Angus King

 ( 1944 Births ) 

King graduated from Francis C. Hammond High School in Alexandria. He then enrolled at Dartmouth College, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1966. At Dartmouth, King joined the Delta Upsilon social fraternity. He then attended the University of Virginia School of Law, graduating with a Juris Doctor in 1969.

Soon after graduating from law school, King entered private law practice in Brunswick, Maine. He was a staff attorney for Pine Tree Legal Assistance in Skowhegan.

In 1973, when he was 29, King was diagnosed with an aggressive form of melanoma. King has said he believes he survived cancer only because he had health insurance, and has highlighted this experience when explaining his support for the Affordable Care Act.

In 1975, King returned to Maine to practice with Smith, Loyd and King in Brunswick. In 1983, he was appointed vice president of Swift River/Hafslund Company, which developed alternative energy (hydroelectric and biomass) projects in New England.

In 1989, King founded Northeast Energy Management, Inc., a company that developed and operated electrical energy conservation projects. In 1994, he sold the company. As of 2012, King's investments were valued at between $4.8 million and $22.5 million.

The general election was a highly competitive four-way race between King, Collins, Brennan, and Green Party nominee Jonathan Carter. King invested early in television advertising during Maine's unusually early June primary, allowing him to emerge from the primary season on an equal footing with his rivals. He positioned himself as a businessman and a pragmatic environmentalist focused on job creation and education. The Washington Times described King as an idealist who "wants to slash regulations but preserve the environment; hold the line on taxes; impose work and education requirements on welfare recipients; experiment with public school choice and cut at least $60 million from the state budget." His opponents criticized him for flip-flopping. Collins argued King "presents different images, depending on who he is talking to. Angus has been a Democrat his whole life. In my opinion, he became an independent because he didn't think he could beat Joe Brennan in a primary. He's extremely smooth, articulate and bright, but he says different things to different groups." King narrowly won the November 8 election with 35% of the vote to Brennan's 34%, a margin of 7,878 votes. Collins received 23% of the vote and Carter 6%. King won eight counties, Collins five and Brennan three. King's election as an independent was preceded by fellow independent James B. Longley, elected to the same office 20 years earlier.

During his tenure, King was the only U.S. governor unaffiliated with a political party. He was also one of only two governors nationwide not affiliated with either of the two major parties, the other being Jesse Ventura of Minnesota, who was elected in 1998 as a member of the Reform Party. The terms of Connecticut's independent governor Lowell Weicker and Alaska's independent governor Walter J. Hickel both ended when King's began. In his 2004 book Independent Nation, political analyst John Avlon describes all four governors as radical centrist thinkers.Avlon, John (2004). Independent Nation: How the Vital Center Is Changing American Politics. Harmony Books / Random House, pp. 177–93 ("Radical Centrists"). . As governor, King signed legislation requiring that all school employees be fingerprinted and undergo .Alan K. Ota, 113th Congress: Angus King, I-Maine (Senate), CQ Today (November 6, 2012).

King had an approval rating of 75% going into his reelection bid in 1998, Portland Press Herald, March 17, 1998 which he easily won, garnering 59% of the vote and defeating Republican Jim Longley Jr. (the son of the former governor), who took 19%, and Democrat Thomas Connolly, who received 12%. King's 59% was the highest share of the vote a gubernatorial candidate had received since Brennan's 1982 reelection with 62%. Brennan's 1982 victory was also the last time until 1998 that a gubernatorial candidate had won a majority of the vote, and King's 1998 reelection was the last time a Maine gubernatorial candidate received the majority of the vote until 2018.

In 2002, King launched the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) to provide laptops for every public middle-school student in the state, the first initiative of its kind in the nation. It met with considerable resistance due to its cost but was enacted by the Maine Legislature. On September 5, 2002, the state began the program with a four-year $37.2-million contract with Apple Inc. to equip all 7th- and 8th-grade students and teachers in the state with laptops.

