Grappling with the Government’s Place in Society with U.S. Senator for Nebraska, Ben Sasse

0:06 when people try to cover Politics as a boxing match and as a horse race it leads us to do and say and feel stupid things about tribe um I want Republicans and Democrats to differ about some policy issues and then set it aside and go have a beer together and break bread together and you know maybe some people are Packers fans and

0:27 some people are Chiefs fans but you wouldn’t need to sort your community based on your political tribal loyalties and right now we have too many folks who think if you’re going to do politics you got to do it as Bloodsport and if you don’t want to do it as Bloodsport then you shouldn’t be involved at all what we need is a lot more regular people to show up and roll their eyes at the

0:48 weirdos in politics we’re pleased to welcome Senator sass as part of our Constitution Day Live program today the senator is not just the senator from Nebraska but also a long time student and teacher of the Constitution and we’re delighted to explore with him his observations and thoughts on the relationship between the branches of

1:09 government as it’s set up in the Constitution Senator could we just start with your description of what is the unique job of your branch well thank you for having me good good to be with you and your students well obviously we are the legislative body the article one body so what we’re supposed to do is write the laws

1:31 um article one and article 3 have different purposes but articles one and two so article one the legislature and article two the executive branch um are supposed to be able to be hired and fired by the American people on a regular basis so in a Democratic Republic uh we’re supposed to be the legislative body that between the Senate

1:51 and the house together uh construct whatever the legal framework is for the United States and uh um the Senate is supposed to be the most deliberative body the house is obviously the popular body hired or fired by the people every 24 months senators are supposed to serve six years which means every time there’s an election only one-third of senators

2:13 are turning over so we’re A continuing body in that every November when there’s an election in January worry when new people are November of an odd number even numbered year in January of an odd numbered year when folks are sworn in two-thirds of us still show back up that next January and continue the conversation um so we’re supposed to be doing uh the legislating we’re supposed to do

2:35 oversight of the executive branch to make sure that it is carrying out the laws uh that have been passed by the Congress um and then we’re supposed to also ratify treaties and confirm folks who work for uh the president in article two that’s a lot uh what does that look like in just a regular day’s calendar for you

2:56 and your your staff how does that go well so first of all we spend you know 80 percent of our work weeks uh in Washington DC and 20 of the work weeks back home I live in Nebraska so I commute almost every week so I’m home on weekends for Husker football and uh Youth Sports and uh driving Uber and driving a garbage truck and detasseling

3:18 corn and doing AG manufacturing and listening to my constituents but in the 80 of the weekdays uh that we’re in DC when the Senate meets the the traditional structure is committees meet in the morning and the full body of the Senate meets in the afternoon so I sit on the intelligence Judiciary finance and budget committees um and those committees unfortunately

3:39 are less and less deliberative over time because I think we’ve made a bad mistake of putting cameras in every room around here uh so what the the public tends to see is a whole bunch of senators at these televised hearings acting like political weirdos and trying to grandstand for a great 10 second sound bite that they hope will go viral and so

4:00 that’s really not what the committee structure is supposed to be doing the Committees are supposed to be a place where you can develop some expertise uh I I happen to sit on four pretty good committees the average Senator sits on three uh committees and that allows you with you know 15 to 20 of your colleagues to develop a little bit of expertise you know I’m coming to you right now having just been at a meeting

4:21 with the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons that’s because sitting on the Judiciary Committee I have some oversight responsibilities for the Department of Justice and one of the sub-agencies under Justice is how do we run all the federal prisons and one of the most important questions that the Bureau of Prisons has is how do we make sure when people are in a Federal Institution prisoners tend to be there

4:41 for on average 10 or 11 years that they can redeem some of that time and when they get released that they don’t immediately recidivate and reoffend and get uh you know re-convicted reincarcerated and so the question is do our work programs inside these Federal institutions work one of my jobs is to think about what the legislative framework is for that but do that by

5:01 oversight with the people who are the the senior managers of the correctional institutions that doesn’t tend to lend itself very well to sound bites and so the Committees are supposed to be deliberative my intelligence committee work tends to work pretty well um but that’s because we’re overseeing the NSA and the CIA and all the work that we do is classified and so we do it in a bunker we do it in a skiff a

5:22 compartmentalized facility where cameras would be illegal you can’t even have uh your cell phone or a smart watch in there and that committee tends to work pretty well because there aren’t cameras but by and large right now the Congress isn’t too productive because you’ve got a lot of people who’d rather be social media Stars uh than than servant leaders trying to do the long-term grinding work

5:43 of getting smart about topics that the American people sent you to do here on a six or twelve year basis on their behalf okay you’ve just alluded to a couple of these things uh changes that have occurred in in the cases you’ve mentioned very recently because of introduction of Technology into the Senate what other ways has the the role and responsibility and kind of practical

