Handing Over the Keys: Senator Angus King on Power Grabs, PBS Cuts, and Why Congress Needs a Spine

Sane(ish) with Jo Carducci · The Siren Network

July 17, 202524m 44sExplicit

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Show Notes

Jo sits down with Senator Angus King—Maine’s straight-shooting Independent and connoisseur of constitutional reality checks—for a conversation that blows the lid off Washington’s latest “power of the purse” giveaway. From Congress rolling over on the Rescissions Act (“one more building block in the edifice of authoritarianism”) to the boneheaded crusade against PBS, NPR, and USAID, Senator King calls out the dangerous shift: lawmakers too scared to do their jobs, too eager to hand the President a blank check.

They break down why these budget “rescissions” aren’t about fraud or waste—they’re about ideology and giving the executive free rein to decide what gets funded, what gets axed, and whose voices and lives are on the chopping block. If you want a sanity check on what the Founders actually intended, and why the final line of defense is still us, this is the alarm bell you can’t afford to sleep through.