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Floor Speech

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Mr. KING. Mr. President, almost 75 years ago, the junior Senator from Maine rose in this Chamber to deliver a speech from her heart about a crisis then facing our country, a crisis not arising from a foreign adversary but from within, a crisis that threatened the values and ideals at the base of the American experiment.

Senator Margaret Chase Smith's ``Declaration of Conscience'' turned out to be one of the most important speeches of the 20th century and defined her for the ages as a person of extraordinary courage and principle. And here she is with her famous red rose that she always wore on her lapel.

Now, I should admit upfront that I worked for Candidate Bill Hathaway, who defeated her in the election of 1972. But she and I made it up years later when I was producing a documentary on her life for Maine PBS. In fact, as we began the project, I was so worried that she might resent my having worked for her opponent, so I sent her a letter confessing my role in her last campaign.

Her response was pure Margaret Smith:

Dear Angus King, it is perfectly alright with me that you once worked for Mr. Hathaway. Yours sincerely, Margaret Chase Smith.

Simple as that.

In working together on the documentary, she shared some fascinating background on this famous speech, including that she drafted it by hand at her kitchen table in her hometown of Skowhegan, ME, on Memorial Day weekend of 1950.

After returning to Washington a couple of days later, she steeled her resolve and headed to the Senate floor. As luck would have it, when she got to the trolley from the Russell Building, there next to her sat Senator Joe McCarthy, who was the subject of the speech.

``Why are you looking so serious, Margaret,'' he asked her.

``Because I'm on the way to make a speech, Joe, and you're not going to like it.''

She told me that she was so nervous about the speech and the breach that it would make in her relationship to the then-powerful Senator McCarthy--this was the height of the Red Scare in the 1950s, remember-- she told her chief aide, Bill Lewis, who was up in the Press Gallery, not to hand out the copies of the speech until she started speaking on the floor because she was afraid she might lose her nerve. But she went through with it, and the rest is quite literally history.

Here is how Margaret Chase Smith began that speech:

Mr. President, I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear. It is a condition that comes from the lack of effective leadership either in the legislative branch or the executive branch of our government.

Remember, this is Margaret Chase Smith. These are her words, 75 years ago.

She continued:

I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some real soul searching and to weigh our consciences as to the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America and the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges.

Later in the speech, here is one of her conclusions:

It is high time that we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats about elections and started thinking patriotically as Americans about national security based on individual freedom.

I think that is very important, Mr. President.

She said:

It is high time that we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats and started thinking patriotically as Americans about national security based on individual freedom. It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques--techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.

Senator Smith's speech had plenty of criticism for the Democratic administration at the time, but the real focus of her urgent plea to her colleagues was the actions of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom she never mentioned by name in the speech, by the way. But Joseph McCarthy had embarked upon an anticommunist crusade in a manner that threatened the principles of free speech and the rule of law embedded in our values as a nation and in our Constitution. In other words, it wasn't McCarthy's anticommunism she objected to; it was the manner in which he carried it out.

I fear that we are at a similar moment in history. While today's serious national condition is not involving the actions of one of our colleagues, it does involve those of the President of the United States.

Echoing Senator Smith, today's crisis should not be viewed as a partisan issue. This is not about Democrats or Republicans or immigration or tax policy or even the next set of elections. Today's crisis threatens the idea of America and the system of government that has sustained us for more than two centuries.

Again, this is not about the President's agenda, although, yes, I do disagree with most of it; it is about the manner in which he is pursuing it, which includes ignoring the Constitution and the rule of law. And it is this roughshod nonprocess that endangers all of us--all of us--his detractors and his supporters alike.

What is at stake is simple and, in fact, was the driving force behind the basic design of our Constitution: the grave danger to any society of a concentration of power in one set of hands--the concentration of power in one set of hands.

The paradox at the heart of the structure of any democratic government is that power is given to the government to protect and serve the people, but at the same time, the people must be protected from that same power being used against them.

