This (Independent) Senator Has a Warning. Who Will Listen?

Angus King, the U. S. Senator from Maine (and former quarterback), is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. So we should listen very closely as he takes PTFO inside what he deems an unprecedented constitutional crisis — from tariffs and mass deportations to trans athletes and DOGE — by way of the ancient Romans, a vegetable slicer and Bill Belichick. And he explains exactly why his colleagues in Congress must stop handing their power to Donald Trump... before it's too late. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

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• 0:44Pablo Torre?

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• 1:02Speaker 01

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• 1:48Pablo Torre?

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• 2:28Pablo Torre?

  My move: QPC, fries and a drink after a long day of recording. That is my happy place. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Fries and a Drink, now $8 for a limited time only, only at McDonald's. For a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California, and for delivery. Fresh beef not available in Alaska and Hawaii. Offer not valid for delivery. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  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 [BLEEP].

• 3:14Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  You're listening to DraftKings Network.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  How are you doing, man? You've had a long day. You've already done about 12 hours on Morning Joe. Holy smoke.

• 3:39Pablo Torre?

  Oh, Senator, you know what? The energy I have for you remains, remains at maximum capacity, just to be very clear.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  I thought politicians were supposed to be bull [BLEEP] artists. Oh, wait a minute. Let me...

• 3:57Speaker 02

  How's it... I think that's... Will that be... Is that better?

• 4:01Pablo Torre?

  Oh, look at that. Senator, how old are you? I guess, before I pay you the compliment I want to pay you to get going here.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  I'm a year younger than Mick Jagger. I just turned 81.

• 4:13Pablo Torre?

  81 with all of the gyration. All of the gyration of Jagger.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:27Pablo Torre?

  Oh, my God. I thought you were a Commanders fan, but now I'm gonna clip that and get into trouble.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:42Pablo Torre?

  You know how the media works. We're aggregating this. We're getting you in trouble with everything.

• 4:47Speaker 02

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

• 4:52Pablo Torre?

  American politics is in trouble. And it's the bad kind of trouble, by the way. The kind where your timeline is just drowning in these fake sports fans and also crypto scams and this president that so many powerful people are very conspicuously afraid to even slightly criticize. And so what we here at PTFO wanted to do today was find that rarest of things in modern American politics. A genuinely independent politician and a real sports fan, ideally, who'd be willing to take us inside the halls of power. The halls of no less than the United States Senate, to be specific.

• 5:36Pablo Torre?

  The Hotel California of American democracy, where so many senators are prisoners there, it would seem, of their own device. But luckily, the sitting senator that we found, from Maine, at age 81, could relate to exactly how I feel.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:26Pablo Torre?

  And so Angus King did it. He set his sights on a brand new job, governor of Maine, and won. And yet, the most striking aspect of his political perspective here for our purposes today, I would argue, is his party loyalty. Because Angus King doesn't have any. He is, very authentically, neither a Democrat nor a Republican.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  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, somewhat to my surprise, ended up running for the US Senate in 2012.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  And on behalf of the great state of Maine, I give you Senator-elect Angus King.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  Keeping the White House, we know Democrats keeping control of the US Senate, Republicans keeping control of the House, but we're adding an independent to the Senate. He is Senator-elect Angus King of Maine, and he's being a tad coy today, not revealing which way his political affections may bend. Everyone in the Senate now wants to know, will King caucus with the Democrats or the Republicans?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:12Pablo Torre?

  But something you should know is that while Angus King has voted "no" on 14 different Trump Cabinet appointees, as he did, for instance, with former wrestling promoter and our current Secretary of Education, Lyndon McMahon, he did vote "yes" on seven of Trump's picks, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which is to say that Senator King is not some categorical "never-Trumper." And so I just needed to highlight another line on his resume here. A line we found on a physical piece of paper, actually, from a course he taught entitled "Leaders and Leadership" at Bowdoin College in Maine in the spring of 2005, exactly 20 years ago now. And this line on Angus King's syllabus simply read, "Belichick and Parcells."

