Who is Ben Sasse? A lot of people seem to be asking that question these days. The junior senator from Nebraska has been in office just over a year, and even people on Capitol Hill still don’t know who he is. It’s well after 9 p.m. on Super Tuesday, and Sasse is watching the election returns in his office in the Russell Senate Office building when a security guard barges in and asks for his ID. Sasse smiles and amiably says, “I’m the senator,” only to have that explanation met with an awkward silence. It takes the security guard a moment to decide the 44-year-old guy sitting on the floor is telling the truth. Sasse is young enough he doesn’t look like a senator, and he doesn’t exactly put on airs—he frequently makes TV appearances wearing a University of Nebraska warm-up jacket instead of a suit.
Until recently, Sasse’s low profile was deliberate. He didn’t speak on the Senate floor for nearly a year after he was elected so he could observe and generally get a sense of how the institution worked. But it’s unlikely that Sasse is going to enjoy obscurity much longer. When he did finally speak last November, Sasse delivered an impressive stemwinder about the dangers of the growing “administrative state,” that is, the problem of Congress ceding its legislative power to unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch (see Fred Barnes’s “Sasse Finally Speaks,” Nov. 16, 2015). The following month, Sasse delivered another Senate address on the abuse of executive authority. Sasse, a Yale Ph.D. in history and former professor, managed to take abstruse, but nonetheless vital, constitutional issues and make them resonate in plain language. The speeches were met with acclaim from Senate colleagues of both parties.
Following the December 2 terror attack in San Bernardino that killed 14 people, Sasse flew there to deliver a short speech. It was in part a pointed response to President Obama, who had used the terror attack to push gun control and express concern about a backlash against Muslim Americans. On the face of it, a nobody Republican senator’s piggybacking on a national tragedy to criticize a Democratic president should have been a spectacularly ill-advised bit of political theater. But Sasse’s speech was uploaded to YouTube, and once again, his obvious sincerity struck a chord. “We are at war with militant or jihadi Islam, but we are not at war with people who believe in the American creed, which includes the right of everybody of every religion to freely worship and to freely speak and to freely assemble and argue,” he said. “We will win this battle, but we will not win it without reaffirming our core values.”
Since then, Sasse has played many variations on this theme of asking Americans to think deeply about our national values and how they relate to our founding documents. He says he is trying to encourage “cultural catechesis.” The result is that, over the last four months, Ben Sasse has arguably received more uniformly positive media coverage than any other national politician. That’s an especially impressive feat for a socially conservative Republican from a flyover state.
The problem for Sasse is that he’s now in a bit of an awkward transitional phase. People have abruptly moved from asking “Who is Ben Sasse?” to “Who does Ben Sasse think he is?” The proximate cause of this shift is the same person who has disrupted the tenor of every recent political debate: Donald J. Trump.
Excepting the other presidential candidates, Sasse, who currently ranks 99th in seniority in the Senate, is the most prominent Republican officeholder courageous enough to regularly and publicly criticize Trump. As Trump’s political fortunes rose, Sasse was perturbed by Trump’s thoughts on one of the defining issues in Washington. “It’s very possible that he could, even in the midst of his deal-cutting, try to run a crazy executive unilateralist agenda,” Sasse tells The Weekly Standard. “He’s talked about Obama as a model and said he’s ‘paved a new way.’ ” Indeed, in his December speech on abuse of executive power, Sasse was at pains to insist that his opposition to Obama was on constitutional grounds, not partisan ones. The fact that he’s leveling the same critique against the GOP frontrunner would seem to indicate he means business.
But his critique of Trump hasn’t stopped there. Sasse is an especially savvy user of social media, and in January, he went on Twitter to politely but pointedly ask Trump about a host of issues, ranging from Trump’s flip-flops on the Second Amendment to his praise of single-payer health care to his boasts about affairs with married women. After the Twitter barrage, Sasse went to Iowa to campaign—not for any particular candidate, as he made appearances with Rubio, Cruz, and Fiorina, but simply to stump against Trump. Just before Super Tuesday, he circulated a characteristically thoughtful Facebook post urging people to oppose Trump. “Do you believe the beating heart of Mr. Trump’s candidacy has been a defense of the Constitution?” he asked. “Do you believe it’s been an impassioned defense of the First Amendment—or an attack on it?”
