 Good evening. We're on the air again with another edition of Patience on the Noobs. Tonight, I'm very pleased to say we have a guest who is a return guest, Senator Angus King, who is perhaps one of the most articulate members of the United States Senate and a guy with great insights and analysis, a terrific senator, and he's going to join us in just a few minutes. He's going to join us from Washington. We're zooming him in as he takes a break from his Senate duties and he'll be with us shortly. Before Senator King comes on and we get to ask him about what's going on in Washington, I want to talk briefly about what it looks like from here. I've been reading this book. It's a book by Robert Shogun called The Double Edged Sword, How Character Makes and Ruins Presidents from Washington to Clinton. Bob Shogun, I know Bob Shogun. He was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He's written seven books on the presidency and Shogun's thesis here is that character matters and it really was triggered by Bill Clinton and his character issues. He wrote this book essentially about Clinton but about the presidency and for instance, he talks about the first president and there's some contrast between the first president and the most recent president and he says that character obviously matters. Washington Washington was admired by all his peers. He was a man of great self-discipline and self-confidence and he didn't need to put on a show for anyone because he was so self-confident. I think that's interesting because we have a president now who has no self-confidence, who feels he needs to put on a show, a mask, a costume to demonstrate to people he is what he would like to be. I'm not trying to be pejorative here. I think that's fact and Shogun goes on. He talks about a few other presidents with character problems. I'm going to read just one little piece about Warren Harding. Warren Harding was thought to have a very corrupt administration. Harding died in office and Shogun says, thus the fact that Warren Harding, who led America into the roaring 20s, had a mistress means little by itself but the mistress's revelation made after Harding's death that their relationship reflected Harding's obsessive need for approval and affection. Sound familiar? Reflected Harding's obsessive, obsessive, sound familiar, need for approval and affection. Sound familiar? And that might have served says Shogun as a warning of the scandalous corruption that ultimately engulfed a president who would not separate himself from his crooked friends because he feared being without friends. So he then goes on, of course, to talk a lot about Clinton who he did not admire because of what he said was a defective character. So if a president thinks soldiers who go to war get killed, captured are suckers and losers and a majority of Americans find it difficult to reject that, to criticize him for it. I say a majority, not all Americans, and indeed find it, I guess, tacitly acceptable. Then it becomes an acceptable standard for our country and part of our national values. And I think that's what Shogun is talking about in this book. Well, we're pleased that Senator King has arrived via Zoom. Senator King, how are you? I'm great. Harold, how are you? Or perhaps a better answer would be Jack Benny's answer compared to what? Compared to what? All right. Well, we're delighted to have you here. We want to talk about a variety of things, but I have something on my mind and I'd like you to talk about it for a little bit. You are a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee after, I guess, three years of hearings and investigation. Your committee issued a report on what happened in the 2016 election with respect to the Russians. And there it is. And it says, how many pages is it? This is the fifth volume and this is a thousand pages. And that's the fifth volume. Well, that's an important question and answer because I run into people all the time. I did the other day on the golf course. The guy says, yeah, and nothing happened. It was all a hoax. All this business about Russian interference and trying to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton. It's been proven that that's just a hoax. There was nothing there. It's all thin air. What does that report say? It says completely the opposite. I mean, if you want to boil it down on, I think it was August 2nd, 2016, Harold, Donald Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, met with a guy named Konstantin Klimnik in New York who is a Russian intelligence agent and gave him internal polling data from the Trump campaign. Now, if anybody who's ever run for office knows that polling data is a blueprint for the campaign. It tells you where you're weak, where you're strong, which demographics, who you need to appeal to. They talked about campaign strategy, what were the battleground states. I don't know that there could be a much clearer piece of evidence of the relationship between the campaign and the Russians. Plus, we have just, I mean, I can tell you there's no doubt whatsoever that the Russians played a significant role in the 2016 election. We don't know what votes, if any, they influenced, but they certainly, they were the ones that broke into the Democratic National Committee, stole the emails of the people there, plus John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, and then leaped them through WikiLeaks to the American public over a period of months, including, I thought this was interesting, the day that the access Hollywood tape came out. Remember the one about Donald Trump talking about women and what you could do if you were a celebrity. 