6:05 work of the Senate evolved since the founding in its original conception yeah I think there have been two major changes uh over the course of the last century one of them I’ve alluded to which is more immediacy in the media so um a shift from print journalism to to radio and to the rise of TV and now

6:26 viral videos on the internet makes this sense of in a nation of 330 million people the immediacy of if somebody sees an image of a put down or a quip real quickly they think that government should move very very fast and government that moves fast tends to either screw a lot of things up or not actually get anything done because it

6:46 ends up in travel gridlock it would be more uh healthy for the American people to consume more of what used to be print journalism and less of image-centric stuff and then for the Congress to move more slowly but move on a smaller set of more important issues so that the first thing is our media diet is not very healthy and that changed a lot over the

7:08 course of the last century the second biggest thing that’s happened is after the New Deal after the Great Depression we ended up with a much much larger federal government and what that did was it gave a lot of executive power to the president and Congress has gotten weaker over the last century because the presidency has gotten so strong and

7:30 politicians have an incentive to pass the buck to the executive branch which has an army of bureaucrats writing regulated regulations and both parties really love to do this so I think the the thing that from a constitutional standpoint has devolved over the course of the last 240 years for your students thinking here not chiefly about my media

7:51 consumption questions but a little bit more about the relationship among the three branches is the single biggest change is that article one which is supposed to really write the laws and you can’t write a law to speak to every circumstance so you have to think what are the big and important things that should exist at the federal government and how do you allow the rest of

8:12 governance to happen at the state and local level what’s happened is the Congress has started to pass much more generic laws that aren’t really completed and then they punt to the executive branch to write regulations that essentially finish the statute I think the single biggest change is we’re supposed to have a system where we distinguish between legislation which is

8:32 deliberative and administration or the executive branch which is supposed to carry out the laws and increasingly in our tradition now we give the president a lot more power to write a huge bit of what counts as our legal framework for the country and I think that results in a lot less healthy laws a lot less thought out uh legislation and frankly

8:53 way too much tribalism and doomsday Panic around every presidential election you have people constantly saying this is the last election in American history or this is the be-all and end-all and the whole country’s going off a cliff if the bad guy of the other party wins a presidential election our Founders will be totally confused by that kind of speech because they didn’t think that

9:15 the president’s job was kingly even the term also I said I’d pull up but I’ll say one more thing here even the term president is a pretty weird term I mean the term existed before the Philadelphia constitutional convention in 1787 but it was basically not used anywhere the word president as our Founders employed it

9:35 was just a way to create a noun around the term presiding officer they wanted somebody that had a ministerial servant-like role in the executive branch to carry out the laws and they worked really hard not to give kingly powers to a president and so they made up this term president which was supposed to mean like Secretary of the

9:56 federal government the presiding officer the person who makes sure that the laws that the Congress passed get carried out and right now we treat our presidents a lot more like their you know priests or Kings they’re these giant figures and our Founders in George Washington in particular would have been very confused by that because he wanted to make sure there wasn’t any Regal sense that a

10:17 president is all that important you’ve spent some nice time here kind of describing the relationship between the executive and legislative branches of the government in the Senate and in committees that you serve on you also have a very specific relationship to the Judiciary can you describe how that relationship works and

10:38 and what maybe the the strengths and weaknesses of it as it’s currently functioning yeah so um obviously our Judiciary is incredibly important um we talk about the separate but equal branches that are supposed to check and balance one another but kind of like the executive branch Article 2 has gotten stronger as article one the Congress has

11:01 gotten weaker the Judiciary has also gotten more powerful over the course of the last 50 60 70 years and our Founders I think would be confused by that as well and in particular they would be confused by how much protest you see outside the Supreme Court and that flows from a tradition of uh you know you

11:23 could name lots of starting points but between the 1930s and 1970s I think everybody would agree um the Judiciary started to assert a lot more powers that are quasi-legislative powers and that’s really not what the the judge’s job is and I think one of the best ways to think about that as you know if you were explaining it to an eighth grader or a 10 is greater or a

11:44 12th grader is our our Judiciary historically has worn robes precisely as symbolism of the fact that they were cloaking their personal preferences we don’t have Republican judges or Democratic judges our judges don’t stand for re-election um and they don’t they’re not supposed

12:05 to Signal what their policy preferences are some some judge might have strong personal views about you know minimum wage should be much higher than it is minimum wage should be a little higher than it is minimum wage leads to the destruction and erosion of jobs and accelerates automation you can have a lot of different policy views as an individual but when they’re a judge none

12:25 of that is supposed to matter because what they’re supposed to do is make sure that individual laws don’t violate the Constitutional protections that are allowed to the American people are recognized for the American people as existing in nature nature we believe we have a lot of pre-governmental rights when we say people have the right to freedom of religion speech press assembly protest we don’t think the