• 9:00Speaker 02

  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's 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 Marshawn

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Lattimore, but the key thing is, how is the institution led? The Washington Commanders are, 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. No, 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 lacked two-

• 10:27Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, we saw the photo. We saw the photo of this too.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  I only lacked two qualities. I would have been in the NFL, but I lacked two qualities: speed and athletic ability.

• 10:38Pablo Torre?

  Before we get you going on all your sports takes, because I know, by the way, I know you've got Cooper flag takes, right? The son of Maine, about to go and become the number one pick in the draft, and possibly going to Washington, by the way, becoming a wizard, which is a cruel fate. I think we can all agree.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Oh, come on.

• 10:52Pablo Torre?

  Senator?

• 10:53Speaker 02

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

• 11:00Pablo Torre?

  But in terms of the, by the way, the shifting allegiances, the reason why I'm gonna cut you off from you going all, you know, PTI on me is because we're at this moment where leadership is not merely abstract. It is actually quite concrete and actually quite imminent. And so when it comes to the area of study that you are most passionate about, I think, the reason I really called you today, which is to say, what executive power looks like in the context of our Constitution? Can you just state as plainly as you can, as an independent, what you see the landscape being right now as I talk to you?

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Pablo, this is a really, really dangerous moment. And not, I mean, I don't like a lot of these policies, the deportations, the tariffs, all, you know, 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.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  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 wanna 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 I like to do is to demonstrate how the Constitution works. Okay? You ready for this? Here's a cucumber.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:14Pablo Torre?

  Oh wow, there, oh, hold on. For those not watching on YouTube, get to YouTube and watch the Vegematic in full clarity.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  You want to see that again? I wish I could do it in slow motion.

• 13:45Pablo Torre?

  Oh, we'll slow it down in post. And if you've never seen a Vegematic before, this device from 1963. It is made of white plastic, has a sharp metal grate. And you put the vegetable over the grate. You slam the thing down on the top, hit that lever. And now come on the other side, the separation of powers, as it were.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:22Pablo Torre?

  He's throwing it over his shoulder, every piece.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  That's the whole way the Constitution is supposed to work. And the problem is now, the lever is jammed.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  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 of political science. Quiis custodiet 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

• 15:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:53Pablo Torre?

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• 16:37Pablo Torre?

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• 17:22Pablo Torre?

  Head to dell.com/deals. That's dell.com/deals.

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• 19:31Pablo Torre?

  Not to be all highfalutin' John Rawls, but the whole idea of what are the rules here irrespective of whether, to now torture the historical reference you made to the Roman Empire, irrespective of whether the Romans, the people are chanting, "We want Barabbas", right? Irrespective of whether the people are demanding something, we have a set of rules. And so, how? How dire, Senator, I guess is my question here. How does this compare to America's history? How dire this situation is that you see before you right now?

• 20:03Speaker 02

  I think it's the most direct assault on the Constitution in the history of this country. I think it's, 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, 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.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  Can I have an Article II where I have the right to do whatever I want as president? But I don't even talk about that. You have Article II and you have many other things. That's the other thing. If you use your rights, if you use your power, if you use Article II, it's called obstruction. Also, someday you ought to read a thing called Article II. Read Article II, which gives the president powers that you wouldn't believe.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  I went back and reread Article II the other day.

• 21:16Pablo Torre?

  Oh yeah, what's in it?

• 21:17Speaker 02

  It gives the president practically no power. He only has one and a half unilateral powers. The one is pardons. 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 of 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."

• 22:02Speaker 02

  And the compromise was to split it. Congress has the power to declare war. The president is the commander in chief. After that...

• 22:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  In a few moments, I will sign a historic executive order instituting reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world. Reciprocal, that means they do it to us and we do it to them. Very simple, can't get any simpler than that.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  The Constitution, Article 1, 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,

• 23:38Speaker 02

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

• 23:55Pablo Torre?

