As Trump grabs power, GOP lawmakers sit on their hands - Marcus WaPo. Bravo Senator King!
Angus King, the independent senator from Maine who caucuses with Democrats, posed this gut-punching query to his Republican colleagues last week as they prepared to vote to confirm Russell Vought, the presidential power extremist Donald Trump tapped for a second tour of duty as the head of the Office of Management and Budget.
King’s question contained unmistakable echoes of Army lawyer Joseph Welch’s challenge to demagogue Joseph McCarthy: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” At one point, King directly channeled Welch, referencing Elon Musk’s boast that he had spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” an action that, as King noted, “will literally take food from the mouths of starving children.”
“Forget red lines,” King’s said. “Do we have no decency?”
(snip)
These days, there are no red lines for any but a few Republicans, and then only the faintest. Not a single one — not King’s fellow Mainer, Sen. Susan Collins, not Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, not the seemingly liberated former majority leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — defected from the party-line vote to confirm Vought.
This about a man who, as King reminded his colleagues, would usurp their most fundamental power, to decide how to spend taxpayers’ money. Who has declared that “we are living in a “post constitutional” time in which a “Radical Constitutionalism” is needed to reassert untrammeled presidential authority. Who is an architect of Project 2025, the plan to reshape federal government and the constitutional order.
(snip)
But King’s speech was less about Vought than about the existential peril to the constitutional order, the system of checks and balances that has protected our democracy for nearly 250 years. The Constitution, King warned, “is under the most direct and consequential assault in our nation’s history. An assault not on a particular provision, but on the essential structure of the Constitution itself.” “So the concern I’m raising today isn’t some academic exercise or manifestation of political jealousy or abstract institutional loyalty. It is the guts of the system designed to protect us from the inevitable — and I mean inevitable — abuse of an authoritarian state.”
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