| | | You, Trump and Musk need to be reminded of the difference between running a government vs running a business. Here is an excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson's post yesterday that quotes extensively from an Angus King speech that reminds people of that difference and the role in the government of the Senate in particular and Congress in general. Hint: their role isn't to rubber stamp the executive branch. Or to allow the executive branch to unilaterally decide which of their spending dictates they will perform. The First Branch is Congress, not the President!
February 7, 2023
source: heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
Senator Angus King (I-ME) took his Republican colleagues to task yesterday for their willingness to overlook the Trump administration’s attack on the U.S. Constitution. King took the floor as the Senate was considering the confirmation of Christian Nationalist Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought, a key author of Project 2025, believes the powers of the president should be virtually unchecked.
King reminded his colleagues that they had taken an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic” and noted that the Framers recognized there could be domestic enemies to the Constitution. “Our oath was not to the Republican Party, not to the Democratic Party, not to Joe Biden, not to Donald Trump,” King said, “but…to defend the Constitution.”
“And…right now—literally at this moment—that Constitution is under the most direct and consequential assault in our nation's history,” King said. “An assault not on a particular provision but on the essential structure of the document itself.”
Why do we have a Constitution, King asked. He read the Preamble and said: “There it is. There's the list—ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” But, he pointed out, there is a paradox: the essence of a government is to give it power, but that power can be abused to hurt the very citizens who granted it. “Who will guard the guardians?” King asked.
The Framers were “deep students of history and…human nature. And they had just won a lengthy and brutal war against the abuses inherent in concentrated governmental power,” King said. “The universal principle of human nature they understood was this: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
How did the Framers answer the question of who will guard the guardians? King explained that they built into our system regular elections to return the control of the government to the people on a regular basis. They also deliberately divided power between the different branches and levels of government.
“This is important,” King said. “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, the whole idea was that no part of the government, no one person, no one institution had or 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,… is an essential feature of the system, not a bug. It's an essential, basic feature of the system, designed to protect our freedoms.”
The system of government “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.”
In the government, “[p]ower is shared, principally between the president and this body, this Congress, both houses…. [T]his herky-jerkiness…this unwieldy structure is the whole idea,... designed to protect us from the…inevitable abuse of an authoritarian state.”
Vought, King said, is “one of the ringleaders of the assault on our Constitution. He believes in a presidency of virtually unlimited powers.” He “espouses the discredited and illegal theory that the president has the power to selectively impound funds appropriated by Congress, thereby rendering the famous power of the purse a nullity.” King said he was “really worried about…the structural implications for our freedom and government of what's happening here…. Project 2025 is nothing less than a blueprint for the shredding of the Constitution and the transition of our country to authoritarian rule. He's the last person who should be put in the job at the heart of the operation of our government.”
“[T]his 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.”
King asked his Republican colleagues to “say no to the undermining and destruction of our constitutional system.” “[A]re there no red lines?” he asked them. “Are there no limits?”
King looked at USAID and said: “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?”
Trump’s “executive order freezing funding…selectively, for programs the administration doesn't like or understand” is, King said, “a fundamental violation of the whole idea of the Constitution, the separation of powers.” King said his “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?”
King turned to “the power seemingly assumed by DOGE to burrow into the Treasury's payment system” as well as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, with “zero oversight.” “Do these people have clearance?” King, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked. “Are the doors closed? Are they going to leave open doors into these? What are the opportunities for our adversaries to hack into the systems?... Remember, there's no transparency or oversight. Access to social security numbers seem 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's data that should be protected with the highest level of security and consideration of Americans' privacy. And we don't know who these people 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. The government of the United States is not a private company. It is fundamentally at odds with how this system is supposed to work.”
“Shouldn't this be an easy red line?” he asked.
“[W]e'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 policy pronouncements, more fundamentally what's happening is the shredding of the constitutional structure itself. And we have a profound responsibility…to stop it.”
King’s appeal to principle and the U.S. Constitution did not convince his Republican colleagues, who confirmed Vought.
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