  I want to make this even more specific and relevant to your personal experience in your state. Because the controversy, which feels like it's underselling it at this point, let's call it something closer now that we're in vocabulary mode, the extortionary dynamic, the mafioso dynamic of what it's like when the president is threatening the governor of your state about the trans athlete problem and how that is now this cudgel he is using to demand not just fealty, but also the conditions he needs to give you the public programs that your people normally deserve.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  I understand Maine. Is the Maine here, the governor of Maine?

• 24:38Speaker 03

  Are you not going to comply with it? I'm complying with state and federal laws. Well, we are the federal law. Well, you better do it. You better do it because you're not going to get any federal funding at all if you don't. And by the way, your population, even though it's somewhat liberal, although I did very well there, your population doesn't want men playing in women's sports.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's sort of like, 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. The question, 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."

• 25:33Speaker 03

  Well, we are the federal law.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  He almost, he started to say, "I am the law." He caught himself and said, "We are the law."

• 25:41Pablo Torre?

  He stopped himself before he officially quoted Judge Dredd. Correct.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  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 has looked, "I'm just obeying main law." And she ended her comment by saying, "See you in court."

• 26:14Speaker 03

  See you in court. Every state, "Good, I'll see you in court." I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:04Pablo Torre?

  Over the weekend, the president posted a comment on Truth Social, saying that while the state of Maine has apologized for the governor's statement regarding the issue, he wants to hear it from her.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  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. Twenty-four across the country 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.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  So it was a tell, as I say, when he said, "We are the law," because I think that's what he thinks.

• 28:11Pablo Torre?

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• 28:55Pablo Torre?

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• 29:38Pablo Torre?

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• 30:20Pablo Torre?

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• 31:01Pablo Torre?

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• 31:35Pablo Torre?

  But it is worth noting, of course, that the latest reason that independent Senator Angus King has broken out his Vegematic cucumber slicer, even beyond the tariffs and also Elon Musk and his Department of Governmental Efficiency, came about last month with the rarest of things: an admission of error from the Trump administration itself. Return now to what immigration officials are calling an administrative error. That error sent Kilmar Abreu Garcia, a protected legal resident in the United States, to a prison in El Salvador last month.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  The Supreme Court has ordered the federal government to facilitate the return of a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  And this was a unanimous order by the Supreme Court, 9 to 0.

• 32:24Pablo Torre?

  And the real takeaway: neither US nor Salvadoran officials showing any interest or desire to bring him back to the United States. As Judge J. Harvey Wilkinson, the legendary conservative Reagan appointee on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, noted in a remarkable ruling today: "The government asserts that Abreu Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13." Perhaps, perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process. This should be shocking, not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear. I'll bring my personal experience into this a bit, too. My parents are from the Philippines. I'm the first one in my family born in the US.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Birthright citizenship, man.

• 33:09Pablo Torre?

  Well, the conditions that you're describing, Senator, they remind me of the Third World. And this is not merely a hypothetical comparison. It is truly something that I see in the news as our foremost ally seems to be a man who calls himself, literally, "the world's coolest dictator" in El Salvador. And when it comes to that part, when it comes to are we exporting our problems to El Salvador and their terrorist prison camp?

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Are we importing their values?

• 33:45Pablo Torre?

  Are we importing their principles? Exactly right. This is the argument that I've been trying to make. All of this feels... Like, so clearly objectively un-American to me. And that's even if you agree that we should deport people, that we should have a debate around trans athletes. It's merely about how we have the conversations through our system. And that's what's un-American. It's not the outcome that is bothersome, even though I might, I might disagree. It's the utter trashing of the process again. And, and so when you say, we'll see you in court. I'm just worried now more than ever, Senator,

• 34:30Pablo Torre?

  and I wonder how you feel about this, that the judiciary itself is a norm. Meaning, it relies upon the respect of certainly the administration, but all of us, every American, in order to actually have power.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Well, there are really three guardrails, Pablo. The first is the Congress, and frankly, we're falling down on, on the job miserably. I keep talking to my Republican colleagues and say, you know, what's it gonna 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 US Supreme Court. Pretty rare to get nine to nothing in the US 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 gonna do your, your, your precious tax bill

• 35:27Speaker 02

  until you start to, to control Doge and to also not claim these kinds of, 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.

