To the editor:
On Feb. 6, the Senate gathered to vote on the confirmation of Russell Vought, a key author of project 2025 who believes the powers of the president should be virtually unlimited. During the hearing, Senator Angus King stood before his colleagues and took the opportunity to remind them of the oath they took to uphold the Constitution. King said that, “Right now — literally at this moment — the Constitution 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 document itself.”
He spoke of the framers of the Constitution and noted that they were “deep students of history and human nature. The universal principle of human nature they understood was this: power corrupts absolutely.”
This is why the framers made sure that systems were in place to “guard the guardians.” This is why we have regular elections and divided power between different branches and levels of government. The slow pace of government we like to complain about was put in place for a reason, King said: so that “no one person, no one institution had or could have a monopoly on power. Why? Because it’s dangerous. History and human nature tells us that.”
King went on to say, “We’re experiencing in real time exactly what the framers most feared. When you clear away the smoke, the DOGE, the executive orders, foreign policy pronouncements, more fundamentally what’s happening is the shredding of the constitutional structure itself and we have a profound responsibility…to stop it.”
The preamble to the Constitution begins with “We the People,” not “I the King.” Not “I the Authoritarian.”
Surely all Americans can agree on this: that the foundation of the Constitution’s power comes from the people, not the government.
As King said, “The concerns I’m raising today…it’s (for) the guts of the system designed to protect us from the inevitable, and I mean inevitable, abuse of an authoritarian state.”
Angela Wotton
Hammond