32 minutes after that news hit, there was a huge release of John Podesta's emails. So it was clear, it was clearly involved in the campaign. So tell your friend there was no doubt whatsoever that the Russians were involved and that the Trump campaign was aware of what they were doing. So, but you've seen this, you've seen in talk shows, box news, etc. They just say it's a hopes, there's nothing to it. Is there a problem with a national security problem with that conclusion and that selling that notion to the American people? Don't worry about it, nothing happens. Well, of course there is because they're doing it again, and they'll continue to do it, particularly as long as people look the other way. They interfered substantially in our election, and there were a whole bunch of different ways they did it by the way. Part was the hacking and leaking of the emails as I mentioned, but a big part, which really didn't become clear until after the election, and our committee did a whole volume of our report on that, was the use of disinformation, particularly on social media. What they were doing to try to suppress the vote, to try to suppress certain votes in order to help Donald Trump, it started out by the way, as near as we can tell. I mean, we can't know what was in Putin's head, but it started out more as undermining Hillary Clinton. Putin hated Hillary Clinton, and it was to undermine her and to destabilize her if she was elected president. Later, sometime in the spring summer of 2016, they decided that they would move over toward helping Donald Trump, but there's just no question of what they did. We have the first amendment. We are an open society. We have lots of television and news and the internet, and so that makes it vulnerable. This is a Russian playbook. This isn't anything that they invented for us. They've been doing this for years. In fact, they've been doing it in Eastern Europe for decades, and their whole goal is to destabilize the democratic system. They want us to be at each other's throats. They want us to lose faith in our system, and they want us to eventually break off with NATO and withdraw from the world. That's Vladimir Putin's playbook, and he's executed it very well. If people say, well, it was a hoax, it never happened, then that means it's going to continue to happen. The first rule of prevention is knowing what the problem is. Apparently, you don't think that Vladimir Putin is out to help the United States, and he's a friend, do you? I've never seen that in anything he's said or done. You've got to understand, this is a guy, he's a former KGB agent. He's a guy who feels that the breakup of the Soviet Union was a great historical tragedy, and he's trying to do everything he can to exercise power on the world stage, even though their economy is weak and they're really not in a very strong position. This information warfare is relatively cheap. I did a rough calculation one day in an Armed Services Committee meeting that Vladimir Putin can hire 8,000 hackers for the cost of one jet fighter aircraft. This is a very powerful tool that they've used extensively in the past, and they're using it again, and of course, they've taught other people about using it, so now we have to worry about similar kinds of things from other foreign countries. Harold, you know history. If you go back to the founding of this country, to the Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention, our framers were terrified of foreign interference in our politics. They mentioned it specifically. Hamilton mentioned it. I think it was the 51st Federalist. He talked about how dangerous it was. This was, and that's why the emoluments clause is in the Constitution about not accepting gifts from foreign states or princes. Here we are. The bottom line is, American elections should be decided by Americans. I guess a lot of people do care about what you're saying. It's a substantial number. I know many of them. I know many people who could care less about this, who could care less about Vladimir Putin trying to upset the American system, and they don't care. Well, I think Marco Rubio once said this in one of our committee meetings. Putin is not a Republican. Putin is an equal opportunity opportunist, and people don't care about it right now because they feel like it may be, you know, they like Donald Trump and they like what he's doing. They won't like it so much if Putin does the opposite in a future election for a Democratic candidate, and that's the problem. This is a really serious danger to our politics at the presidential level, but also at the U.S. Senate, at the House, governors, we just shouldn't tolerate foreign countries, whoever they are, trying to meddle in our elections. I mean, it's just flat out dangerous. Regardless of which side they're on now, they could be on the other side four years or six years or eight years from now. Yeah, I don't want to be a wise guy on this show, but apparently the Americans tolerate and so does the party in control of the Senate tolerate American presidents actually soliciting help from foreign governments to interfere in our campaigns, and that seems to be okay, even though the framers feared it. Well, again, it's a case of, well, maybe the best example is four years ago, it was a mortal sin to approve a Supreme Court justice in a presidential election year 10 months before the election, and now it's perfectly okay to approve one five weeks before the election. In fact, the final vote it looks like