• 36:07Pablo Torre?

  But many people have called for his impeachment, the impeachment of this judge. I don't know who the judge is, but he's radical left. He was Obama-appointed.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  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 out, rallies.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  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 their, 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.

• 37:23Pablo Torre?

  No.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  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 undermined. The president just last night is really mad that people that are in this country

• 38:05Speaker 02

  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 used "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.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:58Pablo Torre?

  When you talk about returning to Congress, physically now, just showing up to work, knowing that these are the ways in which you have an uphill battle. Does that suck? Does it suck to wake up and go to work and just be like, "Time to not roll this boulder up this hill"?

• 39:19Speaker 02

  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 [BLEEP]. If you don't, you're gonna make big mistakes."

• 40:03Speaker 02

  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 gonna get the straight information and he's gonna 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.

• 40:48Pablo Torre?

  The fundamental question I ask myself all of the time, and maybe it's the most useless question I'll ask you today, Senator. Is this malice? Or is this incompetence?

• 40:57Speaker 02

  I think it's a little of both.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  I think some of the president's advisers 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.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw!

• 41:53Speaker 02

  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 subterfused way, of destroying social security, which there are people in this country have been trying to do since 1935.

• 42:16Pablo Torre?

  When you see the people who do know better, right? Malice or incompetence, let's just grant. There are lots of senators. The Senate's a hard place to get into. It's a hard room you're in, a hard intersection to access. There are people who know better. What's it like to see them every day? Body language-wise? Do they betray any notion that they are risking all of the things that you see at stake?

• 42:42Speaker 02

  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 a...

• 43:24Speaker 02

  And by the way, the framers assumed that this separation of power would be policed by the people in power to protect their own prerogatives and power. In other words, there's writing in The Federalist that the Congress would not cave in to an autocratic president because they wouldn't want to give up their own authority.

• 43:50Pablo Torre?

  Yes, self-interest, self-interest as a check.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  It was supposed to... That's the way it was supposed to work. But the framers didn't contemplate political parties. They hated the idea of political parties. In The Federalist Papers, Washington's farewell address talks about the danger of parties. But sure enough, within about five or 10 years, we had The Federalist and The Anti-Federalist. We had Adams and Jefferson. And so now what we have is party loyalty is trumping, excuse the term, institutional loyalty. Rather than fighting for the prerogatives, these folks are putting their party first, saying, "You know, we've got to be loyal to our president." And it doesn't help that this president is notoriously vindictive.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  The current rumor is they're being told, "If you buck us, we will primary you, and, this is new, Musk will pay for it." Wow. It's one thing to face a primary. It's another thing to face a primary with an opponent with unlimited funds. It's legitimate fear. You see Lisa Murkowski right there making really what was a...

• 45:01Speaker 04

  Stunning admission. She's a sitting Republican senator, and she's admitting that she and her colleagues are full of fear because of this Trump administration.

• 45:10Speaker 06

  I'm oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  So it's a sort of double-barreled threat. It's easy for me to say this. I'm not in their position. I'm not, you know, a senator from a red state who could face a primary. So I don't, I'm trying not to be judgmental, but I do think at some point, a line is crossed, and people are going to have to step up. Lincoln said in a speech to Congress in 1862, that nobody from this Congress or this administration is going to avoid history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. And we can't avoid this question.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  I mean, this is, this is the question of our time, and it goes to the fundamental survival of the system that has served this country well for over 200 years.

• 46:23Pablo Torre?

  As much as this administration is operating with a degree of ahistorical fraudulence, they are living in the most perfect time to do so in.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  But here's one of the problems, Pablo. I have found in my experience that if people have a general, common understanding of the facts, getting to the proper solution is pretty easy. If they don't share an understanding of the facts, it's practically impossible. And in our country today, we have people living in different factual universes. If you're conservative, you watch Fox News and Newsmax, and you get on the Internet to various people that reinforce your views. In fact, somebody said, had a great line the other day, "People are now seeking confirmation, not information."