Madison put it clearly in the 51st Federalist:

But what is government itself--

Madison said-- but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men--

And, of course, it would now be men and women over men and women-- the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

A dependence on the people--

He was talking about elections-- is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Precautions that go beyond regular elections. The most important of these ``auxiliary precautions'' is the explicit separation of powers between the Executive and the legislature, which is at the heart--at the heart, at the very heart--of our Constitution, better known as checks and balances.

My fear is this phrase ``checks and balances'' has become such a cliche that we don't recognize it as the fundamental premise of our constitutional system.

There is nothing new, by the way, about the recognition of the danger of concentrated power. The ancient Romans summed it up with a simple question: ``Quis custodiet, ipsos custodes?'' or ``Who will guard the guardians?'' How do we control the government that we have created to keep it from abusing the people?

Another way to define this danger is a universal principle of human nature: All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It is important to emphasize that the danger I am describing here isn't based upon institutional jealousy of Senators worrying about the President taking some of their power or a loss of the prerogatives of the Senate or the politics of Democrats and Republicans. It is about the violation of the very deliberate division of power between the legislature and the Executive, which is, as I said, at the heart of our Constitution. It is there for a reason: to see that the power is not concentrated in one set of hands. And this is the most important bulwark between our citizens and--let's call it what it is--tyranny.

Again, Madison warned us in no uncertain terms, this time in the 47th Federalist:

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

Madison's word, ``tyranny.''

Later in the same essay:

There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person.

``There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person,'' and yet this ``accumulation of all powers''--the term that Madison used--is exactly what is happening today before our very eyes. Although many in this body, unfortunately, seem determined to ignore it, deliberately ignore it, the evidence is everywhere: from the elimination of congressionally established Agencies to the withholding of appropriated funds--an appropriations bill, Mr. President, by the way, is a law; it is not a suggestion to the Executive about where he or she should spend money, it is a law to be observed--to issuing Executive orders purporting to be law in place of legislation, to sidestepping, if not ignoring, court orders.

This President is engaged in the most direct assault on the Constitution in our history, and we in this body, at least thus far, are inert and therefore complicit.

It is worth pausing for a moment to look at the terms of article II, which outlines the powers and responsibilities of the President-- article II of the Constitution. At the outset, we have to remember that the Declaration of Independence was directed specifically at the depredations of the British King, and later, the Framers had recently come through a brutal 8-year war against that same King. It is clear that a monarchy was exactly what the Framers were trying to avoid in the structure of the new government, and it explains the limited powers granted to the President in article II.

So let's look at article II. In light of this antimonarchical intent, article II only gives the President 1\1/2\ unilateral powers. The unilateral power is the power to issue pardons. That is something the President can do without any check or balance. The half unilateral power is the role as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces in wartime, but even that is constrained by the reservation to the Congress of the power to declare war.

With these two exceptions, all the other powers in article II granted to the President--appointment of judges, Federal officials; making treaties with other countries; vetoing legislation--are all bounded in some respect by the requirement of congressional assent.

I want to repeat, article II is not a broad grant of authority to the President. It is anything but. It is a restriction on the powers of the President.

And here, I think, is the most important phrase in article II. The principal responsibility of the President is spelled out in the last paragraph of article II: The Chief Executive ``shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed''--``shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.'' It doesn't say only the laws he agrees with or that he has any power whatsoever to make laws. His job is to execute the laws passed by Congress without exception--a responsibility this President is spectacularly failing to meet, to ``take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.''

While this is the most serious breach of our constitutional order, the administration has also taken a series of apparently unconnected actions which, taken together, spell out our rapid path toward one-man rule--or tyranny, as Madison would say.

In the style of the Declaration of Independence, here is a partial list--only, where the Declaration says ``he,'' it is referring to the King of England. ``He'' as used in my list refers to the President.

Here is the list:

He has enabled the random firing of personnel throughout the government without regard to the importance of the job or the qualifications of the individual, which has severely compromised the ability of the affected Agencies to carry out the purposes Congress intended--the very antithesis of faithfully executing the laws.

He has enabled the dismemberment of Agencies providing essential services to the American people, most particularly in the Social Security and Veterans' Administrations, by people who literally don't know what they are doing--again, in violation of his responsibility to faithfully execute the laws creating those Agencies and programs.

