When Angus King was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012, he had been a former governor for 10 years. It was an unlikely comeback that went like clockwork, renewing ties with voters that had made him the most popular politician in Maine.
I visited King in Washington that spring; he had taken to Capitol life like a duck to water, and was clearly energized. We got the full tour – the still awe-inspiring citizen experience that will be rare until we’ve emerged from the lockdown in force since Jan. 6.
But King was also incensed by events that had just occurred during his first months in office.
It began when Barack Obama was re-elected, much to the consternation of Republicans, who believed even after the polls closed that Mitt Romney had won. There were two major bipartisan bills that, by agreement, were cleared for debate without the filibuster being employed.
One was a firearms bill to buttress fearfully weak federal laws; the previous December, 20 second graders had been massacred in a Newtown, Conn. classroom – a then-unthinkable event. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat with close ties to the NRA, co-sponsored.
The other was a comprehensive immigration reform bill co-sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican freshman, former Florida House speaker, and a rising star.
Everything seemed set for a major legislative push to open Obama’s second term. Then it all went wrong.
Enough Republicans switched their votes so both bills failed – the immigration bill after Sen. Ted Cruz, just elected along with King, denounced Republican colleagues for supporting it.
King was incredulous. He couldn’t believe that, after an unprecedented, heart-wrenching misuse of semi-automatic weapons, Congress would do nothing, and hoped there were be another vote.
But there were no more votes, and no significant bipartisan legislation the rest of Obama’s presidency, nor in his successor’s, until the pandemic made obstructive inaction no longer viable. Obama, again like his successor, ended up governing largely by executive order.
Eight years later, Angus King is more accustomed to the ways of Washington, having been re-elected to a second term, likely his last.
When he welcomed Joe Biden as our 46th president, King talked about the American experiment, lasting “nearly a quarter of a millennium,” and how “this lasting success was not preordained.”
And he turned to Abraham Lincoln – not the Lincoln of the Gettysburg Address or the Second Inaugural, pouring balm on the nation’s wounds, but Lincoln the wartime president, who addressed Congress on Dec. 1, 1862, when the war was going badly and many in Union states doubted it was worth it.
“The occasion is piled high with difficulty,” the president said, “and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew.”
The U.S. Senate’s debacle over the Newtown bill was not quite the end of the story. On April 4, 2013, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, now serving as the University of Maine System chancellor, signed comprehensive firearms legislation hours after the Legislature approved it.
Malloy had personally broken the news to parents about what happened at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. After signing, he said, “This is a profoundly emotional day, I think, for everyone in this room and everyone watching . . . We have come together in a way relatively few places in our nation have demonstrated an ability to do.”
The Connecticut law has reduced misuse of firearms, and violent deaths. Yet it applies to only one state.
In 1862, at one of the lowest points for the Union, Lincoln faced the greatest national crisis of all – greater even than the Great Depression and World War II, which tried generations of Americans closer to our own day, because it involved the nation’s very existence.
He left no doubt as to Congress’s own responsibility: “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.”
We have arrived at a similar moment in our own encounter with history. Joe Biden, whatever his abilities, cannot meet the stern tests of the pandemic and the equally worldwide climate crisis, and well as the confrontation with what Martin Luther King called “the race question” that can no longer be avoided.
Congress must act, come what may.
Lincoln’s words can guide us once more. He told the Congress, “In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.”
Douglas Rooks, a Maine editor, reporter, opinion writer and author for 36 years, has published books about George Mitchell, and the Maine Democratic Party. He welcomes comment at drooks@tds.net
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