Sen. Angus King of Maine bills himself as an “independent,” but his voting record is such that if it could, the Federal Trade Commission might want to charge him with false advertising.

That’s because, when Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York says “jump,” King — like the Democrats he caucuses with, despite being a nominal independent — dutifully asks: “How high?”

As a Maine native, it’s long rankled me that the supposedly “independent” King is never called out for his reflexive support of the liberal Democratic Party line, while Maine’s other senator, Republican Susan Collins, is willing to deviate from the conservative GOP party line when she thinks it’s warranted.

Collins’ independent streak is born somewhat out of necessity, given that Maine is a purplish-blue state. It was on display as recently as the night of Jan. 24, when she voted against confirming Pete Hegseth, Republican President Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense. In doing so, Collins sided with all 45 Senate Democrats, along with King and that other independent in name only, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, in their lockstep opposition to Hegseth.

Collins was alone among Republican senators in 2021 in voting in favor of all 21 of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet nominees, including underqualified nominees such as Pete Buttigieg for transportation secretary and horrible-in-hindsight Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

King also backed all 21 of Biden’s Cabinet picks, but on Jan. 24 he voted against Hegseth and skipped the Jan. 25 vote on Mayorkas’ successor, Kristi Noem. On Jan. 29 he voted against making Lee Zeldin the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

More recently, on Feb. 20 King voted with all the Democrats against Kash Patel for FBI director, the day after joining all but one Democrat in opposition to Kelly Loeffler’s appointment to head the Small Business Administration.

On Feb. 13 King voted with all Senate Democrats against making Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the secretary of Health and Human Services. The day before, on Feb. 12, he joined all Senate Democrats in voting against former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to become director of national intelligence.

On Feb. 6 King voted with all the Democrats against Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget. On Feb. 5 he voted with all but two Democrats against Eric Turner to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development. On Feb. 4 he voted with all but one Democrat to approve Pam Bondi as attorney general.

Unlike Sanders — who’s upfront about the fact that it’s because the Democratic Party isn’t far enough left for his liking to formally align with the Democrats yet still caucuses with them — there’s no apparent reason for King to tout himself as an independent.

Soon after arriving in the Senate in 2013, for example, King supported then-Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid’s so-called nuclear option, which eliminated the filibuster for most presidential picks for the federal courts in an effort to grease the skids for Democratic then-President Barack Obama’s liberal judicial nominees.

King’s purported independence was the subject of a 12 ½-minute puff-piece profile on CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Jan. 10, 2021, in which interviewer Jon Wertheim talked to King “about not being hitched to a party in a time of extreme polarization.”

“I didn’t feel comfortable with the Democrats on the taxation-regulation side,” King told Wertheim in recounting his successful 1994 third-party bid for governor of Maine. “I didn’t feel comfortable with the Republicans on the social issues side, on the abortion and those kinds of things, so … ‘I think I’m going to take a path up the middle.’”

But having just been reelected in November to a third term as a senator, King, now 80, has been anything but independent since arriving in Washington.

On Jan. 20, the day Trump took office, King voted against the Laken Riley Act, named for the young Georgia woman slain by an illegal alien. Over King’s opposition, it will require the Department of Homeland Security to detain for deportation certain non-U.S. nationals who have been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting.

Two days later, on Jan. 22, King voted along with every Senate Democrat to prevent a final vote on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (despite his opposition to the filibuster).

During his first 12 years in the Senate, King has compiled a 98% pro-Big Labor legislative score from the AFL-CIO, including a perfect 100% in 2023 — both of them higher than the average Democratic senator’s score of 95. His Americans for Democratic Action liberal rating for 2023 was 80%, while drawing a scant 5% rating from the American Conservative Union.

Maine has had a long history of electing political independents and mavericks, dating back to at least the mid-1970s. It elected a genuine independent in Jim Longley as governor in 1974, and two maverick Republican centrists to the Senate — Bill Cohen in 1978 and Olympia Snowe in 1995.

Asked by CBS’ Wertheim on “60 Minutes” what he saw as the primary advantage of having “remained an independent” when he came to Washington, King said, “It sort of liberates you, because you don’t have to do what the party says.”

But that’s not necessary in King’s case, because Schumer doesn’t need to remind him.

Peter Parisi is a Rumford native now living in Virginia.