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Angus King represents Maine in the U.S. Senate.
This column was adapted from King’s speech on the Senate floor Thursday to oppose the nomination of Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget.
When my colleagues and I began our careers in the Senate, we pledged an oath to the Constitution with the following words: “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.”
We took this oath to support and defend the Constitution, and as it says: against all enemies foreign and domestic. I’ve always thought it was interesting that the framers conceded that there might be domestic enemies to the Constitution. It’s a reminder that our oath was not to the Republican Party nor to the Democratic Party — and it was certainly not to Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Our oath was to defend the Constitution and the very fragile institutions of our perfectly imperfect government.
But right now — right now literally at this moment — that Constitution is under the most direct and consequential assault in our nation’s history. An assault not on a particular provision of that document, but on the essential structure of the document itself.
It’s hard to grasp the reality of this situation with all of the events that have been swirling around us over the last several weeks since it’s coming from so many different quarters and so many different actors.
But by all means, this is an assault. And how we respond to this assault will define our life’s work, our place in history and the future of our country. None of us, all Americans together, will ever face a greater challenge.
Before we get to the challenge, however, I think it’s important to ask why we have a Constitution in the first place and why ours has, so far, stood the test of time.
The answer to the first question, why have a Constitution in the first place, is contained in the preamble: “We the People of the United States, in Order to Form a More Perfect Union,” that is the first answer. The rest of the answer lies in: “Establish Justice, Ensure Domestic Tranquility, Provide for the Common Defense, Promote the General Welfare, and Secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and our Posterity do Ordain and Establish this Constitution of the United States of America.”
You want to know what the Constitution is for? There it is. There’s the list.
But there’s a paradox at the heart of the creation of any government, whether it’s here or any time else in history. There’s a paradox built in, because the essence of creating government is to give it power, in order to look after us, in order to provide for the common defense, to ensure domestic tranquility, and to provide justice to our people.
In other words, we must give our power to this separate entity. But we have to do so with the realization that the power that’s being given has the potential to be abused. In other words, how do we give power to the government, and ensure that the government itself doesn’t use that power to abuse us as citizens? This is a question at the heart of all political discussion throughout history.
The Romans even had a question that captured it. The question was, “quis custodiet, ipsos custodes?” It means who will guard the guardians? Who will guard those who we have given power to guard us? It’s a fundamental question that’s confronted every society and every government throughout history.
James Madison put it this way in the 51st Federalist Paper: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither internal nor external controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this — you must first enable the government to control the governed. That’s the function. And in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”
Our framers understood this. They were deep students of history and also of human nature. And they had just won a lengthy and brutal war against the abuses inherent in concentrated governmental power: George III. The universal principle of human nature they understood was that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That’s a universal principle, all over the world throughout history.
So how did they answer the question of who will guard the guardians? They answered it by building into the basic structure of our government two essential safeguards. One was regular elections. In other words, returning the control of the government to the people on regular scheduled elections. And the other essential safeguard is the deliberate division of power between the branches and levels of government.
This is important — the cumbersomeness, the slowness, the clumsiness is built into our system. The framers were so fearful of concentrated power that they designed a system that would be hard to operate. And the heart of it was the separation of power between various parts of the government. The whole idea was that no part of the government, no one person, no one institution could ever have a monopoly on power.
Why? Because it’s dangerous. History and human nature tells us that. This division of power — as annoying and inefficient as it can be, particularly to the executive, I know because I used to be a governor — is an essential feature of the system, not a bug. It’s an essential, basic feature of the system, designed to protect our freedoms.
Now, this contrasts with the normal structure of a private business, where authority is purposefully concentrated, allowing swift, and sometimes arbitrary, action. But a private business does not have the army, and the president of the United States is not the CEO of America.
Power is shared, principally between the president and this Congress. In fact, this herky-jerkiness, the two houses, the war power divided between the president and Congress, this unwieldy structure is the whole idea. No one has or should ever have all the power.
So the concern I’m raising today isn’t some academic exercise or manifestation of political jealousy or abstract institutional loyalty. It’s the guts of the system, designed to protect us from the inevitable. And I mean inevitable — abuse of an authoritarian state, the inevitable abuse of an authoritarian state. It’s the guts of our protection. In fact, this clumsy system is the main spring of our freedom. By the way, it’s worked and distinguishes us from the historical norm.
But we have to understand, we are an anomaly in history. The historical norm is pharaohs, kings, dictators, emperors, presidents for life. But the fact that we’re such an anomaly, and we’ve seen in our lifetimes other government systems based upon ours slip into authoritarianism and dictatorship, tells us how fragile what we have is. What we have in this country is an anomaly in history and it’s fragile. And it must be protected from generation to generation. This makes this moment all the more urgent and portentous.