During his post-gubernatorial residency in Maine, he lectured at Bowdoin College in Brunswick and Bates College in Lewiston. He was appointed a visiting lecturer at Bowdoin in 2004 and an endowed lecturer at Bates in 2009, teaching courses in American politics and political leadership at both institutions.

In 2007, King and Rob Gardiner, formerly of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network, formed Independence Wind, a wind energy company. In August 2009, Independence Wind along with joint venture partner Wagner Forest Management won Maine DEP approval for construction of a proposed $120-million, 22-turbine, utility-scale wind power project along a prominent mountain ridge in Roxbury, Maine. To avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, King sold his share of the company after entering the 2012 U.S. Senate election. Of the project, King has said, "People who say wind is only an intermittent resource are looking for a one-shot solution. And my experience is that there are rarely silver bullets, but there is often silver buckshot. Wind is an adjunct source of energy. Ten percent, 20% can be very significant".

King's Senate campaign came under scrutiny for posting a heavily edited newspaper profile of him on its website.

On November 6, 2012, King won the Senate race with 53% of the vote, beating Democrat Cynthia Dill and Republican Charlie Summers. The following week, King announced that he would caucus with Senate Democrats, explaining not only that it made more sense to affiliate with the party that had a clear majority, but that he would have been largely excluded from the committee process had he not caucused with a party. King said he had not ruled out caucusing with the Republicans if they took control of the Senate in 2014 United States Senate elections, but when Republicans did win the majority that year, he remained in the Democratic caucus. King remained in the Democratic caucus after the 2016, 2018, and the 2020 elections, the first two of which also resulted in Republican Senate majorities and the last of which produced a 50–50 tie.

King opposed attempts by the U.S. House to cut $40 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program over 10 years, fearing that it "would affect people in a serious way" and drive more people to soup kitchens and food banks. He supported the more modest Senate efforts to save $4 billion over the same period by closing loopholes.

In 2014, King was chosen for the annual tradition of reading George Washington's Farewell Address to the Senate. King endorsed his colleague Susan Collins for reelection in the 2014 U.S. Senate election, calling her a "model Senator". At the same time, he endorsed Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire for reelection. King also endorsed Eliot Cutler for governor in the 2014 election, as he had in 2010, but on October 29, 2014, he switched his endorsement to Democratic nominee Mike Michaud. He also endorsed Democrat Emily Cain for the Maine's second congressional district election and Republican Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee in his reelection campaign.

After Republicans gained the Senate majority in the 2014 election, King announced that he would continue to caucus with the Democrats. He cited his belief that it is good for a state to have a senator from each party, and that it is important to have a senator who caucuses with the same party as the President, saying, "In the end, who I caucus with is less important than who I work with." He added, "It does not mean I have become a Democrat. It does not mean I have made a promise to anybody."

• Committee on Armed Services
• Subcommittee on Airland (2017–present)
• Subcommittee on Personnel (2013–2017)
• Subcommittee on Seapower
• Subcommittee on Strategic Forces (2013–2017; 2019–present) (Chair, 2021–present)
• Committee on Energy and Natural Resources (2015–present)
• Subcommittee on Energy
• Subcommittee on National Parks (Chair, 2021–present)
• Subcommittee on Public Lands, Forests, and Mining (2021–present)
• Subcommittee on Water and Power (2015–2021)
• Select Committee on Intelligence

• Committee on the Budget (2013–2019)

• Afterschool Caucuses
• Congressional Coalition on Adoption
• Congressional Motorcycle Caucus
• Rare Disease Caucus

• Affordable College Textbook Act (S. 1864; 115th Congress)
• In April 2023, it was revealed that Justice Clarence Thomas had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of travel and free gifts from a Republican donor. King and Senator Lisa Murkowski introduced a bipartisan bill intended to force the Supreme Court to establish an ethics code that would require the court to appoint an official to examine public complaints and potential conflicts.