now will be three days before the election. I don't know, Howard, maybe you remember there was an American comedian in the 50s who was a political comedian. He was sort of the 50s version of John Stuart named Mort Saul. You remember, and Mort Saul once said, if you maintain a consistent political opinion in this country long enough, you will eventually be tried for treason. So I'm kind of one of those old-fashioned guys that tries to be consistent, and I was on the radio this morning and they asked me about the Supreme Court thing, and I read them this quote that said, the Supreme Court should not be decided during an election year, the American people should have that decision. And then I said, oh, wait a minute, that wasn't me, that was Mitch McConnell in February of 2016. So suddenly it's all okay. It's, you know, we have the Constitution, we have laws, but we also have sort of expectations and precedents, and those are important too, and that's what's falling by the wayside right now. Well, they, it's true. I did want to note one thing and have you confirm it. These conclusions about Russian interference and helping the Trump campaign and the connection between Manafort, the campaign manager for Trump, and a Russian agent, those are not, yes, you're independent, but those conclusions were reached by a lot of Republicans as well. Your committee was led by Republicans, and they subscribe to this, right? Yeah, our report, and I'll give you some sort of fine distinctions, but our committee is bipartisan, and it is very diverse ideologically. We have Tom Cotton and John Cornyn, and we have Ron Wyden and Diane Feinstein. I mean, that's a pretty good spread in terms of the ideology in the Senate. The first four volumes of the report were essentially unanimous. The last one, the one I just held up, was a voice vote with one dissent. So it's, you can fairly say it's a bipartisan consensus. Now, it's important for me to be honest and say that the fifth volume, which is about the connections between the Trump campaign and the Russians, does not draw conclusions. The earlier volumes have conclusions that, for example, the Russians interfered substantially in the election of 2016. Bipartisan, in fact, unanimous conclusion. The last volume, as you can imagine, it would be hard to get consensus on the conclusion, but what it does, the thousand pages, it just lays out the facts, like what I told you about Manafort, and that was adopted by a voice vote with one dissent. And so that's the finding of a bipartisan committee. Here's what happened. And our job was different than Mueller. It's important. Mueller's job was to look for criminal actions. He's a prosecutor, and he was looking for actions that could be proved as a matter of criminality beyond a reasonable doubt in a court. Our inquiry was what happened. It was more factually based than we weren't looking for whether laws were broken. We were just trying to get to the bottom of what happened, and our investigation was a counter-espionage investigation. We wanted to know how our country was penetrated and how we could protect ourselves in a future election, and so that's the nature. But you're right. Your basic point is this was a bipartisan finding. This whole project was very much bipartisan. And our other senator, Republican Susan Collins, she signed on to these conclusions as well, right? Absolutely. As did Richard Burr. I got to tell you a funny story about Richard Burr early in the process when he and Mark Warner were working together on this and making it a bipartisan inquiry, which really was important. I saw Richard one day outside of the Capitol, and I said, Richard, you're really doing a great job. It's bipartisan. You had this press conference with Mark Warner. The country appreciates what you're doing. As they say in Hamilton, history has its eyes on you. And Richard took one step back and smiled and said, well, Angus, I don't know if you want to quote Hamilton to me since my great-great-grandfather shot it. I don't know if Richard is really a direct descendant of Aaron Burr, but I think there's a family connection. But I felt that part of my job as the independent on the committee was to sort of keep shepherding both sides toward as close to unanimity as we could get because that enhances the credibility of our findings. And the American people needed some reassurance on a bipartisan basis, and our committee has provided that. They sure have provided it. It's one of the few things we can point to in the last four years that was truly so important and bipartisan. Incidentally, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, you hear from a lot of our national security group, and you get to know people. You hear from them regularly. Can you tell us whether there's a great level of concern among the professionals in our national security establishment about the threats to America and to our security from Russian interference of all kinds? Yes. Generally, yes. You can't talk about specifics. I know. But I can say that the new director of national intelligence, which is the position that sort of oversees the whole intelligence community, is a former congressman who is a very, very strong Donald Trump advocate, partisan. And we've had a bit of a scrape in the last month or so where we were expecting regular updates to the Congress and to the American people about what's going on in this election. And he decided in August that there wouldn't be any more. We've now worked through that. In fact, we had a classified briefing with him and many of the intelligence