I went to visit my senators’ offices in Augusta today.

My goal was to ask their staffers when, if ever, the outrages being committed by the current president would suffice in number and/or hideousness to make them (and Congress generally) exert some meaningful push back. How about his allowing Musk’s DOGE team to run wild through our private information? Selecting thoroughly unqualified Cabinet members and then gutting our essential institutions? Firing thousands of federal employees, for no good reason? Turning the DOJ into his private law firm, dedicated to revenge and retribution? Disgracefully betraying of brave Ukraine? Colluding gleefully with Putin? How about the “president” now calling himself a king?
When will it be enough?

When I entered the Federal Building I learned that Susan Collins’s staff no longer even allows visitors to come up to the office, so I should wait until someone came down to the lobby to hear my concerns. When that person arrived, she was entirely uninterested in anything I had to say. She answered none of my questions, gave me a printed form on which to write them, and scowled at me silently throughout like I was a grotesque freak of nature or something smelly she had stepped in.

The staffer in Angus King’s office was slightly more pleasant but no more helpful or responsive. She never got up from her desk behind the plexiglass barrier that separated us, did not write down (or answer) any of my questions or comments, and although she promised to pass my concerns on to the senator, when I asked her to repeat my concerns back to me, couldn’t articulate a single one.

I was in and out of the building in less than 20 minutes, feeling very much like we are really on our own now.

Elizabeth Leonard

Waterville