• 47:18Speaker 02

  And if you're liberal, you watch Rachel Maddow.

• 47:21Pablo Torre?

  Sure.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  And so, people are walking around, literally with different views of the facts. I think it was Barack Obama once said, if he watched Fox News for a week, he'd hate himself. And it's very hard to resolve these problems when people have different views of the facts. For example, what is the crime problem among immigrants? Well, the data shows that immigrants actually have a lower crime rate. Recent immigrants that are being targeted by this administration have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans. That's supposedly valid data from the FBI and other law enforcement. But if that's the case, then the premise is not correct, that this is a national emergency

• 48:06Speaker 02

  and we have to forget about civil rights and we have to forget about the Constitution and due process, because it's, you know, these people are dangerous and running rampant in our communities. We've got to understand the facts before we make the policy.

• 48:21Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, even the very basic fact of how many illegal immigrants are there? JD Vance is on Twitter, saying 20 million. Of course, there are few, few places, serious places, that will come anywhere close to that estimate, when it comes to the fourth estate, by the way. Just to mention us gasbags in the media, of course, the tribe to which you used to belong. Another would-be check on the powers.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  I'm now in the stratosphere of gasbags, man, come on. I'm graduating.

• 48:54Pablo Torre?

  You know what? You're so right. You're so right. You're an inner circle, inner sanctum gasbag, Senator.

• 49:16Pablo Torre?

  I'd just like to imagine you as a guy who has so many takes on sports that you are hoping to get off on a sports-adjacent show like mine. So many takes, by the way, that I presume you want to get off in the halls of Congress. In various capacities, I imagine you'd love nothing more than to talk about Cooper Flag. And meanwhile, all I can think about, listening to you give us a helpful civics lesson, is that I used to consider, I grew up considering, without question, the United States as a fundamentally great organization. And now I do worry that we are the Washington Wizards.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Or the pre, the Dan Snyder Washington Football Team.

• 49:59Pablo Torre?

  You know, maybe. The better metaphor is the team owned by a guy who ran a building that had literal sewage spilling out of the pipes on occasion, as the aforementioned football team had.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  And to go back to what I've said 100 times, it's dangerous, and it's dangerous for everybody.

• 50:19Pablo Torre?

  Senator Angus King, what I'm hearing you say is that, much like the man you put at the center of your syllabus, you would like everybody in the halls of power, in the Senate, to just do their job.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  That's absolutely right. I was just writing something last night, and I went through this long thing about the role of the Congress, and believe it or not, my last job was, my last sentence was, you know, just do our jobs.

• 50:46Pablo Torre?

  Bill Balashevich, I seldom quote him when it comes to constitutional crises, but with you today, Senator, I find myself doing a lot, including, including, reflect upon how I often think of my show as a, as a way, as an excuse to melt some cheese on vegetables for people, to get them nourishment, but to put it inside of this, this delicious casing. And what I realize is that sometimes, you just gotta go to the vegetables themselves.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Well, now, listen, I do want to make a little news here by announcing that if they pick up an edge rusher in free agency, the Washington commanders are going to be in the Super Bowl next year.

• 51:31Pablo Torre?

  Oh, God. Get them out of here. Can we get the senator? I'm reclaiming my time, Senator. I'm reclaiming my podcast. The Mick Jagger of senators. It's been a pleasure.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  Pablo, what a pleasure. Great to talk to you. Look forward to getting together again.

• 51:49Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

• 52:26Speaker 04

  Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.

• 52:32Pablo Torre?

  Love the crown molding.

• 52:34Speaker 04

  Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.

• 52:37Pablo Torre?

  Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet?

• 52:41Speaker 04

  No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.

• 52:45Pablo Torre?

  No FiOS? Yeah, no, thank you.

• 52:48Speaker 04

  Don't try to see the rest. Okay. Bye-bye.

• 52:51Speaker 05

  Get Verizon FiOS, because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.

• 52:54Pablo Torre?

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