One thousand phone calls in the space of a day. That’s how many Rep. Chellie Pingree’s office fielded over a couple of days last week. On a normal day, according to her staff, the call volume tops out at about 50 calls from constituents.

Our opinion section staffers can attest to similar inflation in the letters-to-the-editor inbox and in the number of anxious op-ed submissions that have made their way to our desk in recent days.

Of chief concern to the public is the increasingly heavy-handed involvement of billionaire Elon Musk in the second Trump administration.

“We are just in the middle of a daily, lawless amount of chaos and confusion from an executive branch that is trying to take over the government’s responsibility for funding,” Pingree said last week.

In a rare show of solidarity (intentional or, as is more likely, incidental) the position assumed by each of her three counterparts in D.C. last week didn’t appear to be all that different.

Sen. Susan Collins told reporters that she was “very concerned” about Musk’s access to financial information held by federal agencies and later in the week met with other concerned lawmakers to discuss the degree to which Musk and his team have, in Collins’ own words, “clearly exceeded their authority under the law.”

Rep. Jared Golden, who also reported a spike in concerned phone calls on the subject of Musk, referred to the tech executive as “an unelected weirdo billionaire” who was “stepping on the president’s toes … making decisions without his approval and pursuing his own agenda.”

Sen. King, who has also been outspoken in his criticism of “power seemingly assumed by” Musk’s just-created Department of Governmental Efficiency (by definition, just an advisory body) took aim at the administration’s moves in admirably level remarks on the Senate floor last Thursday.

“Now is the time to establish a red line,” King appealed to his colleagues, “the Constitution itself.”

To read the text of the senator’s principles-laden speech, which contrasts starkly to the recent onslaught of tweets, all-caps outbursts and off-the-cuff ideas, is to feel as though you have traveled back in time.

“The whole idea [of constitutional controls] was to see that no part of the government had, or ever could have, a monopoly on power. And this division of power, as annoying and inefficient as it can be … is an essential feature of the system, not a bug.

“This contrasts with the normal structure of a private business, where authority is purposefully concentrated, allowing swift and sometimes arbitrary action. But a private business does not have the army,” King said pointedly, “and the president is not the CEO of America.”

Earlier in the week, each of the four representatives characterized President Trump’s absurd plan to take over the Gaza Strip — if it can be called a plan — as dangerous and unserious.

Although these rhetorical interventions will not be nearly enough for the most distressed voters, they amount to something. To dismiss any rational calls for order as somehow inadequate would be foolish. Goodness knows it isn’t challenging, in this dizzying day and age, to imagine a group of elected representatives by whom they simply would not be made.