Sen. Angus King: Maine’s independent in name only

OPINION:

Sen. Angus King of Maine bills himself as an “independent,” but his voting record is such that the Federal Trade Commission might want to charge him with false advertising if it could.

When Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, says, “Jump,” Mr. King — like the Democrats he caucuses with despite being a nominal independent — dutifully asks: “How high?”

As a Maine native, I have long been rankled that the supposedly “independent” Mr. King is never called out for his reflexive support of the liberal Democratic Party line while Maine’s other senator, Republican Susan M. Collins, is willing to deviate from the conservative Republican Party line when she thinks it’s warranted, even though she knows it will get her branded in some quarters as a “RINO,” or Republican in name only.

Ms. Collins’ independent streak is born somewhat out of necessity, given that Maine is a purplish-blue state. It was on display as recently as the night of Jan. 24, when she voted against confirming Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s pick for secretary of defense. In doing so, Ms. Collins sided with all 45 Senate Democrats, Mr. King and that other independent in name only, Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont, in their lockstep opposition to Mr. Hegseth.

Ms. Collins was alone among Republican senators in 2021 in voting in favor of all 21 of President Biden’s Cabinet nominees, including underqualified nominees such as Pete Buttigieg for transportation secretary and horrible-in-hindsight Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Mr. King also backed all 21 of Mr. Biden’s Cabinet picks, but on Jan. 24, he voted against Mr. Hegseth and skipped the Jan. 25 vote on Mr. Mayorkas’ successor, Kristi Noem. On Jan. 29, he voted against making Lee Zeldin the Environmental Protection Agency administrator.

Mr. Sanders is upfront that the Democratic Party isn’t far enough left for his liking to formally align with it, yet he still caucuses with Democrats. Mr. King has no apparent reason to tout himself as an independent.

Mr. King is mild-mannered and soft-spoken, not a rhetorical bomb-thrower like Mr. Sanders. But like Mr. Sanders, Mr. King’s voting record makes clear that there’s little about it that’s independent when the liberal ideological rubber hits the road.

Soon after arriving in the Senate in 2013, Mr. King supported Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s so-called nuclear option, which eliminated the filibuster for most presidential picks for the federal courts to grease the skids for President Obama’s liberal judicial nominees. That move boomeranged on Mr. King and his Democratic pals when the judicial filibuster was no longer available to them to block Mr. Trump’s court picks.

On Jan. 7, 2021, the day after the Jan. 6 Capitol protests, Mr. King said Mr. Trump’s Cabinet “should consider” voting to remove him from the presidency under the 25th Amendment. Yet, despite mounting evidence of Mr. Biden’s steep cognitive decline, Mr. King never invoked the 25th Amendment as a basis to force him out.

Mr. King’s purported independence was the subject of a 12½-minute puff-piece profile on CBS’s “60 Minutes” three days later, on Jan. 10, 2021, in which interviewer Jon Wertheim talked to Mr. King “about not being hitched to a party in a time of extreme polarization.”

“I didn’t feel comfortable with the Democrats on the taxation-regulation side,” Mr. King told Mr. Wertheim in recounting his successful 1994 third-party bid for governor of Maine. “I didn’t feel comfortable with the Republicans on the social issues side, on the abortion and those kinds of things, so … I think I’m going to take a path up the middle.”

Ironically, Ms. Collins was the Republican nominee for governor, but he defeated her in 1994. He joined the Senate in 2013, some 10 years after completing his second term as governor. (By 1994, I had long since left Maine, so I can’t attest to what kind of a governor Mr. King was nor how “independent” he may or may not have been during his eight years as Maine’s top elected official.)

Newly reelected to a third term as a senator, Mr. King, now 80, has been anything but independent since arriving in Washington.

As for that “path up the middle”? It quickly took a sharp left turn. According to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com, in the first 24 months of the Biden administration, Mr. King compiled a “Biden score” of 98.5% of “how often [he] votes in line with Biden’s position.”

In 2017, Mr. King opposed Mr. Trump’s signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, contending the measure would add $1 trillion to the national debt over 10 years. Yet he had no such deficit qualms in 2021 when he voted in favor of Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion boondoggle American Rescue Plan or in 2022 about voting for the euphemistically named Inflation Reduction Act, which squandered $891 billion, mainly on wasteful Green New Deal energy projects, but did little or nothing to reduce inflation.

On Jan. 20, the day Mr. Trump took office, Mr. King voted against the Laken Riley Act, named for the young Georgia woman slain by an illegal alien. Over Mr. King’s opposition, it will require the Department of Homeland Security to detain for deportation certain non-U.S. nationals (aka illegals) who have been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting.

Two days later, on Jan. 22, Mr. King voted along with every Senate Democrat to prevent a final vote on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (despite his 2013 opposition to the filibuster).

During his first 12 years in the Senate, Mr. King compiled a 98% pro-Big Labor legislative score from the AFL-CIO, including a perfect 100% in 2023 — higher than the average Democratic senator’s score of 95. His Americans for Democratic Action liberal rating for 2023 was 80% while drawing a scant 5% rating from the American Conservative Union. (Ms. Collins’ ratings were 40% and 54%, respectively.)

Maine has a history of electing political independents and mavericks dating back to at least the mid-1970s. It elected a genuine independent in Jim Longley as governor in 1974 and two maverick Republican centrists to the Senate — Bill Cohen in 1978 and Olympia Snowe in 1995. Ms. Collins replaced Mr. Cohen in 1996 when he stepped down, and Mr. King replaced Ms. Snowe in 2013 after she retired.

Even today, Maine has a Democratic member of the House in its 2nd Congressional District, Rep. Jared Golden, who can actually be said to be somewhat of an independent, scoring a 23% rating from the ACU and a 40% from the ADA in 2023.

Mr. Golden’s independence might be a political necessity since Maine’s CD-2, which encompasses 92% of the state’s land mass, is the second most rural district in the country and has voted for Mr. Trump for president all three times. But it’s still more than can be said of Mr. King, who favors the ideological leanings of the much more liberal southernmost 8% of the state.

Asked by CBS’s Mr. Wertheim on “60 Minutes” what he saw as the primary advantage of having “remained an independent” when he came to Washington, Mr. King said, “It sort of liberates you because you don’t have to do what the party says.”

That’s unnecessary in Mr. King’s case because Mr. Schumer doesn’t need to remind him.

• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.