Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, took to the Senate floor last week to call on his colleagues to "wake up." In a subsequent interview, King described what he called Trump's "assault on the Constitution — the most serious in the history of the country."
The senator said Democrats cannot simply assume that the courts will rein in Trump. But he also acknowledged that they had relatively few tools to push back as the minority party in both chambers of Congress.
"We're in uncharted territory. There's no playbook for this," King said. "Everybody's trying to figure out what's effective."
The Democrat base is not in a patient mood.