The Ricochet Podcast - Senator Fix-It

Episode Date: September 11, 2020

This week, the rare single guest show. But when that guest is Senator Ben Sasse, he has enough brain power to fill two segments and that’s exactly what the does on today’s episode. Mostly, we discuss his WSJ Op-Ed, Make The Senate Great Again, which is a manifesto on how to fix the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body. Also, some thoughts on Woodward v. Trump and the less than great mayor of the... Source

I've been told now that the Chinese, because I interviewed Jimmy Lai, the Chinese are probably listening to everything I say and do. And which actually would give me the first really reliable audience I've ever had. That's true. I have a dream. This nation will rise up. Live out the true meaning of its dream. We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal.

Well, I think, Bob, really, to be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don't want to create a panic. I'm the president and you're fake news.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lylex and our guest today is Senator Ben Sasse talking about, well, everything. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Hello, I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is not smoldering, which is beautiful, if cold. Rob Long's in New York, we believe, where apparently it's still summer. Peter Robinson is in California, where it's always summer. And we're always just wondering, Peter, when they split up California into five separate states, as the Democrats want,

as one of their conditions for Donald Trump being allowed to have a second term, which state would you be in? The wrong one, for sure. I would certainly be the only conservative in Northern California. By the way, Minneapolis may not be smoldering, but California most definitely is. We're on the third day now of smoke so heavy and so high in the atmosphere that it's just weirdly blocking out the sun. I feel like a dinosaur after a volcanic eruption. Barack Obama tweeted out some pictures of the red skies, which seems to be pictures from the second Blade Runner movie, indicating that, you know, climate change is real and we have to do something. So I assume then that we have to take all of the

measures that California has had. The rich and diverse political culture with all of its, you know, interplay between Democrats and Democrats has produced a situation where, A, you have those fires, but, B, you can't burn, do the controlled burn. You can't upgrade your electrical infrastructure, so you have the governor telling everybody to turn the fridge off at 3 o'clock. That's what they want for the rest of the country. Rob? I'm so happy that a man in Minnesota can see through the nonsense here in California. I feel as though it's just a California-specific issue. But, yes, all that is true.

Everything you said is true. The Democrats have been running this state for nigh onto a quarter of a century now. That's the climate change. It's the change in the political climate. All right, don't get me started. Well, let's get Rob started. You're in a city that is— Too late.

You're Rob started. You're in a city that is run by Democrats as well, lo these many years, except for the Giuliani interregnum. Do New Yorkers at this point look around at their city, which probably feels as depopulated in as curious way as Minneapolis downtown does, and say, gosh, I want some more of this. I want de Blasio plus. Or are they looking about for de Blasio better? You know, the same postures. Universally loathed political figure. What's most amazing about de Blasio is he's managed to do something that no other political figure has been able to do. You can be Black Lives Matter. You can be Antifa.

You can be wearing a MAGA hat. Everybody agrees de Blasio has to go. It's kind of an amazing, well, you know, he was never popular, I don't think. can be antifa you can be wearing a maga hat everybody agrees de blasio has to go it's it's kind of an amazing well you know he was never popular i don't think he was just sort of default but this is kind of what's happening i think i hope anyway in politics in general the country which is that you're starting to realize that certain things have consequences that it isn't really just a tv show that we're watching right that we just are hiring a star or the class clown to be the leader, that these things actually matter. And that, you know, it's okay in, you know, good times to sort

of like relax a little bit and maybe have a little fun and indulge yourself if you're a left-wing Manhattanite or New Yorker with, you know, this kind of crackpot left-wing radical chic mayor. But if it hits the fan, as it certainly has in New York City, you suddenly look around and think, well, can we just get rid of that guy? Can we just fire him now? I mean, the most depressing thing New Yorkers remember, all New Yorkers, I think it doesn't really matter what side of the political aisle you're on, is that he's here for another year.

