As the effort to protect Americans’ voting rights hit a wall in the U.S. Senate, The New Yorker profiled one of the effort’s biggest Senate champions, Senator Angus King, the Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
I’ve covered King and the rest of Maine’s Congressional delegation for many years for the Portland Press Herald and provided some “from the ground” context as to where King and centrism stand in the Maine political landscape. LePage and Trumpism in the Pine Tree State touched upon too (subject of my recent Politico story.)
Also last night I spoke to King myself about his efforts to generate reform of another vulnerable aspect of our democracy, the Electoral Count Act of 1887, for this story that just posted at the Press Herald. The ambiguously worded act governs Congress’s mostly ceremonial role in counting the Electoral College ballots after each presidential election, the very process targeted by Donald Trump, his Congressional allies, and his violent supporters on January 6, 2021. (Senator Susan Collins, who is leading her own parallel effort on the ECA, declined an interview request.)
Both Senators recalled their personal experiences on January 6th in this story I wrote for the first anniversary of the attack.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.