He has systematically--early in the administration--fired independent inspectors general throughout the government whose job it is to find fraud, corruption, and malfeasance in Agency programs, in clear violation of Federal law and apparent intent to govern without constraints.

He has used the power of the government to threaten, intimidate, and extort private law firms for the supposed offense of representing clients he doesn't like--an exercise of governmental power nowhere found in the Constitution and a clear violation of the very structure of our legal system.

He has used the power of the government to threaten and intimidate former government officials based upon actions and statements with which he disagrees, thereby sending the message throughout the government that pleasing the President is more important than telling the truth.

Again, he has no such power over the Constitution, and the result of this abuse of his office is the opposite--the opposite--of faithfully executing the laws.

He has openly threatened media platforms, particularly television networks, with license revocation or other punishment for airing content he doesn't like, in clear violation of the First Amendment, which is one of the fundamental bulwarks of our freedoms. For a President of the United States to threaten a media firm with revocation of their license or other kinds of punishment because they publish content he doesn't like--that is the antithesis of the First Amendment.

By the way, the compromise of the free press has been a sign of incipient despotism throughout history and right up to today.

He has used the power of the government, including the impoundment of congressionally appropriated funds and threatening tax-exempt status, to threaten and intimidate private universities in order to force them to adopt policies to his liking--again, a power found nowhere in the Constitution, nowhere in article II.

He has enabled a national program of arrest and deportation of individuals in this country with no due process whatsoever. And even when it is admitted that at least one such individual was sent to a foreign prison by mistake, he has refused to make any effort to return that person to his home, despite court orders--including a unanimous order of the United States Supreme Court--of him to do so.

This entire process is a violation of the 5th, 6th, 8th, and 14th Amendments. It certainly is not consistent with his obligation to faithfully execute the laws.

He has openly suggested the possibility of sending U.S. citizens to a foreign prison for undefined crimes, thereby placing them outside the reach of our criminal justice system, including the constitutionally guaranteed right to counsel.

He has abused the limited powers delegated to him by Congress in connection with tariffs and trade by declaring emergencies where none exist and singlehandedly plunging our economy into chaos and risk of inflation, unemployment, and possible recession--a perfect example of the dangers of one-man rule.

The Constitution specifically delegates to the Congress, in article I, section 8 clause 3, the power over trade and commerce among nations. Congress delegated that power to the President under certain limited circumstances, that of an emergency, not that the President can define an emergency however he wants.

I live in Maine. We are on the border of Canada. There is no emergency that justifies the imposition of tariffs with Canada. If he wants to propose a tariff against Canada or Britain or any other country, he should come here, because that is our responsibility. We should debate it; and chances are, we can come up with a more rational solution than the one that was presented to the country several weeks ago.

He has also attempted to cut off funds to a single State, my own, because he took personal umbrage at our Governor's refusal to bend to his policy preference, which was inconsistent with the law of our State.

Our Governor's position was not on the issue of trans athletes. It was on the issue of State and local control, which is the basic bedrock of our representative form of government.

Tellingly, during that exchange, he said something really amazing and revealing. The President of the United States said:

We are the law.

That is more fitting to a king than to a President. ``We are the law.''

By the way, an Executive order is not law, despite what this President seems to think. An Executive order is not law. The Constitution does not give the power to the President to unilaterally decide what the law is. Again, his job is to faithfully execute the laws that are made here in this building.

This ``we are the law'' comment is a clear statement of an intent to govern as a sovereign without regard to the Constitution or the rule of law.

In a field that I have some specific knowledge of, he has compromised national security by dismantling those Agencies charged with defending our Nation against the clear and present danger of cyber attacks and firing many of the individuals--with no stated cause--who are best suited to mount that defense.

He has further compromised national security by alienating our allies with his unlawful and indiscriminate imposition of tariffs, which has severely undermined confidence in our country, again, acting far in excess of the limited power over trade delegated by Congress.