We have to keep our eye on the big picture. Not all the confusion and smoke that’s going on over the last couple of weeks. Again, this isn’t about politics. This isn’t about policy. This isn’t about Republican versus Democrat. This is about tampering with the structure of our government, which will ultimately undermine its ability to protect the freedom of our citizens. If our defense of the Constitution is gone, there’s nothing left to us.
St. Thomas Moore said: “I expected you to betray me, Richard, but for Wales?” We should not betray the Constitution for temporary expedient because we don’t like this or that agency.
Now I want to speak to my Republican colleagues and friends. Don’t stand aside in the midst of these confirmations, ill-considered foreign policy pronouncements, flood of executive orders, none of which will do a thing about the price of eggs, cost of housing or availabilities of child care. Don’t get caught up in all of that and ignore the steady and not-so-slow usurpation of congressional authority and fundamental alteration of the framers’ scheme.
Once this door is open, it’s going to be very difficult to close it again, no matter who the president is at the time. No matter who’s in charge.
We must all ask ourselves: Are there no red lines? Are there no limits?
Just in the past 10 days, we’ve seen the literal destruction of a statutorily, I emphasize that word, statutorily established and funded federal agency by people ostensibly working for the president understand vague authority, no transparency and no guidance from the Congress. Did they come to the Foreign Relations Committee and say “What do you think about USAID? Are there parts to work with or be reformed?” No, zero.
This small group, and we don’t know who they are, but this small group of Elon Musk and his associates — apparently, it’s reported, in their 20s have no experience with government, no experience with foreign aid, no experience with the operation of the U.S. government — they’re making basically policy decisions and constitutional decisions.
The Constitution does not give to the president or his designee the power to extinguish a statutorily established agency. I can think of no greater violation of the strictures of the Constitution or usurpation of the power of this body. None. I can think of none.
Shouldn’t this be a red line?
By the way, I find it especially galling to read the sneering comment from the richest man in the world that, quote, “we spent the weekend feeding USAID into the chipper.” Describing an action that will literally take food from the mouths of starving children. Forget red lines; do we have no decency?
And then there is the executive order freezing funding, again, selectively, for programs the administration doesn’t like or understand. I was a former governor and I would have loved to have had this power, but it’s a fundamental violation of the whole idea of the Constitution, the separation of powers.
This approach says to the executive: you can pick and choose which laws you like, which funding programs, the level of funding, you can impound if you don’t want to spend it. Richard Nixon tried to do that. He was rebuffed by the Congress that passed a specific statute: no impoundments.
In addition to the chaos, the uncertainty and demonstrable damage, there’s nothing theoretical about cutting off funding to a rural health clinic, for example, or support for small farmers or grants to your fire department. But getting away from those specifics, it’s easy to get pulled into the conversation — my office is hearing calls every day, we can hardly handle the volume. This again, to underline, is a frontal assault of our power, your power, the power to decide where public funds should be spent.
Isn’t this an obvious red line? Isn’t this an obvious limit?
Or finally, and I picked a few examples, but my final example is the power seemingly assumed by DOGE to burrow into the Treasury’s payment system, and now [the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services], for undefined purposes with zero oversight, which raises questions up to and including threats to national security. Do these people have the proper security clearances? What are the opportunities for our adversaries to hack into the systems?
We’ve already been under unprecedented cyberattacks and now we’re opening more doors to potential vulnerabilities, although it’s impossible to determine what they’re taking. Remember there’s no transparency or oversight. Access to Social Security numbers seems to be in the mix. All the government’s personnel files, personal financial data, potentially everyone’s tax returns and medical records. That can’t be good. That can’t be good. That’s data that should be protected with the highest level of security and consideration of Americans’ privacy.
And we don’t know who these staffers are. We don’t know what they’re taking out with them. We don’t know whether they’re walking out with laptops or thumb drives. We don’t know whether they’re leaving back doors into the system. There is literally no oversight.
Shouldn’t this be an easy red line?
In short, we’re experiencing in real time exactly what the framers most feared. When you clear away the smoke, clear away the DOGE, the executive orders, foreign pronouncements, more fundamentally what’s happening is the shredding of the constitutional structure itself.
And we have a profound responsibility, based on that pesky oath that we all took, to stop what’s going on in terms of altering how our government is supposed to fundamentally function to protect our people — all of you here in Maine.
Together, Republicans, Democrats and independents alike, we have the power to right the balance, to reclaim the authority we thought was inherent, and in the process save our country.
At a prior time of crisis, Abraham Lincoln defined the stakes for each of us: “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We, of this Congress, and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”
Now is the time to establish a red line — the Constitution itself.
