food to go to food banks. to support low-income kids in our schools. At one point, they cut off something called the Sea Grant Program.

24 across the country, it supports local fishing communities and programs along the coastline. We were the only ones that were cut off. You don't want a system where one person can reach out and... take this kind of action. So it was a tell, as I say, when he said, we are the law, because I think that's what he thinks.

Are we importing their values?

Well, there are really three guardrails, Pablo. The first is the Congress. And frankly, we're falling down on the job miserably. I keep talking to my Republican colleagues and say, you know, what's it going to take? And maybe this sending this guy to El Salvador and not making the slightest effort to get him back and essentially defying an order of not only the lower court, but the U.S.

Showing 61–80 of 123 · page 4 of 7