He's not going anywhere. We've got de Blasio for one more year. I mean, if you don't like the president of the United States, you're going to get a new one pretty soon. If you don't like the governor, depending on where you are, you can get a new one. We have another year of this guy. And he doesn't seem to – of all the politicians, he doesn't seem to realize just how despised he is. And that is incredibly enraging. It's one thing to hate a politician.

It's another if you think that politician doesn't even know it. And this guy seems to be in his own bubble. So it is a reckoning, and I think it's a good reckoning. I just want to go back to what Rob is saying here. Things may be, Minnesota's beautiful at the moment, and thank goodness for the sane center of the country, but just think about this. California has about 10 or 11, 11.5% of the population of the entire country. New York is overwhelmingly the most important city in the nation. Now, I can hear people in Dallas and Houston and Boise getting their backs up over that.

But in terms of finance and publishing and media, New York still has no parallel. And also, as what New York has always been, which is the melting pot, so many kinds of immigrants go to New York first and spend a generation or two there before moving out to the rest of the country. And California and New York both have governments that are not just mouthing liberal platitudes and playing games, but that are doing serious, I was about to say irreparable, That's not true. There's always the chance of redemption and repair in this country, at least for now, but doing serious, long-lasting damage to the lives of the people in those states. This is no longer a joke. I'm not even getting into the presidential camp. None of it. What is happening now is serious but remember the playing has ended they did exactly what they said they were going to do you know when when uh donald trump is running in 2016 people said uh the the big mistake that people in the media made and

sort of the chattering classes made was they took donald trump uh literally but not seriously whereas his voters and supporters took him seriously but not literally. And that was a pretty, that's a sort of insightful formulation. But I think that that is sort of, that has happened, that is an interesting formulation for political choices. And a lot of times, I think there are a lot of left-wing, or there are a lot of liberals, self-described liberals in New York, certainly New York City, and definitely California, who took their liberal politicians that they supported, they took them seriously, but not literally. But then those politicians, Gavin Newsom, people like that, Bill de Blasio, got into office and they governed literally. They said they had, you know, the mayor of New York,

of Los Angeles announced why, but when he was running.A. was going to be free of coal. There will be no coal. It will have no coal plant. The DWP, no coal plants will power Los Angeles. And, of course, that just seemed kind of ridiculous. It's going to roll your eyes. It's not going to happen. But it kind of has happened.

And the result has been blackouts in los angeles like oh you know it's oh my god the guy was serious we thought this was just right value whatever the virtue signaling or exactly you know value sharing or whatever it is but no no no they really meant it when bill de blasio says that you know black lives Matter is the most important thing right now happening in New York City in the middle of a pandemic and riots, he's not just saying that. He really believes it. And that, I think, for a lot of liberals, certainly liberals that I know, has been really shocking. Do they not see the consequences of these? Do they not game it out a little bit and say,

I would like to sign on to the Paris Climate Accords because I'm a good person who wants the planet to thrive and America is bad and rapacious and we have to do less. And then actually to find themselves confronted with the result of that. Does that cause any re-evaluation, or do they look to the right and figure out exactly who on the pernicious conservative side has screwed things up so that the wonderful utopia was not delivered entirely to their doorstep

in one fell swoop? I think there are a lot of liberals who say sometimes what a lot of conservatives say to themselves, which is, oh, he's not really going to do all that. That, oh, he's not really going to do all that. That's just he's not really going to do all that. I mean, that's what a lot of conservatives who voted for Donald Trump said about the wall. He's not really going to build the wall. And they were right. He didn't build the wall. So that's not true for the governor of California or for the mayor of New York City.

So they content themselves with the idea that Joe Biden then is just hypocritical and it doesn't mean what he says. And that when he backtracks on his fracking, when he backtracks on his national map, that it's almost reassuring to them to learn that the guy who previously had made a ridiculous, extreme statement, it's like, oh, phew, he was lying about that. He was insincere. Oh, thank you. I can vote for him now with a clear conscience. Well, I mean, I think that the nightmare for the Trump campaign right now is that voters will take Joe Biden seriously but not literally, which is precisely the argument that they made for Donald Trump four years ago. If you take him seriously now but literally, you think, okay, well, he's going to address all these problems. Well, not exactly the way he said. He's not going to defund the police.

