US Senate News:
Source: United States Senator for Maine Angus King
To watch the floor speech, click here
WASHINGTON, D.C.— U.S. Senator Angus King (I-ME) today spoke on the Senate floor to commemorate the 75th anniversary of former U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s (R-ME) ‘Declaration of Conscience’ speech. The speech, delivered on June 1, 1950, would be the defining moment in which a Republican stood up to her own party in defense of American democracy.
More specifically, King called on his colleagues in both parties to remember her legacy and “…stop thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats about elections and start 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.”
More on former U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith can be found here. The original Declaration of Conscience speech transcript can be found here.
The full transcript of Senator King’s floor speech from this afternoon is below.
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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 Twentieth Century and defined her for the ages as a person of extraordinary courage and principle. Here she is with her famous red rose which always wore on her lapel.
Now, I should admit up front that I worked for the candidate Bill Hathaway who defeated Smith in 1972, but Smith 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 the famous speech, including that she drafted it by hand at her kitchen table in her hometown of Skowhegan, Maine over 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 in the trolly 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. “Because I’m on my way to make a speech, Joe, and you’re not going to like it.”
Smith told me that she was so nervous about the speech and the breach it would make in her relationship with Senator McCarthy—this was the height of the Red Scare of the early fifties, remember—that she told her chief aide, Bill Lewis, who was up in the press gallery, not to hand out the copies of the speech to the press 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 these are Margaret Chase Smith’s 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’s very important Mr. President. She said,
“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. 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 of the Democratic Administration of that 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) who had embarked upon an anti-communist 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 anti-communism she objected to, it was the manner in which he carried it out.
Mr. President, I fear that we are at a similar moment in history. And while today’s ‘serious national condition’ is not involving the actions of one of our colleagues, it is involving 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 disagree with most of it), it’s about the manner in which he is pursuing it—which includes ignoring the Constitution and the rule of law—and it’s this roughshod non-process that endangers all of us, his detractors and supporters alike.
What’s at stake is simple and, in fact, was the driving force behind the basic design of our Constitution—the grave danger to any society is 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, 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, 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 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. And the most important of those “auxiliary precautions” is the explicit separation of powers between the executive and the legislature, at the heart of our Constitution better known as checks and balances. My fear is this phrase has become such a cliche that we don’t recognize it as the fundamental premise of our Constitutional system.
There’s nothing new about the recognition of the danger of concentrated power; the ancient Romans summed it up with a question: “Quis custodiet, ipsos custodes?” or “Who will guard the guardians?”
Another way to put this is a universal principle of human nature, “All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
It’s important to emphasize that the danger I am describing isn’t based upon institutional jealousy, a loss of the prerogatives of the Senate, or the politics of Democrats and Republicans; it’s about the violation of the very deliberate division of power between the legislature and the executive which as I said is the heart of the Constitution. It’s there for a reason to see that power is not concentrated in one set of hands. It 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.” And 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” 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 is a law, by the way. It is not a suggestion to the executive about where he or she should spend money, but a law) 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’s worth pausing for a moment to look at the terms of Article II which outlines the powers and responsibilities of the President. At the outset, it must be remembered that the Declaration of Independence was directed specifically at the depredations of the British King, and later, that the Framers had recently come through a brutal eight-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 anti-monarchical intent, Article II only gives the President one-and-half unilateral powers—the power to issue pardons and the role of Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces in wartime, but even this latter is constrained by the reservation to the Congress of the power to declare war.
With these two exceptions, all the other powers granted to the President—appointment of judges and 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’s a restriction on the powers of the president.
And here is the most important phrase in Article II. The principal responsibility of the President, however, is spelled out explicitly in Article II—the chief executive “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
It doesn’t say that only the laws he agrees with, or that he has any power whatsoever to make laws; his job is simply 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.
And 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’s a partial list, only where the Declaration says “he” it’s referring to the King as the King of England; “he” as used in my list, however, refers to the President:
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; 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 under the Constitution, and the result of this abuse of his office is 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, 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 forms of punishment for content he doesn’t like, that’s the antithesis of the First Amendment. The compromise of the free press has been a sign of incipient despotism throughout history—right up to the present day;
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 an unanimous order of the United States Supreme Court—that he do so; this entire process is a violation of the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments and certainly isn’t 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 single-handedly 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 VII, Clause III, 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 a 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, Britain, or any other country, he should come here because that’s our responsibility. We should debate it and chances are we would come up with a more rational solution than the one the made several weeks ago;
He has 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. The basic bedrock of our representative form of government.
Tellingly, during that exchange, he said, “We are the law,” a statement more suitable to a king and one which is wholly inconsistent with our form of government. By the way, Mr. President, an Executive Order is not law despite what the President seems to think. 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 special 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 those individuals—with no stated cause—who are best suited to mount such a 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. Mr. President, I have served for the past 12 years on Intelligence and Armed Services, 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 anybody as far as I can tell, is a serious compromise of our national security, both in terms of our intelligence capabilities, but also who will come our aid in a time of trouble
Mr. President, this is not a complete list, but it does present a disturbing and dangerous pattern—that this President is attempting to govern as a monarch, unbound by law or Constitutional restraint, not as a President subject to the constraints of the Constitution and the rule of law.
Again, this not about his policies—whether they be mass deportations or trans athletes, trade and tariffs, or the appropriate levels of staffing in the federal government—no, the issue before us—and we can no longer avoid it—is the manner in which he is pursuing those policies which violates both the spirit and the express terms of our founding document.
And again, this is not about observing the boundaries prescribed by the Constitution just to check the appropriate boxes; this is about observing those 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 unconstitutional 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), it could be you.
Once this power is concentrated into one set of hands, it’s going to be very difficult to get it back and it can turn that power against anybody who displeases the monarch. So what can we do? What are the guardrails and how can we buttress and support them?
The first guardrail is the Congress itself, the part of our government actually empowered to define policy, appropriate funds, and oversee the actions of the executive. But unfortunately, the majority in Congress has thus far wholly abdicated these fundamental responsibilities and, thus far, has 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’s a bill to do that), instituting vigorous oversight of the activities of DOGE to determine to what extent their actions compromise congressional intent, or holding the President’s nominees and his prized tax bill until he ceases his attempts to make policy unilaterally, including impounding congressionally authorized and appropriated funds.
You know, 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 need to know that 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’s a cop-out; 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 to us.
I don’t think we have 19 months; given what’s 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 can’t escape the responsibility of our oath. Each of us swore, 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 there might someday be “domestic” enemies of the Constitution and made it our sacred obligation to defend the Constitution from them.
(I should mention that Joe McCarthy primaried Senator Smith a few years after her speech as punishment to standing up to him, but to no avail, she cruched her opposition and won going away).
So, with thanks to Margaret Chase Smith for her example and inspiration, this is my ‘Declaration of Conscience.’ I don’t relish this moment, but feel I have no choice but 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 have 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.
And so, here I stand.
Abraham Lincoln came to the Congress in the midst of the Civil War—at a time when our forebears—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.
