A tradition in the Senate required a newly elected member to wait a year or more before addressing his colleagues on the Senate floor. But that practice has been absent from the Senate for decades—until today.
Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb), elected a year ago today, decided he would first consult his colleagues and former senators extensively about the way the Senate works. Today, having talked at length to more than half of them, including the leaders of both parties, he is set to deliver his initial speech.
Sasse’s theme is that the Senate has strayed from concentrating on big issues. It’s been distracted by the sound-bite culture of today’s news cycle.
Before today’s speech, Sasse told me he had been “thinking about this topic since last spring.” He characterized his speech as “a plea for substance, not a plea for civility.” He said senators might think the speech is too idealistic or too scolding.
“No one in this body thinks that the Senate is laser-focused on the most pressing issues facing the nation,” he says in his prepared remarks today. “No one…No one disputes it. No one is on the verge of coming to the floor to announce…that the Senate is diligently working last year, or this year, or next year, on detailed plans for confronting the greatest challenges facing the nation.”
The Senate, Sasse says, “is built to insulate us from opinion fads and the short-term bickering of the 24-hour-news-cycles. Stated differently: the Senate was built to focus on the big stuff, the really hard, long-term problems. The Senate was built to be the antidote to sound bites.”
What major problems are insufficiently addressed? “I’d put national security at the top of the list,” he said in the interview. Three others: the rising cost of entitlements, the jobs market in the fast-churning economy, and “the crisis in civil engagement.” Civic disengagement, he says in his speech, “is arguably a larger problem today than is polarization. It isn’t so much that regular folks are locked into predictably Republican or Democratic positions on every issue,” he says. “It’s that they are turning away from politics altogether.”
Sasse argues for “a kind of Socratic speech” in which senators “will upgrade their game” through debate with each other. “But bizarrely, we don’t really do this here very much,” he says. “We don’t have many actual debates. This is a body that would be difficult to today describe as ‘the greatest deliberative body in the world’ – something that has often been true historically.”
What the Senate does, Sasse says, is important to national recovery. In fact, he says recovery will not occur “without this special institution. I believe a cultural recovery inside the Senate is a partial prerequisite for national recovery.”
When he arrived in the Senate, he chose to sit at the desk of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), who died in 2003. Moynihan is Sasse’s model senator, a Harvard professor before his Senate terms. Sasse has degrees from Harvard, St. John’s, and Yale (Ph.d).
Moynihan “read social science prolifically, and sought constantly to bring data to bear on the debates in this chamber,” Sasse says in his prepared text. “Like any genuinely curious person, he asked a lot of questions – so you couldn’t automatically know what policy he might ultimately advocate just because he could ask hard questions of everyone. He had the capacity to surprise us.”
At the least, Sasse may surprise his colleagues with his sharp critique of the Senate.