That's insane. But he might. I wonder, this is on my mind maybe, because before the podcast began a few moments ago, I was exchanging texts with my now freshman daughter at Dartmouth College about what course. And so I'm thinking generationally. I was there 40 years ago. My parents, my dad never went to college, but I'm thinking the child who's beginning her freshman year at Dartmouth is the granddaughter of a man who grew up in the Depression. When my father graduated from high school, the best job available was digging ditches with the Johnson City, New York Department of Public Works.

And then the war happened, and he spent four years at sea on a Coast Guard cutter that was used as a minesweeper. Okay, that generation knew that things could go wrong. That generation, and that generation, my father was older when he had me, I was older when I had my daughter, so I'm talking maybe for a lot of people listening, it's not grandfathers, but great-grandfathers, that sort of thing. On the other hand, that generation was with us until not that long ago. George H. W. Bush fought in the Second World War. And also, I think I was watching, the two of you, I don't know whether you'll be pleased with this or laugh at me again. I was watching a documentary on Frank Sinatra the other evening, which is about, you know, the most recent popular culture that interests me. And there was an interview between Sinatra and Walter Cronkite.

And I thought, Walter Cronkite, Walter Cronkite. And I thought, Walter Cronkite? Walter Cronkite was a real reporter. You know how he had reported on the Normandy invasion? As a member of the press, he was in one of the gliders that landed behind the hedgerows, behind enemy lines in Normandy. He saw guys get killed. The press was serious in those days. And so this, I suppose in some ways, this is the perpetual question about democracy. Does each generation or each generation and a half, so to speak, have to learn for its own, on its own, how bad things

can get when they go bad? I hope not, but I feel there's something to that. Perhaps so, but they may differ on their interpretations as to why it went bad. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, one of the things that just absolutely makes me tear my hair out what little I have up top is casting your eye over 2019 and remembering what the political and social landscape was like then. All of the good, virtuous young folk on Twitter were all bitching and moaning and screaming in 2019 about the capitalist hellscape in which we live. I mean, before all of this went south, there was just a large cohort in the culture

that had this assumption that everything really sucked, that everything was... This was a nadir of human civilization. And you look back at that and you look at the prosperity that we had and how things were getting better, the resurrection of the American city, the advancement of American interests across the world in ways that were not, you know, were not exactly what the foreign policy establishment may have wanted, but were different and accomplishing. It was good. It was good. And they still regarded themselves as living in this horrible, nightmarish, dystopian world.

And now, pitched into this, they don't seem to have any retconning. They never go back and look and say, boy, were we a bunch of panel members in 2019. Well, not necessarily. I sometimes think that that's true that's that that in my more superstitious moments there's something that the virus is trying to teach us and tell us and one of them is that things can get pretty bad um so be prepared and the second is the best

possible outcome the best possible i'm sorry not, but course of action for all of us is to shut up because they've actually discovered that speaking in a low tone of voice slowly and at low volume is about as good as wearing a mask. In that case, Rob, the three of us are dead men. Yeah, but I love the idea. They're like, what could this possibly mean? And the universe is screaming, how about try shutting up? What this means is conservative talk radio will be wiped out, and all those, hello, this is NPR hosts, will inherit the earth. This can't be true. Well, I mean, it's all studio stuff anyway. But I think more about it's in public.

Ah, all right. Silence in public would be a very welcome thing. I don't know. I go to the store. I walk around. I go downtown, and I see silent people moving around masked outside. I see this constant assumption of a risk in everything, and it's not as hairy as it was three months ago, but now we're just sort of used to being masked. We're used to assuming infection. There's this

whole different shift in the way we look at other people. And frankly, I am a little hungry for angry New Yorkers yelling at each other in an intersection in a time-honored manner. I know, but it's not when Ratso Ritzo bangs on the hood and says, I'm walking here. You can't hear him because he's muffled. Good. There's a certain... Well, I'm not in New York, and I like to see it when I was a tourist because I knew I could leave.