professionals just last week. But the general, I would say it's fair to say that the general conclusion, well, we specifically looked into, one of the whole volume of our report was an analysis of the accuracy of the intelligence community's assessment in January of 2017, that the Russians did it, that Putin knew it, and that they were consciously trying to support Donald Trump. We examined that conclusion in detail, reading all of the background, the classified documents, the raw intelligence, and came to the unanimous conclusion that that was a correct report. That's the opinion of the intelligence community and there's nothing I've seen that changes that. You're an interesting position as an independent, as the guy who was an independent governor of Maine who kind of exudes moderation on either side. What's it like serving in the United States Senate that is so partisan that all that counts is whether you're a Republican or Democrat. They don't think about anything else. Tell us a little bit about that. These are colleagues of yours and you hear them saying things. You know them, you know they're intelligent, you know they're decent people, but because they're Democrats or Republicans, you hear them saying things that you know are not right. Well first, as you know, I caucus with the Democrats. The reason for that is I had this sort of fantasy of going down and putting my chair literally in the aisle between the two sides until I learned that it was through the caucus that you got your committee assignments. So I had to choose and at that time this was 2013. I chose to caucus with the Democrats. The principle, my principle criteria was that they promised Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer essentially guaranteed that they would respect my independence and I can honestly say in four years, for example, with Harry Reid as the majority leader, he only asked me for my vote twice and one time I was going to vote with him anyway and the other time I didn't and that was what was important to me. But to get to your question, here's what really goes on. The place is very partisan institutionally as you suggest. The votes are all pretty much down the line. There are little strays back and forth every now and then but on major issues it's a partisan enterprise. By the way, Harold, one of the reasons people say, well the Senate is a partisan divide, the country has a partisan divide. I mean the Senate in effect represents the strong partisan differences we have in the country. The good news is that it's not as partisan on a personal basis. In other words, we don't hate each other. Every now and then I read stories that say it's a toxic atmosphere. I don't think Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell like each other very much but by and large, I mean it sounds silly but it's a cliche to say some of my best friends but some of my best friends in the Senate are Republicans. James Langford of Oklahoma, very conservative guy, is one of my best friends in the Senate. Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Lisa Mikowski. I work with Marco Rubio, Marco and I just introduced a major bill yesterday together. So it's not as partisan as it seems and the other piece is the partisanship is most intense on the high visibility issues, the Russia investigation, immigration, guns, but a lot gets done that isn't in those high visibility categories on a nonpartisan, bipartisan basis. For example, five weeks ago, six weeks ago, we passed the largest land conservation bill in the last 50 years and the vote in the Senate was 73 to 25. It was completely bipartisan and it passed the House, I don't know, 430 or something and the President signed it. So every now and then bipartisan cooperation breaks out and there's a lot done that sort of doesn't get the publicity because conflict is much more interesting. So I've watched you as governor, now as senator and you, one of the roles that you see for yourself as a political leader is kind of calming people and saying let's talk sense and be rational about things. A lot of people are worried about the upcoming election. They see chaos. This is my comment is of course the President intends that there be chaos. It is his intention. How do you think we're going to get through this? Well, it's no secret that I have disagreed with this President on a lot of issues, but I believe that the worst thing he has done is the sowing of distrust in the election. Our system is based on a fundamental premise of the peaceful transfer of power. I remember my first political science class in college, first government class in college, the professor said what differentiates the United States from most countries throughout history and many countries in the world today is that we've mastered the idea of the peaceful transfer of power. That's in world history, that's very uncommon. And the reason we've mastered it is it's all based upon trust. It's based upon the idea that you work hard for your candidate, but if you don't get enough votes, you accept the results of the election and move on and maybe work hard the next time. This President keeps using terms like rigged. If I don't win, it's rigged. And he did this in 16, but of course he won. That's extremely dangerous in terms of undermining public confidence in the election, particularly because he has these very fervent followers. And if he tells them it's rigged, they're going to believe it's rigged. And then if he doesn't win, what do they do? They're going to be, it's a very dangerous moment. Now, you know, I think the