In his first speech on the Senate floor, in November 2015, Sasse essentially gave a lesson on the Constitutional order and on the abject failure of modern-day Congress to assert its authority against the administrative state and the executive branch. It’s a remarkable speech, given only after he’d spent a year in the chamber and spoken with many of his colleagues to understand what was going on.
No one in this body thinks the Senate is laser-focused on the most pressing issues facing the nation. No one. Some of us lament this fact; some are angered by it; many are resigned to it; some try to dispassionately explain how they think it came to be. But no one disputes it.
As a result, he also said, “The people despise us all.”
The point of the Senate’s long terms, Sasse concluded, is to “shield lawmakers from obsession with short-term popularity to enable us to focus on the biggest long-term challenges our people face.” And the character of the chamber matters, he explained, “precisely because it is meant to insulate us from short-termism . . . from opinion fads and the short-term bickering of 24-hour-news-cycles. The Senate was built to focus on the big stuff. The Senate is to be the antidote to sound-bites.”
Former senator Ben Sasse is battling cancer.
— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) February 20, 2026
Losing him would be one more sign that a certain kind of conservatism—and a certain kind of politics—is disappearing, writes @MikeCosper.https://t.co/5clU0XfODE
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.