But yeah, right. The whole stunning of every single public interaction that we have from schools to stores to movie theaters to gyms is not a good thing. And I hate the way that we've just sort of our governor here just extended his emergency orders for another 30 days. But I mean, Eric Idle hasn't been coming by with his wagon shouting, bring out your dead for some time now. But yet we still have this emergency, this still low lying toothache dread. And I'm mightily sick of it. And, you know, those who say, well, it'll lift the day that Joe Biden is elected on November 3rd. But we know there's going to be no voice, no finality on November 3rd. We know that November 3rd is just the beginning of a series of really unpleasant stuff that's going to consume the country for at least another month.

Well, before we go to our first guest, I've got to ask you guys. The Woodward book bumped the losers and cowards off the front page. And it will be with us for about 72 hours before we have the next Trump thing that's going to change everybody's mind. What do you think? What do I think? the woodward book uh okay so here's what i can tell you this right this is the immediate reaction the immediate reaction is it just doesn't matter maybe there's something in the book something else in the book that matters but the notion that trump was playing down the coronavirus. Trump said that. He said that at the time. He said it

in public. My job is to make sure the country doesn't panic. We're going to get through this. He said he was going to play, he was going to emphasize the upbeat. There is, this is, this, all these tell-all books about Trump. John Bolton, he writes this book, assiduous note-taker. it's supposed to be a blockbuster. And what does it tell us? It tells us that Trump is rash, that he operates according to his instincts, that he can be rude and dismissive, that his attention span is short. Is there anybody who didn't know that already? Anybody? Raise your hand. Anybody? Likewise, the woodward book is telling us nothing i do find that there's a puzzle in it and the puzzle is this why did donald trump talk to bob woodward it is i mean but this

is almost people been asking that question about bob oh exactly this this almost fits in in the annals of sorcery administer why did george w bush talk to Bob Woodward? Woodward got two books out of the Bush administration, and it was clear after the first book that he was emphasizing people who were leaking against the president. I mean, Bob Woodward has dark arts. He seems capable of journalistically, so to speak, seducing anyone. I don't know how he does that, but that to me is the only puzzle that's the only interesting part as a member of the press my advice to everybody is never speak to a member of the press oh no so so rob i i guess this is probably the thing that made you a reluctant

that changed you from being a reluctant trump voter to uh somebody who's opposed because uh you can't you can't believe what i'm saying right well. Well, I mean, look, I think there's two things going on. One is the political strategy, which is sort of, I think, whether it's coordinated or not. It doesn't have to be coordinated. The press is all liberal and they're all anti-Trump. The idea is that, yes, you're right. You forget that we've forgotten all about the generals. We've forgotten all about that. But the whole point of the anti-Trump movement here is to create, is to remind you of all the turbulence. It was a very bad week for Donald

Trump, not because of the news, but because he wasn't on offense. And every time, and we're getting very close now, when the candidate is not on offense, it's a bad thing. It's not a good strategy. And so that has been, it's been tough for him. But the second thing I find so weird about this, which I find in general weird about the sort of left wing in general is this is what they're accusing Trump of. Just say he's guilty of it, right? Isn't this exactly what the World Health Organization and the CDC and all the collected brain trusts were saying to us when they told us not to wear masks? Yes, but that's different because shut up. But it's the same thing, right?