election, I was, I told somebody this morning, what we've got to understand is that the results on election night are the halftime score. We're not going to know the final results of the election till the next day or the couple of days later, because of the huge number of mail-in votes and absentee votes, which traditionally aren't counted till the live votes are counted. That doesn't mean it's fraudulent. That doesn't mean the fix is in or that there's any kind of shenanigans going on. It just means we want to count all the votes. And, you know, in main politics, well, in my own election in 1994, I didn't know whether or not I'd won until the next day because it was very close. And there were a lot of places that didn't get their results in and, you know, until early in the next morning. And, you know, that doesn't mean there's anything wrong. It just means that's the process. So I'm very worried, I'm very worried about this, if I don't win, it's rigged. That's a dangerous thing to say. And it undermines the trust and confidence that people have in our system. And our election system, look, you know, the election system in South Portland or Cape Elizabeth or Portland or Brunswick or Madowasca are local people who do it every year and they're volunteers and they're dedicated to what they're trying to do and to get it right and to count all the votes. So, and besides, there's no evidence of widespread voter fraud in mail-in voting or any other kind of voting. If you recall, the president set up a commission the first year it was elected that was going to, you know, be all about voting fraud. They sort of quietly disbanded and went away because they couldn't find any. I mean, all the data is, it's, you know, it's one vote out of a million or something. I mean, it's just, it just, it's just not something that happened very frequently. And to say it's going to happen on some kind of massive scale, just it doesn't, it's just not true. Well, I agree with you and people say to me, have said in recent days, ah, now the Supreme Court, we're going to have a new Supreme Court justice and she's going to vote with Trump on the question of the election. And I remind them and you're a lawyer and I'm a lawyer. The Trump's problem about election fraud is that he's going to have to have evidence. That's never going to get to the Supreme Court unless there is evidence. And it's unlikely there'll be any evidence to support it. You agree with that? I do, I do agree with that and I think there, there are two past cases that are instructive here. In 60, Nixon lost a very close election to John F. Kennedy and people encouraged him to contest the results. There were questions about voting integrity in parts of the country. And the same thing happened in 2000, which we all remember in Al Gore and George W. Bush's campaign. Gore, there were court cases that went to the U.S. Supreme Court. There were still opportunities for Gore to protest and to file more appeals and for recounts and stuff. Both Nixon and Gore conceded specifically to save the country from the damage that would be done by a continuing uncertainty about who was elected president. That's patriotism. They were putting the country before themselves, even though both of them could have taken the protest further. They decided not to and I'm afraid that this president doesn't have that in him. Anybody who has been watching the last four years or in fact watching Donald Trump for the last 40 years, because for 40 years he has made an impression on us intentionally, knows that he will not put the country first. He will not do what Nixon did. He will not do what Gore did. They know it. Everybody knows it. If you watch and observe, you can reach these conclusions. Let me add another thing and ask you about this on elections. You cautioned us to be patient that it might take a day or two for us to know the results. You're concerned about that and rightly so. We're accustomed to the networks calling these things early. We get tired around 10 o'clock at night and we're looking at our watches and we say, when can I go to bed and know who won the election? But you're a student of history. Before we had television and even radio, people didn't know who won the election for decades. Of course, yeah. You get reports out of, I'm trying to remember about the Garfield election, but it took a long time to get it. Of course, the Hayes-Tilden election was contested right up to the last minute. Getting the results, we're all in a habit of, you get up in the morning, you go and vote and you settle down in front of the TV and between 8 and 10, you pretty much know who's going to win. That could happen this year, but it's doubtful. The problem scenario is, according to the polls, Donald Trump may well be leading among people who plan to vote in person, whereas Joe Biden's support is more people who will be voting absentee or through the mail. So you could have a situation where at 9 or 10 or 11 at night, Donald Trump's way ahead. And then the later votes come in and his lead starts to diminish, and that will feed this story that somehow it's being stolen from it. And that's not true. It's just different votes are coming in from different parts of the country. Just like I remember in 2010, watching the returns for main state governor, and until around 10 or 11 at night, Elliott Cutler was way ahead. And then the small town started to come in and Paula Page won that election. But if you had looked at the TV at 10 o'clock, you'd say, oh, Elliott Cutler is going to win, he's ahead. But then these small towns