12:47 government gives us these rights these are rights people have because they’re created in the image of God and in nature these rights exist for people and the government and the Constitution framework is our shared project to secure those rights judges are supposed to protect the individual rights of people not being served by laws that are overreaching and they’re supposed to make sure that in particular from the

13:10 district court level to the Circuit or the appeals court level that everybody gets a hearing and then gets a right of appeal about whether or not the facts have rightly been determined in a case and that the law is being rightly applied to the circumstances and facts at play in an individual issue or matter and so when there is so much protest

13:30 around the Judiciary it’s probably a sign that the Judiciary is acting a lot more like a legislature and one of the reasons why that’s dangerous is because we don’t give our judges those kinds of powers and in return they get lifetime tenure because they’re not supposed to have to be accountable to the people because they weren’t doing anything like

13:52 representing the public will and so if judges are going to act like legislators then it would be pretty important in a democratic system for them to be fireable by the people if the people have different views than the way the judges are choosing to legislate so I think it’s fair to to say article two uh

14:12 the executive branch has grown in power a lot article 3 the Judiciary has grown in power quite a bit and both of these flow from a dysfunction in the Congress of people wanting to be lifetime politicians and therefore not wanting to make a lot of the hard choices that might get them fired and so you have a lot of people that are in my institution

14:32 who don’t want to do hard things they don’t want to be fireable they don’t want to ever really leave Washington DC and so they punt powers to both the executive and judicial branches and that’s a deformity of our constitutional system and as you’ve described it there there is a trunk to these branches and that trunk is the people who are whose

14:52 authority the government is is using and acting on we are represented that way how do we as a people adjust and change our expectations and communicate those expectations in a way that can help improve some of the things you’ve described yeah that’s a great question maybe I have three thoughts the first is uh we need to do things like you all are

15:14 doing today and your students watching this are doing which is we need to re-familiar ourselves familiarize ourselves with our constitutional framework because it’s a pretty darn glorious inheritance to believe that people are created in the image of God with natural rights to predate government and government isn’t the center of our community it isn’t the center of our identity government is a tool and it’s supposed to secure our

15:34 freedoms and so um constitutional education and Civics are pretty darn important um second I think we need more people to run for office and in particular uh to think of it as a service calling for a short time and then go back to the rest of their lives we shouldn’t have the professionalization of politics where a

15:57 small set of people become politicians and they stay for their whole life people should only go to Washington for a limited time and then they should go back home George Washington obviously was a pretty great Exemplar of this tradition in 1796 at the end of Washington’s second term when he decided to step down he gave this farewell address to the

16:17 country in lin-manuel Miranda’s telling Hamilton is his Muse and it’s the the song teach him how to say goodbye and Washington wanted to go back to Mount Vernon not just because he preferred to be a Mount Vernon where he was from and running his farm but also because he he didn’t think Washington DC should be an example of a place you aspired to go to

16:37 this is the heights of of community and meaning and then you want to stay there forever and so we need more people to expect that politicians would only serve for a little while and then go home not try to be Perpetual incumbents um and then third I think we do need to have much better media consumption habits around how we think about politics politics 6 is not like sports

17:00 it’s not as I say this as a you know son of a football coach and a lifelong wrestler uh sports are a lot more interesting than politics and when people try to cover Politics as a boxing match and as a horse race it leads us to do and say and feel stupid things about tribe um I want Republicans and Democrats to

17:20 differ about some policy issues and then set it aside and go have a beer together and break bread together and you know maybe some people are Packers fans and some people are Chiefs fans but you wouldn’t need to sort your community based on your political tribal loyalties and right now we have too many folks who think if you’re going to do politics you got to do it as Bloodsport and if you

17:41 don’t want to do it as Bloodsport then you shouldn’t be involved at all what we need is a lot more regular people um to show up and roll their eyes at the weirdos in politics we need a lot more regular people to say one cheer for politics not three cheers this isn’t the center of life but not zero cheers either maintaining a framework for ordered Liberty and thanking our troops for all they do to put themselves in

18:02 harm Harm’s Way to defend our freedoms those are pretty important responsibilities but it’s like eating vegetables it shouldn’t be cotton candy and it shouldn’t be your evening Recreation you should put in a little bit of time to be knowledgeable about the issues we should thank those who serve on our behalf and then you should go build communities of love and persuasion that are a hell of a lot more interesting than politics

18:23 yeah Senator as you go about your work you’ve expressed several times your appreciation for the Constitution as you face decisions on a routine basis what are the principles and ideas that you turn to frequently as your kind of your your touchstones and decision making

