WASHINGTON, DC – With Congressional approval ratings at historically low levels and Congressional reelection rates continuing to be high, U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) appeared before a breakfast meeting of The Ripon Society this past Thursday morning to talk about the growing level of political disengagement across America and how it is being fueled by the growing level of dysfunction in Washington, DC.
“The fact that Washington is broken is obvious,” he stated. “But the whys of how Washington is broken are different than most people believe. They’re different than I believed. I’ve done a lot of crisis and turnaround projects. Usually, if you’re going into an institution that’s broken, you’re not going in unless it’s near bankruptcy, it’s being disintermediated by new technology, there’s been a merger and acquisition, or they’re missing payroll. There’s something fundamentally broken that brings a sense of urgency. One of the strange things about this place is that even though it doesn’t work, there’s sort of an aura around Washington that says, ‘Well you should pretty much still pretend that it works.’”
Sasse was elected to the Senate in 2014 after having spent over 20 years in the private sector helping to turn around struggling companies and institutions. At the age of 37, he took these skills to Midland University, where he became one of the youngest college presidents in America and transformed a college that was on the verge of bankruptcy into one of the fastest-growing institutions of higher learning in the country.
Since taking office 16 months ago, he has tried to apply the same straight talk and transformative principles he used in the private sector to turn America – and American politics – around.
“We talk constantly about political polarization,” he said. “I actually think political polarization, while a problem, is a much, much, much smaller problem than political disengagement … The approval rating of Congress has been bouncing around for the last decade between 9 and 15 percent, and yet the incumbency reelection rate is north of 90%. How does that make any sense? Name any other sector in life where everyone can think you’re failing and there’s almost no chance that you’ll be held to account.”
According to Sasse, the lack of accountability in Washington is helping to fuel a lack of trust across the United States.
“I think the decline of public trust in institutional life in America in general — but in particular for the institutions in Washington — has a pretty tight correlation with how little accountability there is for the fact that the legislature doesn’t fix much,” he stated. “And the legislature doesn’t fix much because most legislative authorities don’t really reside in Congress right now. The President has an ‘I have a pen and I have a phone’ theory of Washington. And the truth is, the bureaucratic agencies and the rulemaking processes are much more significant legislatively than actual legislation moving through the Congress.”
“Washington may not get that the center of life isn’t in Washington, but Moms and Dads do.”
The Nebraska lawmaker also discussed the difference between community and government and the fact that the younger generation of Americans seems to confuse the two.
“Community and government are different things, and it turns out the next generation doesn’t know that,” he stated. “And one of the ways you know they don’t know that is when President Obama got re-elected in 2012, the DNC was running ads all over the web taking Barney Frank’s line, ‘Government is just another word for things we choose to do together,’ and running that at millennials around the clock across the country. No, government is not another word for the things we choose to do together — community is. Government is the institution that has a monopoly on violence and can take your stuff and take your freedom. Government doesn’t persuade you to do things; government compels you to do things, and right now we have lost any shared sense of that.”
Following his remarks, Sasse took a number of questions, including one about the many ways he communicates with the people he represents. Last month, for instance, he tweeted about his teenage daughter’s experiences working on a ranch in Nebraska. The tweets were so popular that stories have been written about them and, he noted, he is now regularly asked about his daughter’s experience during his travels around his home state.
“Washington may not get that the center of life isn’t in Washington, but Moms and Dads do,” he declared, referring to the fact that most Americans are not consumed by politics. “Real people who live in real communities where they’re trying to run small businesses and persuade people to join their church or their synagogue… they don’t think that we’re the center of the world. And that’s the hope of America.
“So for the next month as I travel, everywhere in Nebraska – nobody wants to talk about policy and politics. They want to talk about my daughter on the ranch and how can their kid go. They’re worried their kid didn’t get the work ethic, and they know that’s the future of the country.”
To view Senator Sasse’s remarks before The Ripon Society this past Thursday morning, please click on the link below:
The Ripon Society is a public policy organization that was founded in 1962 and takes its name from the town where the Republican Party was born in 1854 – Ripon, Wisconsin. One of the main goals of The Ripon Society is to promote the ideas and principles that have made America great and contributed to the GOP’s success. These ideas include keeping our nation secure, keeping taxes low and having a federal government that is smaller, smarter and more accountable to the people.