came in, but very heavy for Paula Page, and that determined the outcome. Because those towns came in late, didn't mean there was anything wrong with the process. It's just the reality. And that's going to happen this year. But we don't know how it's going to come out. But the danger is that if in fact Biden starts to pick up in the later returns, people will say, look, they're stealing the election. That's just nonsense. If you've been in the Senate for quite a while now, so let me give you this scenario. Trump does not get the most votes when it's all counted. But he says he's not conceding because there's been fraud and it's rigged. And I will not concede. And I don't plan on a transition or anything. Do you think, given this partisanship in the Congress, do you think based on your knowledge of many of the Republicans that there'll be a couple of a few senators who might go to the White House and talk to them and say, look, for the good of the country, you got to stop this? Are there people like that up there? Well, that's a really good question. And of course, that's what exactly what happened in Richard Nixon's case. Barry Goldwater and a few other of the leaders in the Senate and the House went to the White House after hearing the tapes and said, you've got to leave. Your support has evaporated. You will be impeached and probably removed in the Senate. And Nixon resigned. I can't answer that question, Harold. I think it depends upon the circumstances. I just I'm running through people's names in my head. I don't know. This is we're in uncharted territory here. I would point out, though, that it really isn't in the hands of the Senate or the House or the could be in the House, I suppose, under some circumstances or the president. This is a the results of the election will unfold over a series, a couple of days or maybe even a week or more. And then it's up. Then you've got the Electoral College and and those votes will be tallied and then sent to Washington and then they're officially received. There is a danger of, for example, a one of the scenarios is a Republican legislature in Pennsylvania says, well, we think the votes in Pennsylvania were illegitimate. We think there was rampant fraud. And therefore, we the legislature are going to say Trump won under the Constitution. It gives the legislatures of the country or the states actually the decision about how their electors are selected. And traditionally, it's been by popular vote and they abide by the results of the popular vote. That's the scenario I just mentioned is pretty far fetched, but it has been discussed and it actually has been discussed apparently, reportedly by people in the Trump campaign and in Pennsylvania. I was in Washington in the 60s and I worked for President Johnson and I remember in the Johnson presidency that Bill Fulbright, William Fulbright was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from Arkansas, a friend of Johnson's, Frank Church from, I guess, Idaho and Wayne Morse from Oregon decided that, you know, they had to shine the bright light on Johnson's war policies concerned about the Vietnam War. Thought they were Democrats. They thought the Democratic president was going in the wrong direction and they had hearings and it infuriated Johnson that these Democrats had turned on him. It just infuriated. Of course, it was a different time and presidents didn't, you know, yell insults at either reporters or members of Congress because they thought they might need them another time. This is different. This guy insults everybody and doesn't care whether he gets them in the fold at a different time. But that's, I guess, I'm talking about that and Barry Goldwater and the guys going down to see Nixon. At some point, senators of the president's party, if he's way off base, have to caution him. And I just assume, and I'm sure it's a correct assumption, that privately, in the minds of many of those Republican senators, they say, oh, this is awful. We got to do something about this. They are concerned, maybe not out loud. They think it might affect their reelection chances. But somewhere up there in their heads, they're concerned. Would you agree that there are concerns? Well, you're interviewing the wrong guy. You should be interviewing Marco Rubio or John Corden and ask them. But I think there's been a kind of a bargain that, you know, a lot of the agenda that they had of abolishing the ACA and passing tax cuts and those kinds of things, he's and conservative judges on the court, he's done. He's fulfilled their desires, their expectations. And in exchange, there's been a sort of... You don't have to call it a devil's bargain. Yeah, okay. Well, there's also the question of his very strong control over his followers. And, you know, he asked Bob Corker or Jeff Flake about how you... What happens when you cross this guy? The followers are fervent, to say the least. That's an understatement, fervent. And we probably haven't seen anything like this since a Democrat had the same kind of following, Williams, Jennings, Bryan. I mean, people were... It was a religious movement. And with these folks too, there's a religious connotation, almost a cultish aspect to it, as there was with Williams, Jennings, Bryan. So I can see why they're concerned. Anything else that you want to tell our listeners, make a comment to them about what's happening and where we're going? Well, I did want to touch a bit on this Supreme Court nomination and put it in a little context. In American history, there has never been a Supreme Court nomination and confirmation