Independent in Name Only: Maine Senator Consistently Votes Liberal Democratic Party Line

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

That’s because, when Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York says “Jump,” King—like the Democrats he caucuses with, despite being a nominal independent—dutifully asks: “How high?”

As a Maine native, it has long rankled me that the supposedly “independent” King is never called out for his reflexive support of the liberal Democratic Party line while Maine’s other senator, Republican Susan Collins, is willing to deviate from the conservative GOP 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.

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, Republican President Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense. In doing so, Collins sided with all 45 Senate Democrats—along with King and that other independent in name only, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont—in their lockstep opposition to Hegseth.

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

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

On Feb. 4, King voted with all but one Senate Democrat in opposition to Pam Bondi as attorney general. Also on Feb. 4, he voted along with all the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee against former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence.

Unlike Sanders—who’s up-front about the fact that it’s because the Democratic Party isn’t far enough left for his liking to formally align with the Democrats, yet still caucuses with them—there’s no apparent reason for King to tout himself as an independent.

To be fair, King is soft-spoken, not a rhetorical bomb-thrower like Sanders. But like Sanders, 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, for example, King supported then-Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid’s so-called nuclear option, which eliminated the filibuster for most presidential picks for the federal courts in an effort to grease the skids for Democratic then-President Barack Obama’s liberal judicial nominees. That move ultimately boomeranged on King and his Democratic pals when the judicial filibuster was no longer available to them to block Trump’s court picks.

More recently, on Jan. 7, 2021, the day after the Jan. 6 Capitol protests, King suggested that Trump’s Cabinet “should consider” voting to remove him from the presidency under the 25th Amendment. Yet, even in the face of mounting evidence of Biden’s steep cognitive decline, King never invoked the 25th Amendment as a basis to force him out.

King’s purported independence was the subject of a 12-and-a-half-minute puff-piece profile on CBS’ “60 Minutes” three days later on Jan. 10, 2021, in which interviewer Jon Wertheim talked to 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,” King told 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, Collins was the Republican nominee for governor he defeated in 1994, but who he joined in 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 King was, nor for how “independent” he may or may not have been during his eight years as Maine’s top elected official.)

But having just been reelected in November 2024 to a third term as a senator, King, now 80, has been anything but independent since arriving in Washington.

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

In 2017, King opposed 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 Biden’s $1.9 trillion boondoggle American Rescue Plan or in 2022 when voting for the euphemistically named Inflation Reduction Act that squandered $891 billion, mostly on wasteful Green New Deal energy projects, but did little or nothing to reduce inflation.

On Jan. 20, the day Trump took office, King voted against the Laken Riley Act, named for the young Georgia woman slain by an illegal alien. Over 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, 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, King has compiled a 98% pro-Big Labor legislative score from the AFL-CIO, including a perfect 100% in 2023—both of them higher than the average Democratic senator’s score of 95. His Americans for Democratic Action liberal rating for 2023 was 80%, while he drew a scant 5% rating from the American Conservative Union. (Collins’ ratings were 40% and 54%, respectively.)

Maine has had a long 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. Collins replaced Cohen in 1996 when he stepped down, and King replaced 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 a moderate and an independent, scoring a 23% rating from the American Conservative Union and a 40% from the Americans for Democratic Action in 2023.

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

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

That’s not necessary, however, in King’s case, because Schumer doesn’t need to remind him.

Originally published by The Washington Times