Ben Sasse Exits the Senate

By John McCormack

Tuesday, January 03, 2023

 

On Ben Sasse’s last full day as a U.S. senator, he mentioned three things when asked what he’s most proud of during his eight-year stint in the upper chamber.

 

First, he said, due to the work of the Senate Intelligence Committee on which he served, “The Senate’s perspective on China has changed Washington D.C., and it’s one of those rare cases where political leadership really has moved the country.”

 

“We are in a relatively much better position to counter the Chinese Communist Party’s expansionist threats, and their technology theft, and their having geared up for a long-term technology race in ways that we hadn’t five or six or seven years ago,” Sasse said in a phone interview with National Review on Monday. He credited the leadership of the previous chairman, Republican Richard Burr of North Carolina, and the current one, Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia, for the shift.

 

Second, Sasse talked about working on the Cyber Solarium Commission, which focuses on defending the country from cyber warfare. Third, he mentioned working on the Senate Judiciary Committee: “I’d be remiss to not mention that I was the founding member of the Amy Coney Barrett for Supreme Court Club back in 2017. And President Trump and I talked on the phone a decent amount, and one of his standard pickup lines was, ‘Is this about that lady from Notre Dame again?’”

 

“I’m very proud as an originalist to see that that project was advanced so much over the eight years,” he said.

 

The man who nominated Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch seems slightly less proud of the work the justices have done on the Supreme Court. Donald Trump has been loath to claim credit for the end of Roe v. Wade, and on New Year’s Day he issued a statement casting blame on pro-lifers for the GOP’s underwhelming midterm performance. (The same Trump statement included a false smear that many Republicans oppose an exception to abortion laws when the life of the mother is in danger; every abortion law in America includes such an exception, but a handful of Trump-backed candidates, including Doug Mastriano and Herschel Walker, did make comments suggesting they opposed any exceptions at all.)

 

Asked about Trump’s Sunday statement, Sasse said that the blame for the GOP’s 2022 performance actually lies with Trump: “There is one single reason — one single human — why our party didn’t pick up seats in the Senate this year, and everybody in America knows who it is regardless of how many deranged press releases he issues on Sunday nights.”

 

“We ran a bunch of yokels this cycle, and that’s a really, really bad idea. We should be running candidates who are Tocquevillian conservatives,” Sasse said. “We definitely need to have a reform of the kinds of candidates we run, and 2022 was a pretty big embarrassment for my party by candidate selection.”

 

Sasse said he’s “not departing because of dissatisfaction with the Senate” — rather, his decision to leave with four years left in his second term is because serving as president of the University of Florida was simply “an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”

 

But when he delivers his farewell address on Tuesday afternoon, Sasse said, he “will talk pretty frankly about why the Senate is so dysfunctional.”

 

“The biggest divide in American life is obviously not really right-versus-left policy preferences,” he said. “The biggest divide in our public and civic life is between pluralists and political zealots or totalitarians. The politically addicted are weird. They’re not representative of America. And yet increasingly, all of Washington, D.C. is captured by the tiny, tiny, tiny little slice of highly online people who presume that other weirdos who put politics at the center of their worldview are normal.”

 

But wait a second. If Congress is increasingly dominated by people pandering to political zealots, why isn’t Sasse staying and fighting against the zealotry in the Senate?

 

“It’s very important for people to serve in public life,” Sasse replied. “But from day one of getting on a campaign bus in the summer of 2013, Nebraskans have understood that I’m not a lifetime politician. I think this is a temporary calling.”

 

“I’m an institution builder, and I need to get back to building stuff. I am optimistic about America, but simultaneously pretty pessimistic about Washington, D.C. Washington is not going to solve the fundamental problems we face,” he said.

 

“One politician isn’t going to solve our problems. One of the dumbest things any politician could ever say is ‘I alone can fix this.’ We’ve heard that kind of bulls*** before. It’s never ever been true. What’s going to have to happen is Americans are going to have to navigate the digital revolution and again affirm a kind of pluralism.”

 

As Sasse sees it, there’s much more good he can do by serving as president of the University of Florida. “The state of Florida is the most economically dynamic place in the union,” he said. “There have been more capital flows to Florida in the last 36 months than to any [place] in human history. And there aren’t a ton of institutions in South Florida where so much of the demand growth is for higher education and health care.”

 

After Sasse leaves the Senate, he has promised the University of Florida that he will refrain from any involvement in partisan politics. “I sought a lot of advice from Mitch Daniels on this question,” Sasse said of the former Indiana governor and current president of Purdue University. While Daniels has stayed out of all political debates, Sasse said that, “I drew a distinction with my board that I will refrain from . . . all partisan politics, so clearly the 2024 Republican primary is included in that partisan politics.”

 

“But this point about pluralists versus political addicts or political zealots, I think, is a far more important question than which person wins the primary or wins an election. And I’m not at all refraining from that,” he added.

 

Certain political questions are bound to land in Sasse’s lap as president of the University of Florida. For example, in November a federal judge struck down portions of a law signed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis and dubbed the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” that would have prevented certain critical-race-theory lessons from being taught at public universities. Sasse said he isn’t familiar enough with the granular details of the legislation to weigh in on it, but he made a general point that, “You need to be exposed to lots of different perspectives. There needs to be intellectual diversity in every debate. That’s what the purpose of higher education is.”

 

“We’re going to build places and a culture that believes in intellectual vigor and debate,” he said.

 

As Sasse departs the Senate, he acknowledged that he’s just one of several GOP senators with similar philosophies or dispositions who have left the institution in the last few years.

 

“A lot of my buddies are leaving,” he said. Republican J. D. Vance, a neo-Trumper, will fill the seat of Ohio senator Rob Portman, who “was the guy that I asked to be my mentor,” said Sasse. “On every macroeconomic issue under the sun, [retiring Pennsylvania senator] Pat Toomey has been my tutor,” and retiring senator “Richard Burr was my favorite chairman during my time in the Senate on the Intel Committee, where I spent the majority of my time.”

 

“A lot of them are leaving, but there are also some people that I’m very hopeful about.” He pointed to Wisconsin GOP congressman Mike Gallagher as his “next of kin in the house” and South Carolina senator Tim Scott as “one of my closest buddies in the institution.” Sasse said he spent a lot of time in the Senate gym lobbying South Dakota senator John Thune to stick around: “John Thune is an honorable man and a serious conservative and obviously has lots of leadership in his future.” Any future leadership race will, of course, be one that Thune will have to win without the vote of Ben Sasse.

 

And Sasse is fine with that. When asked about his biggest regret over the past eight years, he said: “I missed way, way, way too many Little League games. I didn’t adequately think through what a hybrid geography means, where my family came out [to Washington] about four months a year, but eight months a year, I missed all weekday family dinners.” Sasse’s two oldest daughters are now in college, but after a few weeks in Nebraska, Sasse and his wife will be moving to Gainesville with their eleven-year-old son before the former senator starts his new job as university president on February 6.