after July 1st of an election year. In American history? In American history. There were four vacancies during that period between July 1st and the election. And in three of them, the president declined to nominate anyone. And in the fourth, there was a nomination which was tabled by the Senate. Prior in the election year itself, going back to the 10 months before the election, there have been 13. So the four I mentioned. So there were nine in the first four or five months of the year in a presidential election year. Every one of those was confirmed except one, Merrick Garland. So that puts it in a context. We're now five weeks before before an election. As I think I mentioned, we're liable to vote literally two or three days before the election when half of America will have already voted. And here's the thing that bothers me the most about this. This candidate who's very smart, apparently very upstanding person, has openly criticized Justice Roberts' opinion in the first ACA case where the court upheld the ACA five to four and Justice Roberts was the swing vote. One week, seven days after the presidential election. The elections on November 3rd, on November 10th is the scheduled argument of the Trump administration and 15th Attorney General's attempt to declare the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. That will be argued before the Supreme Court one week after the election. If this nominee is approved before the election, certainly she'd be sworn in and would sit on that case. And is almost, I mean, from her writings is very, all the indications are would vote to abolish the ACA. That's not academic stuff, Harold. There are over 60,000 people in Maine on expanded Medicaid because of the Affordable Care Act. There are about 75,000 people who have health insurance through the exchanges because of the Affordable Care Act and about half the people of Maine below the age of 65 have preexisting conditions which would have a major impact on their insurability or the cost of their insurance if that protection goes away in the Affordable Care Act. So the effect would be dramatic on millions of people across the country and hundreds of thousands in Maine. So this is, like I say, this is not something academic. This is the week after the election and that's one of the reasons that I think it's against precedent and it's just not good policy. If Mitch McConnell was right in 2016 that we should wait until an election, then, you know, he's right now. And, you know, Lindsey Graham had all these statements about how we won't do it. You can mark my words and use this tape and he's just completely flipped and they're going through all these contortions as to who held the Senate when and all those kinds of things. No, this close to the election, the people's voice should be heard in my view. Just expand a bit on that. If there is, it would appear then, this is me talking, that she will get confirmed. It looks that way. She will be sworn into the court before that case is argued before the Supreme Court on Affordable Care Act. And she will, there is a likelihood based on what she said, I read what she said too, that she will vote to strike it down. And it is her elevation to the court is going to happen, I think, and the Affordable Care Act is very likely to be struck down. And there is nothing that I know of, and you can straighten me out, that the Republicans have done for safety net for these people. They will be without insurance. They won't have no insurance. Yeah, it'll be absolute chaos. And, you know, the President with some fanfare last week signed an executive order saying, the policy of the government to protect preexisting conditions, you know, that means nothing. I mean, you know, there's no legal effect to that. There's no, the President can't pass a law by executive order. It has no effect. It's misrepresenting. And he's been saying for years, we're going to protect preexisting conditions. And as never, he's had five years to come up with some kind of plan, and never has. I'll tell you why he hasn't, because it's hard. This stuff is really hard and complicated. But there's another issue, and I think you touched upon this earlier that bothers me. I think it's 2A of the judicial canon of ethics says that a judge shall avoid the appearance of impropriety. Not impropriety, but the appearance of impropriety. And if a case comes to the Supreme Court involving this election, and involving the President who appointed this person a month before the election, and she doesn't recuse herself, it seems to me that's a clear violation of that canon. And again, the danger is not the particular case. It's undermining confidence in the judiciary. The court doesn't have an army. The court doesn't have the power of the purse. The court only has its credibility. And the reason that the appearance of impropriety is in the judicial canons is because of the recognition of that, that public trust is where the court gets its authority. And if a judge turns around and votes on a case involving the person that appointed them barely a month before, the public will crash their heads and say, well, this was a setup. And the President has said, in fact, one of my colleagues the other day said, we've got to have eight justices. Well, that didn't bother him with Merrick Garland. We only had eight justices for 14 months. And nobody, I remember raising that question and everybody said, oh, no, that's no problem. They can operate. Well, if again, if it was, you know, what they used to say, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If