In 2017, King opposed the Republican tax bill, criticizing its passage on a party-line vote without hearings, Transcript: Sen. Angus King, Face the Nation, CBS News (December 3, 2017). saying: "The Bangor City Council would not amend the leash law using this process." King criticized the legislation for adding $1 trillion to the U.S. budget deficit over ten years and sought to return the bill to committee, but his proposal failed on a party-line vote.

In March 2018, King and fellow Maine senator Susan Collins introduced the Northern Border Regional Commission Reauthorization Act, a bill that would bolster the Northern Border Regional Commission (NBRC) and was included in the 2018 United States farm bill. In June 2019, when King and Collins announced the NBRC would award grant funding to the University of Maine, the senators called the funding an investment in Maine's forest economy that would "help those who have relied on this crucial sector for generations" and "bolster efforts by UMaine to open more opportunities in rural communities."

On April 15, 2020, the Trump administration invited King to join a bipartisan task force on the reopening of the economy amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

King is supportive of U.S. manufacturers like Auburn Manufacturing, a Maine company he visited in 2022 to promote domestic manufacturing and speak out against Chinese unfair trade practices.

King and a group of Republican senators led by Bill Cassidy proposed a bill that included raising the Social Security retirement age from 67 to 70. Other policy proposals included tweaking the benefits formula to take into account the number of years a person has worked, and expanding the program's ability to invest in private stocks, rather than the current trust fund model.

King opposes oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on the grounds that the amount of oil is not worth the environmental risk of extracting it. He also believes that new developments in the energy field, such as fracking, should be subject to "all appropriate environmental safeguards to protect the American people and the American land." King opposes the Keystone XL pipeline, saying it "will facilitate the transport of some of the world's dirtiest and most climate-harming oil through our country", and has cast several votes against legislation authorizing its construction. King said he was "frustrated" with President Obama's delay in deciding whether to authorize construction, but that he opposed Congress legislating the approval or disapproval of a construction project.

King has expressed opposition to the creation of a Maine Woods National Park. His 2012 campaign website said that local control is the best way to conserve land, but in 2014, King said he was keeping an open mind about the idea.

King initially expressed "serious reservations" about proposals to establish the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, but expressed support for Obama's creation of the monument in 2016, saying that the administration had made commitments that convinced him that "the benefits of the designation will far outweigh any detriment"; that the monument would not hurt Maine's pulp and paper industry; and that the monument would help diversify the local economy.

King opposes efforts in Maine to ban the baiting and trapping of bears, including an effort to put the question to voters in 2014, calling such practices necessary to prevent interaction between bears and people, and saying the practices are based on science and the views of experts.

In 2017, King and Senator Jim Risch introduced the Securing Energy Infrastructure Act. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved the bill in 2018. The bill creates a pilot program for the federal government to study analog, nondigital, and physical systems that can be incorporated into the power grid to mitigate the potential effects of a cyberattack. The idea for the bill came after a 2015 cyberattack in Ukraine took down a large portion of the country's energy grid. In April 2019 King was one of four senators caucusing with the Democrats who voted with Republicans to confirm David Bernhardt, an oil executive, as Secretary of the Interior Department.

In April 2019, King was one of 12 senators to sign a bipartisan letter to top senators on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development advocating that the Energy Department be granted maximum funding for carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS), arguing that American job growth could be stimulated by investment in capturing carbon emissions and expressing disagreement with President Trump's 2020 budget request to combine the two federal programs that do carbon capture research.

In July 2019, King called climate change "one of the most serious threats to" the United States, saying that two thirds of Arctic ice has disappeared over the past 30 years. A release from King's office stated that he had asserted the vital need for the U.S. to return to the aspirations of the Paris Climate Accord.

King favors the Cuban thaw. He opposes the U.S. embargo against Cuba, calling it an "antiquated" relic of the Cold War; in 2015, King introduced legislation to lift the embargo.

As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, King participated in its probe of Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. King said that the entire committee had "no doubt whatsoever" about the Kremlin's culpability in the meddling and described the cyberattacks as "a frontal assault on our democracy" that could present a long-term threat.

