Ben Sasse and the Path Not Taken

The week of Christmas merriment was tinged with sadness as we learned of Senator Ben Sasse’s advanced cancer diagnosis.  In a lengthy social media post he foretold he was “gonna die”.

And while—God willing—Sasse will be with us for a long time to come, his return to public life seems dubious at best.  His tenure in the United States Senate reflected the voice of reason and integrity in a wavering time.  Imperfect, to be sure, but perhaps perfectly emblematic of the sentiments and sensibilities for those of us who’ve found ourselves in the political wilderness these past many years.  For a time, Sasse was our man-on-the-inside in an era where the Trump-skeptical conservative who nevertheless was still very much a conservative felt politically homeless.

Sasse, of course, left congress nearly three years ago, citing the increasing irrelevance of the Senate and a chance to serve the nation as president of the University of Florida.  And while there are still good men and women serving in nation’s capital, his departure felt like the last gasps of an ill-fated attempt to turn the clocks back to a saner time.  Throughout the political turbulence of this past decade, Sasse had consistently pointed the way in words and deeds to an alternative path.

He waited a year into his first term before delivering his maiden speech on the floor of the Senate.  In the interim, he was studying how the institution worked—listening first rather than rushing in with uninformed remarks.  The American people “despise us all” Sasse concluded.  And while the speech pulled no punches, its aim was reform over retribution.  Politicians stand on their soapboxes every day and denounce the very institutions they serve.  Sasse wanted something more.  He wanted not only to show that the Senate was broken, but that it could be mended by focusing on long-term issues over political personalities and brinksmanship.

Congressional reform has been a growing theme of serious political thinkers for some time.  It didn’t start with Sasse, but his speech came at a particularly precarious time.  November 2015 was still only five months after Trump had descended the golden escalators to announce his campaign for president, and long before it could have ever been guessed the 2016 election would mark the beginning of a hostile takeover of the GOP.  Had the Senate taken Sasse’s warnings seriously and begun the arduous task of long-term reforms there may still have been ample time to transform the upper chamber into an institution that was more resilient to cult-of-personality politics.  Instead, both parties were ill-equipped to handle the storms of demagogic populism.

Sasse tried again during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh to highlight the desperate need for reform.  Today, almost all that is remembered from those tumultuous hearings is the circus surrounding sexual-assault allegations and Kavanaugh’s self-proclaimed penchant for beer.  Many who had grown fed up with the Republican party under Trump found renewed interest in defending the GOP in the face of the Democratic opposition’s antics.  It was embarrassing, unbecoming, made-for-TV drama designed to increase the status of Senators who intended to run for president and—perhaps—knock out Trump’s prized nominee.

Prior to the circus, however, Sasse’s opening remarks in the confirmation process had people talking.  Sasse used his platform not for self-aggrandizement or political posturing, but as a civics lesson to critique how confirmation hearings had become needlessly politicized.  He argued that the Senate’s role of “advice and consent” had given way to treating nominees as political enemies or saviors.  His aim was not the Republican or Democratic parties, but a structure that rewarded social media soundbites over careful consideration of the merits of the nominee.

Americans were increasingly asking the Supreme Court to decide big political fights.  This was wrong.  By constitutional design, big political fights were supposed to be settled through the legislative process, not the courts.  Because so much political power had shifted to the courts and executive branch, every Supreme Court seat now felt existential to both parties—so confirmations had become bitter and theatrical.

But this didn’t have to be.  Invoking the old Schoolhouse Rock civics cartoon, Sasse warned we’d forgotten the basics: Congress writes laws, the president enforces them, the courts interpret them.  This was more than a simplistic, archaic formula developed by our founders.  It was the most effective means of dividing the powers of ruling to bring about public consensus and reduced the vitriol of political theatrics.

That vitriol came to a came to a crescendo on January 6.  In his eerily prophetic social media post one week prior to the Capitol riot, Sasse forewarned us that adults should not “point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government”.  Many of his colleagues were joining the president in rejecting the 2020 election results.  Sasse maintained that none of them actually believed the election was fraudulent, but they thought this was an easy way to side with Trump’s politically powerful base without doing any actual harm.  They were wrong.  Had they listened, the insurrection might very well have lost steam without the nominal backing of some wayward congressmen giving credence to the idea that the scheme had a snowball’s chance in hell of actually overturning the election.

Sasse was one of the few Republican lawmakers who voted to convict Trump after his failed attempt to steal the election.  Again, many of his colleagues might have agreed Trump needed to go but chose the easy route of letting the president finish out his final days in office.  What could go wrong?  Trump would leave the White House in short order and certainly never return.  Why bother going through the arduous task of demonstrating the rule of law actually holds weight and risk upsetting the sizeable portion of the base who had been convinced the election was a stolen?

Reading Sasse’s note on his cancer diagnosis sounds like it was written for a different era.  There’s no vindictiveness here.  No calls for retribution.  No attempts to convince us that he was right or had been wronged.  No platforming or platitudinal posturing about what wonderful accomplishments and achievements he’d unlocked.  His note is profoundly human.  Human in that it reminds us of the obvious: we are all “gonna die”.  Some of us just have a better understanding of how soon it might happen.

There’s no sugar coating it.  We can—and often do—deny it or put it out of mind.  But the reality is inescapable.  “The loss of religion makes real loss more difficult to bear,” wrote Sir Roger Scruton, “hence people begin to flee from loss, to make light of it, or to expel from themselves the feelings that make it inevitable.”  But Sasse’s note does none of these.  He faces the horror and the absurdity of this universal loss and miraculously finds something unexpected: hope.  A hope that only makes sense in light of something anchored and stretching beyond the temporal baseness of political squabbles.  Sasse was not sermonizing; he was clinging to something real in the face of the unknown.

Humanity, hope, and a conviction rooted in something beyond self-aggrandizement are sorely missing from our current politic discourse.  So much so that it’s downright starling when we encounter the alternative.  Sasse points the way to a path not taken.  It’s a difficult path, to be sure.  But it leads us out of the sugar-highs of our current political discourse and towards a land of hope.