it was okay to go over a year with only eight justices, we can go a couple of months with only eight justices. You know, my impression, I've been kind of on the edge of politics for 50 years. My impression has always been that most Americans are concerned about fairness. That fairness is a major issue and something that informs them in making political decisions. There's nothing fair about what we've been talking about. It is totally unfair. And I'm not sure that matters to a whole lot of people, perhaps a majority. It's interesting you should use that word because the first senator to question this nomination was Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. And she used the word fairness. She said, if it was fair to hold up Merrick Garland's nomination, then it's fair to hold up this one. It wouldn't be fair to let this one go through. That was exactly the way she put it. And really, this is might makes right that, you know, if you got the votes, do it. One of the things that has surprised me down here, Harold, is that people do things on both sides and act surprised when the other side does it back. And it's a downward spiral. And I think that's really important. And it's not good for the institution or for the country. And this is a, you know, as you say, it looks like it's going to go through. There aren't any, I mean, I have constituents who say, why don't you stop it? Well, I can tell you that a lot of really smart people have looked at the procedures and there's really, if you don't have the votes, you can't stop it. By the way, one of the arguments of Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham as well, the Senate in 2016 had just gone to the, two seats had been added for the Republicans. And so the people had spoken, they wanted the Republican Senate. Well, I went back and look, in that senatorial year, that election, 12 million more people voted for Democratic senators than for Republicans. But of course, the way that, you know, it depends on which state and where you are, but it wasn't exactly a mandate, which is what the way it's being characterized today. Well, Senator, this has been illuminating for our audience and a good opportunity for them to hear directly from you on something, you know, we're not in the soundbite business here. We kind of probe and get into the mind of the guest and your mind is a good one and a lively one. And so it makes it for a great program for us. Well, Harold, I'm afraid people will say, well, he's just a Democrat in most clothing. I voted for Republicans. I voted for Republican presidential candidate. And I just try to, fairness is what's motivating me and some level of consistency. And also a concern about how what we do now will echo five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, because that's, we can't just make our decisions on what works in the moment. And so I, you know, I'm just trying to call them as I see them, which is what I've always done. And in this case, I'm worried about the country. And I'm worried about the divisions in our country, which historically, presidents have tried to heal, not exacerbate. And that's, that's what's different right now. And that's what's, that's what's very bothersome about where we are. Instead of trying to bring us together, we have a leader who is, in fact, feeding the divisions. And in a pluralistic democracy, that's dangerous. People have to trust, they have to have confidence. And we have to somehow take a deep breath and realize there's a hell of a lot more that we have in common, and that unites us instead of these various issues that are now dividing us. I wish everyone, this can't happen, but I wish everyone could read a book on American history. I, I've read a lot of history books you have too. But there's one out now that's just a single volume. Unfortunately, it's 800 pages. I read it, but it's called these troops about the United States of America by Jill LePore. And we've had our ups and downs in this country, ebbs and flows, different kinds of characters who have led us or who have attempted to lead us. But none, you know, all of American history, none has ever seen their role as a divider. Some, you know, thought that they, they should divide us and, and just pull us apart. None, in all of American history, it's never happened before. So the question is, can we survive it? In other countries, we have had political leaders who have determined that using fear and resentment, they can divide people and conquer, get control and power. And it's happened many times, as you know, in world history. And I wish people were cognizant of it, but not everybody pays attention to, to history. Well, I'll, I'll suggest another book that's a lot shorter, The Soul of America by John Meacham. It's a wonderful view of American history. And it really goes to the, to the heart of who we are and the struggles that we've had. And it's, I think it's fascinating that in the Constitution, in, in, in the preamble, they don't say to form a perfect union. They say to form a more perfect union, which implies that it's always a work in progress. And that's exactly what we're engaged in right now. That's terrific. And I'm going to get the book on your recommendation, because I read John Meacham's biography of George H.W. Bush. And it was terrific. And if you're, when you read that, you become a fan of George H.W. Bush, because Meacham is a fan of George H.W. Bush. Thank you, Senator, for coming. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Harold. Nice to be with you. Thanks for the time. Bye-bye.