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

Supreme Court. Pretty rare to get nine to nothing in the U.S. Supreme Court, by the way, these days. And so the Congress needs to step up. We could, for example, pull back the tariff power. We could say, okay, no more nominees, and we're not going to do your precious tax bill until you start to control Doge and to also not claim these kinds of powers.

In other words, the Congress does have a role to play here if they'll play it. So far, they're not doing so. Myself and the Democratic side don't have the votes. There's a majority in the Senate and in the House that gives them the power of what happens in the Congress. The second line of defense, as you say, is the courts. And so far, the courts have been doing a pretty good job.

And again, it's telling... that the response of the president to an unfavorable court decision is to suggest that the judge should be impeached.

Where does that leave us? Where does that leave us in terms of protection of the rights that we all value? The question is, is this administration going to obey a court order? To me, the court order about bringing the fellow back from El Salvador was pretty damn clear. You shall facilitate. Well, what the hell does facilitate mean? It means make it happen.

And it's clear that they were making no effort whatsoever to make it happen. The third line of defense is the people themselves. And we see them acting up, speaking up, rallies. I was at a hands-off rally in Portland, the biggest crowd I've ever seen in Portland two weeks ago.

We had one here in Maine yesterday where farmers, it takes a lot to piss off a farmer, but the farmers were pretty angry because of what this administration has done to the agriculture programs. So the people have a role, but here's the deal. The ultimate power of the people is in elections. And we don't have an election for 19 months. And I don't think we have 19 months.

We could be past a point of no return. And that's why I come back to the Congress. It's our responsibility. Here's really something interesting. We're back to semantics. To defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,

Isn't it interesting that the framers anticipated there would be domestic enemies and that our fundamental responsibility as members of Congress that we take the oath is to defend the Constitution. And right now it's the Constitution that's being

The president just last night is really mad that people that are in this country under parole by the last administration have to have due process before you can kick them out. He was furious. How could this be possible? Well, the Constitution says no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. They knew how to use the word citizen.

It's used in the Constitution, but they use person. Which means any person who's here is entitled to due process rights. And people say, well, those are immigrants to hell with them. I'm reminded of that famous quote from pre-Holocaust. First they came for the Jews and I didn't worry because I wasn't a Jew. And then they came for gay people and I didn't care because I wasn't gay.

Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't care because I wasn't Catholic. Now they're coming for me and there's no one here to stand up for me.

Well, I'll tell you what, when I ran for reelection last year, I never knew what I was getting into. I didn't anticipate this. I mean, I was a senator through four years of the first Trump administration, but this is way different. He doesn't seem to have anybody around him who will tell him no or will tell him, you know, this isn't really the best thing to do.

That's always dangerous for any leader. Remember, I went back to my teaching, and one of the things I used to teach was you've got to have people in your circle who are empowered to, and in fact, in my case, required to tell you when you're full of . If you don't, you're gonna make big mistakes.

A friend of mine in business up here in Maine has a sign on his office wall that says, if you and I agree all the time, one of us isn't necessary. And so that's a real danger. From his point of view, That's dangerous because he's not going to get the straight information and he's going to make mistakes. Just, I mean, the tariff policy is a perfect example of there's no policy.

There's no policy you can discern because it changes every two or three days. And what's clear is it wasn't really thought through. That's why this power was put in Congress because things like tariffs are pretty important. They should be debated and the pros and cons evaluated. That apparently didn't happen in this case.

I think it's a little of both. I think some of the president's advisors are malicious. Elon Musk, for example, really enjoys firing people. Obviously, they don't know what they're doing, literally. They're firing people that they have to rehire two or three days later. Oh, those people take care of nuclear weapons. I guess we shouldn't have fired them.

So there's malice in terms of this, what I believe is taking pleasure. Have you ever heard Elon Musk express a moment of remorse about the people's lives who are being upended and screwed up? No, zero. In fact, he's on the stage at that conference with his sunglasses and a chainsaw grinning about how cool it is that he's destroying people's lives. This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.

Now, what's going on in Social Security, I think, is a little bit of both. At first, I thought they just didn't know what they were doing and they were cutting offices just for the sake of firing people. But now it appears that they really are trying in a subterfuge way of destroying Social Security, which there are people in this country have been trying to do since 1935.

I'm not going to betray any private conversations, but I will say that many of them know that this is dangerous. But rationalization is very powerful. And we all want to rationalize the position that we're taking, particularly at a moment like this. And so one of the most common refrains I hear is, yeah, this is dangerous, but the courts will take care of it. to me, that's a cop-out.

We hope the courts will take care of it, but that presumes that the administration, that the president will obey the orders of the court. If not, where are we then? So, you know, I keep trying to sort of prick their consciences, but it's, and by the way, the framers assumed that, that this separation of power would be policed by the people in power to protect their own prerogatives and power.

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