Judging by the delegate count so far, Sasse’s arguments aren’t slowing Trump down much. But they are having an impact. When Trump took questions from the press following his victory remarks on Super Tuesday, he was specifically asked about Sasse’s declaration that conservatives shouldn’t vote for Trump if he becomes the nominee. Trump responded with the usual bluster and called Sasse “a loser.”
Sasse, who was sitting in his office on Super Tuesday watching this happen on live TV, listened to Trump’s response intently. But when asked if he had anything to say about Trump’s name-calling, Sasse simply said “No” and went back to signing notes
to constituents.
It’s clear Sasse wants his opposition to Trump to be seen as principled, rather than personal. But if Sasse is going to be the only Republican out on this limb, a comparison of the two men is probably unavoidable. And it’s one that Sasse, who is in many ways almost the anti-Trump, shouldn’t be afraid of.
Trump is an heir to a New York real estate fortune with multiple business bankruptcies and marriages. Sasse is a self-made man from small-town Nebraska who’s succeeded at nearly everything he’s tried, and he’s tried a lot of things. Sasse’s career has seen him engage in three different fields—private equity, government, and academia—to great success. After rising through the ranks in the Bush administration, he became one of the most sought-after health care policy experts in the country, and a college president at age 37, to name just a few highlights.
When Sasse ran for Senate, he went from a virtual nobody, who was actively opposed by both the state and national GOP establishments, to winning every Nebraska county but one in a competitive three-way primary. A father of three, he has been married to only one woman, whom he nursed back to health after she had an unexpected and debilitating stroke at a very young age.
Aside from their respective biographies, politically speaking, the two men are vastly different in that one at least has the capacity to be a transformative political figure and the other is Donald Trump. All of the talk about Trump upsetting the political order centers on his confrontational and vulgar discourse. But will rhetorically giving D.C. the middle finger actually do anything to fix American politics? One of the interesting things about Trumpism is that the supposed revolt against the establishment has had little to no effect on incumbents. Trump has not inspired any high-profile primary challenges to GOP officeholders like those in 2014; Trump may have captured 43 percent of the vote in the Alabama primary, but old bulls such as Alabama senator Richard Shelby are cruising to victory.
And as an idea guy, Trump’s not even third-rate. After Marco Rubio humiliated Trump for repeating one idea for health care reform over and over at the February 25 debate, Trump’s campaign was forced to release a detailed health care plan on his website. The general consensus is that the plan is unoriginal and unserious.
By contrast, underneath Sasse’s Nebraska-nice façade is a guy who’s actively embracing radical ways to blowtorch D.C.’s sclerotic institutions. “The Republican party doesn’t have any identity,” Sasse says. “Trump could attack it because it was rotten. The Republican party leadership isn’t about anything big.”
Sasse, by contrast, does have some big ideas. After idly lamenting how Trump narrowly bested Marco Rubio in Virginia on Super Tuesday, Sasse mutes Fox News and outlines his latest thought experiment: “I’ve been playing with the idea of proposing a constitutional amendment for retention elections. When you have Congress at an 11 percent approval rating, and you have incumbency rates of 90 percent, obviously what that tells you is that there’s no campaign finance reform that’s going to make people vote against their own interest. There should have to be an election, just straight-up, it should simply be a public election—do you want your congressman and senator back or fired?” he says. “A stand-alone yes or no question. It’s 51 percent of the people wanting you back against no one. ‘Throw the bums out’ would win constantly right now. That’d be great. Functionally, it would get you more than term-limits.”
He continues, “What that would really do is not create the radical chaos of all these people losing, it would create all sorts of people running for office with a purpose. They would run for the purposes of solving a big problem like an entitlement crisis by essentially pre-pledging to be in Washington for one term. I think it has the potential to be transformative of the electorate and expand the pool of lay governance.”
But before he can get around to hatching constitutional amendments, Sasse is pretty occupied sounding the alarm about Donald Trump. The following evening, Trump supporters would show up at a speech Sasse was giving to the D.C. GOP and attempt to shout him down.
And there are plenty of Trump supporters in Nebraska who are not happy with their senator. As one prominent Nebraskan recently told Sasse, “We thinking people get what you’re doing, but just as your friend, shut up.”
Sasse insists he feels good about what he’s doing. “I’ve been talking to a lot of Nebraskans, and many people just say, ‘I couldn’t ever vote for that guy, so now what am I going to do?’ And then they ask what I’m going to do,” he says. “I couldn’t conceive of ever voting for him. So why not say it now, if there’s a chance it would make a difference? That’s what leadership is, right?”
Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
