Ben Sasse Doesn’t Have the Answers
We’re desperate for solutions, but Senator Sasse has had five years to stand up and fight for reform — or even moderation — and he hasn’t.
Senator Sasse takes great pains to position himself as a reasonable conservative, but his record tells a different story. The stern titles of the two books he’s written during his senate term: The Vanishing American Adult (2017) and Them: Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal (2018) perpetuate this steady, fair-minded persona. His most recent Wall Street Journal op-ed seeks to build on this baseless curated image; one of a team player acting in good faith to reach across the aisle and govern effectively.
His op-ed, “Make the Senate Great Again” proposes solutions to congressional dysfunction by dodging clear evidence of Republican malfeasance and rewrites recent history by ignoring the historic obstructionism by his own party’s leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, laying the blame at the feet of institutions and reiterating the tiresome fallacy of “both-sideism.” His op-ed seems less like a call to action and more like a cynical attempt to whitewash a feeble record of abject cowardice over these last four years.
There are three reasons Senator Sasse’s proposals should be received with extreme skepticism.
First, his most important proposals stand to make the problems he identifies (and those he fails to address) much worse.
Second, Senator Sasse is a Silent Republican in the Trump Era, and such enabling of Trumpian chaos and folly has not earned him the public’s trust. He cannot now expect the public to assume his proposals are brought in good faith.
Third, his overtures appear targeted at positioning himself to wriggle from under the opprobrium that is his due as a Silent Republican in the Trump Era. Such wriggling ought to be called out, not magicked into something less sinister.
His most important proposals stand to make the problems he identifies (and those he fails to address) much worse.
Let’s begin where we agree. True enough, the Founding Fathers would be “stunned by the deformed structure of our government” and the “the Senate’s culture needs dramatic change aimed at promoting debate.” It’s hard not to take a moment here to stare into the void and wonder how Senator Sasse typed both those sentiments and then distributed blame to “both sides,” but more on that later.
Abolishing the standing committees seems sensible, and sure, senators should show up in person for the People’s work (as long as we’re not in a pandemic). These are reasonable requirements for elected officials tasked with operating in a solemn deliberative body doing critical work for the county. Even Senator Sasse’s suggestion that senators should “live, eat, and meet in dormitories when the Senate is in session” is an intriguing idea, provided it includes some major caveats for parents of school age children. As long as we’re talking about a dormitory for all serving senators and not just an “Alpha House,” this might be something to explore.
One can also see good sense in Senator Sasse’s proposals to require consistency around a genuine budget, and establish a “super committee” to review regulatory laws from the past 80 years. History suggests Republicans use the deficit as an excuse to nix social programs when in the minority, but in majority they blast through the debt ceiling to bail out irresponsible lenders, banks, corporations, and then whenever they feel like it (tax cuts for the wealthy in 2017), and whenever a crisis (like this pandemic) arises. So really, creating some sort of consistency within which Congress operates with regards to a budget would be welcome. Just don’t make it a fake thing that you undermine any time you need or want to!
Where Senator Sasse fully loses the plot is in his larger proposals: to cancel re-elections for senators by doubling senatorial terms to 12 years; and to rewind the clock to 1913 and repeal the 17th Amendment, reverting from direct election of senators to legislative appointment by state legislatures. Senator Sasse argues this would keep politics more local (debatable), but at what cost? One shudders at the thought of handing heavily gerrymandered state legislatures the power to appoint senators to double-length terms during which senators would be insulated from accountability. It’s disheartening that a sitting senator who claims to take a hard look at the “political rot” and “think big” presents such an insufficient, problematic suggestion which serves only to entrench the very rot he claims to abhor.
In May 2016 Senator Sasse wrote that the American people “…deserve a Congress that tackles the biggest policy problems facing the nation. And they deserve a president who knows that his or her job is not to ‘reign,’ but to serve as commander-in-chief and to ‘faithfully execute’ the laws — not to claim imperial powers to rewrite them with his pen and phone.” Well, we’ve had a president for four years who sees himself as above the law. And reign above it he has, completely unchecked by the Republican controlled senate. Give these Republicans 12 years? What have you (or any of your Republicans colleagues) done in 6 that has earned a doubling of that term? Would your political calculus, courage, and perspective have changed that drastically if given a 12 year term? Where is your evidence of this? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you have none.
12 year senate terms doled out by gerrymandered legislatures is quite possibly the only thing to make me feel more utterly hopeless. Less transparency and less accountability — is this really the medicine you think our ailing, fragile democracy needs right now?
If Senator Sasse were really affixing his gaze upon the senate with an eye toward “thinking big” and facing structural inequities head-on, he would be faced with some inconvenient realities. As Senator Sasse is no doubt aware, the senate is already a massive check on the will of the majority in the US. The six senators from California, Texas, and New York represent the same number of people as do the combined 62 senators from the smallest 31 states. Put another way: 62 senators represent about 25% of the people in the United States. It is precisely this absurd disproportionality in the senate that permits Mitch McConnell to weaponize the gridlock Senator Sasse purports to abhor. To undo this, we must abolish the filibuster, another procedural weapon to which Senator Sasse inadvisably clings. Though he does not see it now, this will end up assisting both parties in moving legislation forward. Further, we must give statehood to Washington DC and Puerto Rico, standing by our founding principle that there be “no taxation without representation” and honoring the long overdue rights these US citizens are at present denied for the simple reason that it is politically inconvenient for Republicans.