18:43 yeah um so Donald Rumsfeld now dead but um formerly Secretary of Defense but long before that Princeton wrestler uh and then a congressman from Illinois he would say before I’m ever going to vote for anything that gives the federal government new power first I want to understand is the federal government permitted to do this thing is this an

19:06 authority that the constitution has given to the federal government if not I can’t be for it even if it is a permissible power is it possible that the private sector can solve this problem because if the private sector can solve it instead of the public sector then I’d rather not have the public sector crowd out the private sector the private sector allows more failure and more diversity and I mean

19:27 failure in a good way um you want lots of restaurants in your community uh to not be decreed by the government there will be one restaurant and it will be Italian and it will be open five days a week for these hours um you’d rather have an entrepreneurial Market of a whole bunch of people figuring out who may better food and is open the right hours and gives great customer service that’s high quality at a low cost and you’d like a diversity of

19:50 options for the public and so you’d prefer private to public sector both for-profit entities and not-for-profit entities of stuff that happens in the public sector is it possible that we can solve this problem at this state and local level if so again we should prefer to do that because it allows more diversity the founders use this phrase that they

20:10 didn’t say 50 Laboratories of democracy but they referred to the states as Laboratories of democracy because the 13 then the 50 now we have very different communities problems strengths weaknesses Nebraska and Vermont have very different farming Vermont has darn great Gardens but Nebraska feeds the

20:31 world and so the regulatory framework that you’re going to use for a cattle operation in Nebraska we have we’re by far the largest cattle state in the Union um the the regulations you’re going to use about how to manage rainwater runoff from a manure pile at a place that has 10 000 head of cattle so that the toxicity of the rainwater runoff from that manure pile doesn’t poison somebody

20:52 else’s corn and bean row cropping operation down the hill that’s going to be different than the way you should regulate agriculture in Vermont and so I want a diversity of options public and private versus public sector and state and local government versus Federal and then at the federal level there should be a small number of things we do the most important one should center around

21:14 our common defense National Security and intelligence issues and we should make sure that there are opportunities for proof of concept and for trial projects and for Renewal we shouldn’t authorize programs of the federal government to exist for eternity we should do them for one year or for three years or for five or six years and we should have those programs set to expire so that then we

21:35 deliberate again is this the right way to use the monopolistic powers and the taxing authorities and the prohibitions and the imprisonment powers of the federal government what is your aspiration for the country that you hope your service leaves for today’s young people for today’s students yeah I think that we are all

21:57 blessed to grow up in the greatest experiment in Liberty and in government in governance in human history government is not the center of the world but this is a pretty amazing experiment and the fact that it’s gone on 240 years would probably surprise our Founders when uh Benjamin Franklin was

22:18 leaving the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in summer fall of 1787 there’s the apocryphal story The Little Old Lady Who wandered up to him and said what kind of government did you give us because she’s still many people still thought we’d end up with a monarchy and he said a republic man if you can keep it and Ronald Reagan was enshrining that same principle when he regularly said freedom is always one generation away

22:40 from Extinction in the American experiment and he didn’t mean that as a pessimistic comment he may and your grandma and your Grandpa can’t preserve Liberty for you we don’t believe in an autocratic centrally planned State We believe We the People are responsible to pass along freedom to the Next Generation it doesn’t happen in the bloodstream it happens by our Civics and

23:01 that requires us to celebrate and to feel gratitude for what we’ve inherited and what we get to experience and one more George Washington that Abraham Lincoln explained so well and extrapolated upon George Washington would say that our constitutional structure and our federal government are a silver frame

23:23 but the Golden Apple at the center of the frame is the things you use your freedom for we want government to maintain Freedom you want government to make sure it’s not dangerous to walk home from a restaurant late at night we want a police force that maintains order in those streets so people are safe and secure as they walk home but government isn’t the thing you fall in love with

23:44 government is a means to the end and so the silver frame is the thing that makes it possible the framework for ordered Liberty the golden apple is the things you build it’s your it’s your new mousetrap it’s your new app it’s your startup Enterprise it’s the Rotary Club it’s the church or the synagogue where you invite people to worship with you

24:05 it’s the people you try to persuade to marry you it’s the people you invite over for dinner the great things in life are done by persuasion and love and the American system enables that because of the silver frame which is the Constitutional structure that recognizes the inherent Dignity of all 330 million people created in God’s image and I guess what I would aspire to is sitting

24:26 here in 2021 at 2022 that we would look forward to 2032 and we would be able to say more of our students and more of the Next Generation feel that gratitude understand that inheritance and are in love with the Constitutional framework because of the liberty and the possibility that it creates in the community in the neighborhoods where you’re raising your kids because that’s

24:47 the center of meaning not Washington D.C Senator we thank you for your time today and especially for service to our country thank you very much thanks Dan great to be with you all