The Senate was not in session when I arrived at 139 Russell Senate Office Building on Feb. 25. However, due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse remains busy.
When he’s not trying to squeeze in interviews, he’s spending time in a sensitive compartmented information facility (or “SCIF”) as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. There, Sasse receives updates on the goings-on as Vladimir Putin tries to take Ukraine, an independent country the Russian president thinks is part of Russia.
When I asked about the war, Sasse said, “The most important thing is to put it in the context of the last few years. Since 2014, three administrations in a row haven’t been urgent about a problem that was obviously big.” Sasse said Putin’s increasingly hostile actions — such as the annexation of Crimea; shooting down a civilian airliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17; the poisoning of opposition figure and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny; and amassing forces on the border of Ukraine in 2021 — were all harbingers of what was to come. “We should have been arming Ukraine to the teeth in 2016.”
He did say the intelligence community deserves credit for having “taken away any veneer of plausibility” over Putin’s lies about creating a pretext for the invasion. “The idea that Ukraine was a threat to him was always nonsense. This is not a guy who’d be pursuing peace around the world. He’s an asshole, and he wants to kill people. He’s indifferent to human suffering. He’s about his ego and libido and a historical delusion of grandeur. He doesn’t just want a return to the Cold War Soviet Union. He wants an Imperial Russia.”
In addition to arming Ukraine, Sasse says President Joe Biden should request emergency supplemental funding (according to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the Biden administration will ask for $6.4 billion). He also stressed the necessity of sharing tactical intelligence and winning the information battle. Sasse explained, “We should be using surgically targeted sanctions against the oligarchs to make sure that when these guys are getting evicted from their luxury palaces and their yachts, that were fundamentally stolen from the Russian people, it should be televised, so the Russian and global public understand who these thieves are.”
Understanding there is little appetite for getting the U.S. armed forces directly involved in the conflict, as well as the potential for nuclear escalation, Sasse said the United States could take other steps. “We need to buttress all of NATO. We should make sure the Poles understand that U.S. forces are at the ready and getting dispatched along the Polish border.” He went a step further and said the U.S. should apply pressure to our NATO allies. “The Turks should cut off the ability of Russia to bring extra naval support back north. Right now, there doesn’t seem to be enough urgency among many of our allies.”
China is undoubtedly watching unfolding events and the American response closely. On the same day Russia invaded Ukraine, Taiwan’s air force scrambled to warn off nine Chinese aircraft that entered the Taiwan defense zone. China sees Taiwan as its territory and has increased such missions over the last two years. Sasse says any true warning to Xi Jinping starts with naval operations. “We should be making it very clear to Chairman Xi that we regard freedom of naval operations as a nonnegotiable. We should have a larger share of our Navy in the Pacific and navigating the First Island Chain on a regular basis.”
Sasse said the United States has to make clear its support for the Taiwanese people, something he said is more difficult following the “disastrous” withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer. “Xi dispatched his diplomats all over the world to tell people the future of the world is going to involve a U.S.-China conflict and asked, ‘Do you really want to be with the United States when this is how the U.S. treats their allies?’”
Taiwan, to Sasse, represents the “flashpoint of the future.” He continued, “We will have a world post-2030, where either the U.S. republic has seen a resurgence of an understanding of what we stand for: We fight for free trade, open navigation and seaways, human rights, transparent contracts, and the rule of law. Or you’re going to see more surveillance-state, autocratic exports coming out of Beijing, where there is a crackdown on training, the open navigation to seaways, an open internet, etc.”
The senator also said a reckoning is in store for U.S. corporations and the financiers of American tech companies who try to hide their heads in the sand regarding China’s human rights abuses. “Condemning genocide in Xinjiang should be a no-brainer for everybody on Earth. There must be a real conversation of whether or not they want to get on the side of genocide or not. That is a clear issue, but we have not had that conversation in this country.”
On the domestic front, Sasse is also a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. That means he will have a role during the hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Biden’s choice to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court. When asked how he voted when Jackson’s nomination came up for the D.C. Circuit Court, Sasse said he voted “no” on cloture and was not there for the final vote. However, he said he rarely splits cloture with final votes and voted “no” for her confirmation.
How does that figure in his thinking for the Supreme Court? “One of the plenary powers of the presidency is to nominate, and the Senate has the obligation to advise and consent. President Biden doesn’t do a lot of consultation, so it isn’t like he’s asked the advice of Republicans on the Judiciary Committee. White House counsel reached out early when this vacancy occurred, but I think I must take the conversation with her seriously. And we look forward to having her in the office and having an in-person discussion. I will listen to her.” He continued, “But as I’ve said, the three previous vacancies during my time in the Senate, it is essential that any Supreme Court nominee can explain the difference between the responsibilities of Article I and Article II. And so, a potential nominee to a lifetime appointment has to be able to explain why their job is not to be a super-legislator.”
When I asked Sasse about the Republican Party in a post-Trump era, he didn’t resort to the usual rhetoric often sought by the loudest voices. Such are the ones that clamor for the public bashing of the former president as a sufficient means of separating themselves from him. Instead, Sasse began by addressing what he sees as the most significant challenge outside of government: human capital in a disruptive age.
“I think the future of work is an essential problem for a digital revolution society to solve.” As he sees it, the disruption is the end of lifelong work, something he said used to be available to everyone — starting a job somewhere and staying at that one company for 20 to 30 years. Sasse tied that together with societal foundations that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about when he traveled the country: robust institutions and instincts for civil society, such as strong neighborhoods, communities, churches, etc.
That breakdown is evident, according to Sasse: “That is the real story of the opioid epidemic. There are 35-, 40-, and 45-year-old males that don’t have any sense of their identity when their current job ends, and it might end in 36 or 48 months. So, I think human capital is the No. 1 challenge of our time, and the government will not be the primary solver to this problem.”
As for the government, he says the resurgence of involvement at the local level is where people will affect the most change. “If you give the American people a choice between a more powerful Congress or a more powerful mayor, everyone across the political spectrum would overwhelmingly say, ‘Give me a mayor and a transportation board to try to solve some of our problems around housing or regional community.’”
At the federal level, Sasse says the Republican Party should be clear about what it stands for. Because right now (and he said this of the Democratic Party, as well), he described the party as a fully fueled 747 sitting on a runway with an unmanned cockpit, waiting to get hijacked. Part of the problem, he says, is spending too much time catering to the small percentage of the public that is “politically addicted” and not enough time to the 70% of people who aren’t engaged all the time. The danger is that it makes the GOP focus on the short-term rather than doing what is best to sustain a republic.
Sasse says the Republican Party should still center its agenda on the “Reaganist three-legged stool,” with “a robust national security policy, clarity about the fact that the family structure is the fundamental building block of every healthy republic, and economic policy that says entrepreneurship can build things that no central planner could ever conceive.”
Sasse started to wrap up, saying the opportunity is there for the GOP to take the reins in a country that fits the ideological ground he staked out. “I think economically, America is center-right. I think socially and culturally, America is center-right, and I think in terms of wanting a robust national defense, America is center-right.”
However, in closing, he warned about politicians and their constant appeals to the voracious consumers of politics: that when the average person engages, “Most are so turned off by how unimpressive political discourse is that you end up with a burned-over district where only the screaming addicts are left. And that world is not healthy for anybody, including the Republican Party.”
Jay Caruso is managing editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