It's the idea of like, well, you're telling us a lie so that for some other reason that you then double back on. But for a while they were lying to us, telling us, no, you don't need to wear a mask. I mean, did they lie and people die? Can you say that? I find it really hard these days to not approach all of American politics and culture like an old-line Viennese Freudian psychoanalyst and just say, you people are projecting yes constantly the the sins of donald trump that they scream at him you're lying you're distorting it you're agenda driven all those things are the very sins you see in the left-wing news media which is to say all the news media and now i have an image of rob as a as a art as a stereotypical viennese doctor with a white beard and the round black glasses

while the media is sitting on the sofa on the couch ranting about their mother. No, you're absolutely right. I mean, and again, you don't have to be a Trump fan to note the hypocrisy or to note that if Trump had said, well, I'm going to shut off flights to China, you're a xenophobe, that if Trump had come out and banged the talks in as hard as he possibly could, he would have been deemed an anti-urbanist xenophobe for telling people not to go to a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration. No matter what he did, it would have been reflexively gainsaid by the other side because they hate his guts and they can't believe that anything that he says is worth listening to.

That said... No, no, go ahead. I'm saying, truly, go ahead. Go ahead. Well, I mean, here's the thing. There's so much blame that we can ascribe. The statements have been made, and I'm willing to give people endless amounts of latitude because it was a chaotic situation and there was so much that we did not know. There was partially bad data going in that confused the CFR with the IFR that may have inflated the fears. There was China lying, lying, lying, lying. There was the WHO wanting to make sure that nobody really blamed China. There was the media's complicit skill in getting us off China because they wanted to hate Trump. And now there's the belief, of course, that Trump is responsible for a 9-11 that happens every two or three days or so because they actually seriously believe that.

If Trump had been telling everybody, go buy toilet paper right now, stock up on rice because it's going to get really bad. That might have been the smart thing to do. A, it wouldn't have done anything because flattening the curve, as we found out, didn't exactly work. And we're still in our endless two weeks lockdown ruling over and over. But two, people would have said that he was needlessly panicking people in order to make some sort of authoritarian pretext for ruling however the way he wanted to rule. And they would have fought it tooth and nail. So now what we have is absolute revisionist history all over the place. And the media that Rob correctly identifies as being on the left now just wants to be comfortable asking Joe Biden hard questions like, do you love it when they put some brown sugar in your Metamucil because it's easier to come down? One of the more amusing things is

people hammering Woodward for saying, these Trump quotes are important. Why didn't you tell us about them months ago? And, you know, maybe, maybe he tried, you know, maybe his mouth opened and nothing happened because he had lag because he was buffering. You know, we all have lag and buffering when we're watching shows and it's annoying as heck. Well, you don't have to have that. You don't have to have that if you have Eero. Listen, these days, your house just isn't your home. It's your don't have to have that. You don't have to have that if you have Aero. Listen, these days, your house just isn't your home. It's your office. It's a school. It's a movie theater. It's a restaurant. All these activities put a strain on your Wi-Fi. Ask a lot of your Wi-Fi.

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The next day. That's eero.com slash ricochet. Code ricochet at checkout to get your Aero delivered with free next day shipping. Aero.com slash ricochet. Code ricochet. And our thanks to Aero for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Ben Sass, Republican U.S. Senator from Nebraska, currently running for a second term. Before being elected to the Senate, Ben spent five years as the president of Midland University in his hometown of Fremont, Nebraska. In his spare time, Senator Sass likes to sling hot dogs at the Nebraska Cornhuskers games, although maybe not this year. And he also likes to drive the inebriated residents of Lincoln in an Uber. Welcome back, Senator.

Hey, this week you published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled, Make the Senate Great Again. You have many suggestions in it, but let's go to the one that's getting the most attention, and that is repealing the 17th Amendment. And so many people looked at that and said, what is the 17th Amendment? So what does it say exactly, and why will dumping it make the Senate great again? Well, let me say one thing more broadly first, which is I think we need a basic admission in American life that the Senate doesn't work. We don't have a place where Americans can hammer out our biggest near and long-term

policy challenges with debate. And so if we get to a place where people agreed on that, I would be ecstatic because it's obviously true. And yet, it's like the emperor has no clothes, the 100-pound gorilla, whatever metaphor we want to use. We're not telling the truth about it right now. And we need an institution that can tackle long-term challenges like the future of war, the future of work as duration of average jobs get shorter and shorter, et cetera. So I've got eight or nine or 10 ideas about ways we could focus on that problem. But first, I want to focus on the problem. But sure, the 17th Amendment was a progressive era idea to go from having state legislatures control who their state sent to the