In May 2018, King and fellow Maine senator Susan Collins introduced the PRINT Act, a bill that would halt collections of countervailing duties and anti-dumping duties on Canadian newsprint and require the U.S. Department of Commerce to conduct a study of economic health of printing and publishing industries. Proponents of the bill argued it would offer a lifeline to the publishing industry amid newsprint price increases. Critics accused it of setting "a dangerous precedent for future investigations into allegations of unfair trade practices."

In August 2018, King and 16 other lawmakers urged the Trump administration to impose sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act against Chinese officials responsible for human rights abuses against the Uyghurs Muslim minority in western China's Xinjiang region. They wrote: "The detention of as many as a million or more Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in "political reeducation" centers or camps requires a tough, targeted, and global response."

In November 2018, King joined Senators Chris Coons, Marco Rubio and a bipartisan group of lawmakers in sending the Trump administration a letter raising concerns about the People's Republic of China's undue influence on media outlets and academic institutions in the United States. They wrote: "In American news outlets, Beijing has used financial ties to suppress negative information about the CCP. ... Beijing has also sought to use relationships with American academic institutions and student groups to shape public discourse."

In late 2018, King voted to withdraw U.S. military aid for Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen.

In December 2018, after President Trump announced the withdrawal of American troops from Syria, King was one of six senators to sign a letter expressing concern about the move and their belief "that such action at this time is a premature and costly mistake that not only threatens the safety and security of the United States, but also emboldens ISIS, Bashar al-Assad, Iran, and Russia."

In October 2019, King was one of six senators to sign a bipartisan letter to Trump calling on him to "urge Turkey to end their offensive in and find a way to a peaceful resolution while supporting our Kurdish partners to ensure regional stability" and arguing that to leave Syria without installing protections for American allies would endanger both them and the U.S.

King initially rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Gaza war, but as the war progressed, he became increasingly critical of Israel's conduct. He skipped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to a joint session of Congress in 2024 due to Israel's conduct in the war, and in December 2024 joined 18 other senators mostly from the Democratic Party's progressive wing in voting to block arms sales to Israel due to the number of Palestinian civilians killed in the conflict.

In March 2023, King voted with a bipartisan majority to repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq.

In May 2019, King said he believed U.S. intel on Iran was accurate but that he wanted to know which country was reacting to the actions of the other, adding that he was "gravely concerned because of the possibility of miscalculation, misunderstanding, misreading of some event and all of the sudden you're on the ladder of escalation that could be dangerous for this country and for the Middle East."

After President Trump halted retaliatory air strikes against Iran after Iran downed an American surveillance drone in June 2019, King said he agreed with the decision not to carry out the strikes but expressed concern about Trump's potentially limited options after steps taken by National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. King also questioned the difference in U.S. relations with Iran that year as opposed to any other in the country's history and asserted that it was "a high-stakes gamble" if the U.S.'s pressure on Iran was unsuccessful.

King voted for the Manchin–Toomey amendment to expand background checks for gun purchases.

In 2018, King was a cosponsor of the NICS Denial Notification Act, legislation developed in the aftermath of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that would require federal authorities to inform states within a day after a person failing the National Instant Criminal Background Check System attempted to buy a firearm.

In August 2019, after two mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, King cosponsored the Extreme Risk Protection Order Act, a bill authorizing states to use grants to develop red flag laws which would allow family members to petition courts for an order that would temporarily prevent someone from purchasing a gun and an order for law enforcement to take a firearm away.

In 2022, King voted for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a gun reform bill introduced following a deadly school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The bill enhanced background checks for firearm purchasers under the age of 21, provided funding for school-based mental health services, and partially closed the gun show loophole and boyfriend loophole.

After the 2023 Lewiston shootings, King joined fellow Maine Senator Susan Collins in opposing calls for a national assault weapons ban but supporting bans on functionalities such as high-capacity magazines.