A fair-minded self-assessment should lead next to the electoral college, a deeply flawed system first amended in the early 19th century. Now, after the 2000 and 2016 elections failed to represent the will of the majority, its flaws are in even sharper relief and the need for reform is urgent. It’s time we get rid of it. It really should be as simple as this: the candidate with the most votes wins. Not content to await such abolition, however, we must push for more states to join the National Popular vote bill initiative. Nebraska hasn’t passed this initiative yet.
It does not assist Senator Sasse’s case that those who click on his op-ed are first assaulted with an enormous photograph of Mitch McConnell, whose antidemocratic and self-serving strategies (ie: refusing to engage with the nomination of Merrick Garland) are antithetical to the results Senator Sasse purports to seek. Not only is the stack of over 250 bills he refuses to “deliberate over” shocking on its face, it shines as unique in the light of history. As Vox points out, in the 1970s and 80s Congress passed an average of 700–800 bills a year, while in 2019 a mere 105 bills were passed, and many of these were simply extensions to existing funding on items already passed or ceremonial in nature.
Ironically for a Republican, Senator Sasse absolves himself of any personal responsibility, choosing instead to engage in the “both sides” delusion. In the modern American political era, the system has never been more dysfunctional than it has been under Mitch McConnell’s watch, and McConnell has been playing the role of kingpin-speaker for the last five years, entrenching his cynical, Machiavellian politics and most importantly not passing many bills!
In the immortal words of Maya Angelou — when someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. “[T]hink of me as the Grim Reaper,” McConnell said before a crowd of acolytes, “If I’m still the majority leader of the Senate after next year, none of those [progressive] things are going to pass the Senate.” In the face of such self-identification, it strikes one as odd that any senator attempting to seem like a reasonable adult would write an op-ed arguing big reform and breeze past the rotting center of his party, arguing senators should actually be given MORE power, insulated by longer terms, and as appointees of the legislature have even LESS accountability to the people they are supposed to be serving. At least in this hellscape we’re currently in, these senators have to gesture towards the people they serve every 6 years, and it’s up to citizens to take on the yeoman’s work of actually voting.
Second, Senator Sasse is a Silent Republican in the Trump Era, and such enabling of Trumpian chaos and folly has not earned him the public’s trust. He cannot now expect the public to assume his proposals are brought in good faith.
In response to Trump’s endorsement last year, one of Senator Sasse’s staff said: “Ben’s grateful for the president’s kind words…They don’t always see eye to eye, but they’ve built a relationship where they work together when they agree and they wrestle hard when they don’t.” With all due respect, Senator Sasse almost always sees eye to eye on policy and has not “wrestled hard” ever with Trump.The fact that he isn’t a major name in US politics is indicative of his hesitancy to push back on this administration, even tepidly. Senator Sasse represents complicity in a toxic system, not steadfast morality with a clear-eyed vision forward.
I’m just one gal from Seattle screaming and coughing into the smokey clouds here, and I love the big thinking — I wish debates were Lincoln-Douglas style, but Senator Sasse isn’t a credible envoy for his message of “big change.” Thinking big is hard when you’re the party of ‘no.’ Thinking big is hard when you’re the party of Trump. Thinking big means a green new deal, universal basic income, and medicare for all. Thinking big means big bipartisan policies that are humanity driven. Unfortunately, with Trump in office and Mitch McConnell running the show big thinking is dead on arrival. Senator Sasse knows this and hasn’t lifted a finger to change it. He never served as a check on the executive. He never even considered impeachment, as Senator Romney did. He never considered voting against Kavanaugh, as Senator Murkowski did. Never used his voice or vote to oppose Trump’s flagrant corruption, racism, and sheer, fatal incompetence.
Senator Sasse appears to be positioning himself to wriggle out of the long term toxicity of being a Silent Republican During the Trump Era and that is unacceptable.
Too much has come to pass these last four years, and Senator Sasse’s silence has been deafening. He cannot purge the stains of his conscious alignment with Trump. He dodges press and rarely tweets. He hopes to be seen as a deliberate and careful conservative, but this is not possible when you vote with Trump 86% of the time and speak in a whisper on issues that demand booming leadership; family separations, Muslim bans, mass shootings, rising white supremacist hate groups, Russian disinformation campaigns, not to mention Trump’s daily harassment and bullying via Twitter.
There were always choices. And at every turn, Senator Sasse chose the coward’s path. The path that preserved his relative anonymity in this mess. James Baldwin once said “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Patriotism means speaking to defend institutions of democracy and standing up to bullies and strongmen. If, as Gandhi said, the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members, we should be appalled by how far short the US Senate has fallen. Nearly 200,000 US citizens have died from this pandemic the president has admitted to downplaying. Cancerous white supremacy has been minimized, allowed to spread, even tacitly encouraged, so that Proud Boys and Boogaloos boldly march for the same things as the KKK, only without hoods, and more lethally armed. Hurricanes batter the southeast, treacherous fires suffocate the west coast, “once in a lifetime” weather events now happen every year, yet the leader of Senator Sasse’s party goes unchecked in decrying the underlying causes as a hoax.
Big change can’t come fast enough, but we cannot afford to place our trust in the hands of those who were in a position to check Trump and chose not to. Senator Sasse enabled Trump at nearly every turn, aligning with him while trying to preserve a credible legacy. The bare minimum level of resistance to Trump would have earned him enough bipartisan adulation to let him sail through the senate probably for the rest of his life, but Senator Sasse’s record of silence and cowardice undermines his every word now.
I’m all for compromising for the sake of progress, but not with this vanishing American adult. Too little, too late.
