As President Donald Trump continued on with a defiant joint address to Congress, U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree and many other Democrats got up and left the House chamber.
It was one example of how Democrats sought to protest the Tuesday speech that lasted a record 99 minutes and featured the Republican vowing to keep up his “swift and unrelenting action” that has included new tariffs on Canada and Mexico, an immigration crackdown and a freezing of military aid to Ukraine.
Trump repeated false claims about alleged government abuse and tens of millions of dead people receiving Social Security payments. Democrats protested, including when one member was removed from the chamber and others held signs criticizing billionaire “government efficiency” czar Elon Musk and other actions of the president’s tenure so far.
Pingree, who represents Maine’s 1st District, acknowledged the limits of those protests in a Wednesday interview, saying her party members can’t abandon their work and must inform constituents of Trump’s sweeping cuts while forcing difficult votes, including one next week ahead of a shutdown deadline. Answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How did you view the speech, and why did you leave it? Did you expect to get up and leave at a certain point?
Well, I have skipped his speeches before. Last night, I had a wonderful guest, a farmer from Maine [whose U.S. Department of Agriculture grant funding has been frozen]. I wanted to make sure I got my guest seated in the gallery because he wanted to attend the speech. Along with a lot of my colleagues, we thought there’s a certain amount of, “OK, we’ll show up. It’s part of our job.”
But half an hour into the speech or however long, it was such a campaign rally-type speech. It was so disrespectful of both the members in the room but also of the truth, of the responsibilities of the office. I just thought, “I don’t need to sit here. I can catch up on the speech, and anything that I miss I can read in the transcript or I can watch on TV or hear on the radio.”
So for me, I had enough a little while into it. It was a really terrible speech. I think the most difficult part for many of us who believe in the institutions of government and the Constitution is this president has such flagrant disrespect for what the separation of powers means. He has flagrant disrespect of the truth.
Were you holding any signs or shouting things during the speech?
I didn’t have signs. I didn’t do any shouting. I wore pink and a Ukrainian scarf. I had wanted my colleagues to all wear blue and yellow for Ukraine, because I just thought his disastrous approach to international affairs, his alignment with Russia, should have been in his face.
But whatever, those things are just symbolic. And unfortunately, whether you hold a sign or shout or walk out, none of it is going to have the fundamental impact of stopping him. Maybe it gets under his skin, but we are actively trying to fight in the courts, with legislation and then really informing the public every single day about how this impacts us in Maine, why this is important, because it is a hard message.
We have to make sure that we are constantly letting our constituents know he’s cutting people who tell us what the weather is. He’s taking funding away from farmers, many of whom have already paid the money to do the work that they’re doing to improve their farm and make sure we can buy affordable, local food.
What do you think the Democratic Party needs to do next?
We’re trying to act daily, and it’s a little bit of a three-part strategy. We’re certainly submitting legislation, although we’re in the minority [and House Speaker Mike Johnson] won’t put it on the floor. We’re holding shadow hearings and doing our best to inform the public all day, every day through the press, through videos, through explanations of what’s going on, just to make sure that we have the public working with us, because we need that very much.
We’re working with the courts for signing amicus briefs. We’re providing information to attorneys general and organizations, because when you have a president who’s acting illegally, you have to keep fighting him in the courts, and while he often doesn’t even take seriously the rulings of the courts, each one of these is going to work their way up to the Supreme Court.
When it comes to our floor strategy, we have a few pivotal votes. We had one last week on what was their budget reconciliation proposal that will determine even bigger cuts to come [to] provide tax cuts for the wealthy. March 14 is our next deadline on our appropriations funding bill that will [avoid a partial government shutdown], so we expect to vote next week.
What’s the response to constituents who say Democrats should not cooperate if you think these illegal moves are going to happen and if Republicans aren’t going to stand in his way?
Just to be 100 percent clear, we could stop showing up to work, but because [Republicans] are in the majority, they can continue to operate with or without us.
We come into our offices. We meet all day with our constituents who come into Washington. We’re strategizing with them. We’re looking for every opportunity to fight back on funding. We feel we need to be there for pivotal votes when we can actually attempt to block them, and next week, we might have enough votes to stop them from being able to proceed with the funding bill that they want, which refuses to require the president to [spend the money].
So I think that if we denied our presence, the Republicans would feel even more empowered, and we couldn’t even keep an eye on what they were doing.