I have served for the past 12 years on the Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, and I have come to realize that our asymmetric advantage in the world is allies. China has customers. We have allies. To alienate our allies without good reason, with no emergency, with no consultation with Congress, with no consultation with the Foreign Affairs Committee, with no consultation with much of anybody, that I can tell, is a serious compromise of our national security, both in terms of our intelligence capability but also who will come to our aid in a time of trouble.

This is not a complete list. It does, though, present a disturbing and dangerous pattern. This President is attempting to govern as a monarch, unbound by constitutional restraint or by law, not as a President subject to the constraints of the Constitution or the rule of law.

Again, this isn't about his policies, whether they be mass deportation or trans athletes, trade and tariffs, or the appropriate levels of staffing of the Federal Government. Reasonable people can discuss those, work out policies, and find what the law should be. It is not unilaterally in the hands of the President to make those decisions.

No. The issue before us we can no longer avoid is the manner in which he is pursuing those policies, which violates both the spirit and expressed terms of our founding document.

Again, this isn't about observing the boundaries prescribed by the Constitution just to check the appropriate boxes. This is about preserving boundaries to protect ourselves and our people from the abuse that inevitably--inevitably--flows from the unbridled concentration of power.

To those who like the policies of the President and are, therefore, willing to ignore the constitutional means of effectuating them, I and history can only say: Watch out. Today, the target may be the undocumented or Federal workers, but tomorrow, perhaps, under a different king President, could be you.

Once this power is concentrated into one set of hands, it is going to be very difficult to get it back, and it could turn that power against anybody who displeases the monarch.

So what can we do? What are the guardrails? How can we buttress? It is important. The first guardrail is the Congress itself, the part of our government actually empowered to define policy, appropriate funds, oversee the actions of the Executive. But, unfortunately, the majority in Congress has thus far wholly abdicated these fundamental responsibilities and thus far shown little inclination to even recognize the danger, let alone take action to confront it.

We could reclaim our power, however, by pulling back the trade authority--there is a bill to do that--instituting vigorous oversight of the activities of DOGE to determine to what extent their actions compromise the congressional intent, or holding the President's nominees and his prized tax bill until he seizes his attempts to make policy unilaterally, including compounding Congressionally authorized and appropriated funds.

You know, do our job. That is the simple solution. Do our job.

The second guardrail is the courts, which are generally holding up their end of the constitutional bargain. But they read the press just as we do, and they need to know we are ready to reassume our powers and responsibilities. As easy as it may be for us to rely entirely on the courts to save us, that is a copout. Reclaiming power must be a joint project.

The final guardrail is the people, who more and more are speaking up in rallies, in correspondence with us, in town meetings, and in conversations at the grocery store. But their only real power, the midterm elections, don't happen for 19 months. And in the meantime, the burden falls back on us.

I don't think we have 19 months, given what has happened in the first 100 days. We need to act now before the awesome power of the United States Government is consolidated into one set of hands. When that happens, there may be no going back.

No. We here in this body can't escape the responsibility of our oath. Each of us swore, mind you, to ``support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic'' and that we would ``bear true faith and allegiance to the same.'' The ``same'' being the Constitution.

Clearly, the Framers knew that someday, there might be domestic enemies of the Constitution and made it our literally sacred obligation to defend the Constitution from those domestic enemies.

I should mention that Joe McCarthy primaried Senator Margaret Chase Smith a few years after her speech as punishment to standing up to him, but to no avail. She crushed her opposition and won going away.

With thanks to Margaret Chase Smith for her example and inspiration, this is my ``Declaration of Conscience.''

I don't relish this moment, but I feel I have no choice but to call out the clear implications and dangers of what is happening--what is happening day by day--before our eyes.

To do otherwise, to keep silent, would be to compromise what I believed about our country since my first civics class in high school and at about the same time when I watched my dad risk his career to fight for justice and the rule of law.

So here I stand.

Abraham Lincoln came to the Congress in the midst of the Civil War at a time when our forebearers--like us--were reluctant to face the responsibilities that had been thrust upon them. At that critical moment, this is what Abraham Lincoln said:

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.

``The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.''

Mr. President, I deeply hope that in the midst of our fiery trial, we will choose honor and the Constitution.

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