Senate to having a popular election of those people. And there were some good historical arguments during the progressive era for why a lot of states were so deadlocked and controlled by specific industries, that there were good reasons to think about the direct election of senators. But that was at a time when the assumption was states were probably too powerful. I think indisputably states and megacities right now are too weak in American political life and D.C. is too strong and yet D.C. isn't stewarding those responsibilities well. So we should think through different levers that we could pull to get back to a place where, A, we had some federalism in American life and not just coercive federalism where states pretend that they have power over things like the Medicaid programs but don't. And more fundamentally, where are we going to get an institution where we could do some deliberation as opposed to just some short-term theater play acting, which is what the Senate is becoming? Hey, Senator, it's Rob Long in New York. Thank you for joining us. So

I got a question. This is what happened. This is sort of a large bore argument, a larger macro argument to the filibuster argument. And it comes down to even though I know I'm not supposed to think this way and I accept already your condemnation, but it's like, OK, fine. Is this going to be good for conservatives or bad for conservatives? And if it's bad for them, then I'm against it. And if it's good for them, then I'm for it. And does that make me the problem? No, but let's admit that the majority, first of all, what's a conservative right now? Okay. First principles, you're not allowed to get, you're not allowed to get philosophical. But I mean, I think we should admit that if you made a list of the 10 biggest macro challenges we face right now at a policy level, people who just want to scream to get on

reality TV tonight, we got a whole bunch of senators who seem to would rather have fame than power. They'd rather be pundit than actually have some influence over the policy direction of the country. But if we can get past that and make a list of the policy challenges we face, and this is coming from the third or fourth most conservative guy in the Senate by voting record, the majority of the big challenges we face right now aren't really primarily right versus left. They're past versus future in that we haven't modernized policy for an era of really different technologies, really different implications for local communities, and really different jobs. There's been no civilization in human history where people haven't assumed by age 18 to 20

they knew what they were going to do as a calling for the rest of life. That era is over. 35, 40, and 45-year-olds are going to get disrupted not only out of their job and firm, but out of their entire industry and skill set forevermore right now. And there isn't a clear right versus left answer on that. There are just no answers in Washington except more government and more screaming. But it's possible, I mean, just to be, I'm just being, I just want to be bloody-minded here and political and petty.

It's possible, it's conceivable that a republican senator from new york state could exist in the next you know a few years a republican senator from california could be no well you know okay just go with me i'm daydreaming here but i mean i know there are 30 in the polls yeah but it's impossible that the state governments in either one of those states could nominate anyone from the opposing party or even somebody who's centrist it's sort of impossible to imagine the same thing reverse happening in texas although you know beto o'rourke got pretty close last time so uh i'm just wondering whether it's um it's going to make a more responsive my question is what is it going to make the Senate more responsive or less responsive?

And is a less responsive Senate or Senator a good thing? Well, I kind of want to challenge your premise a little bit, Rob, because I would say if you gave the vast majority of Americans a choice between a more powerful mayor and county board or a more powerful Congress and president, almost everyone, not just on the right, but in the center and on the center left, I believe, would choose a mayor and a county board to actually tackle some of the problems. Lots of the future of policy around transportation policy, housing policy, job returning policy is probably going to happen in the megacities and suburbs and exurbs. All the net job creation in America from 2008 to 2019, so basically at the

end of the financial crisis through to the arrival of COVID, there was a lot of job creation in America. All that net job creation was in 30 cities. There was job loss everywhere else in the country on that. And if you could give more power back to cities, suburbs, and exurbs, I think you'd actually see some policy innovation that'd be interesting and plural. There'd be new federalism. And I think New York might want some of that power as opposed to pretending that just a Congress that's dysfunctional is something we should all just But the mayor of New York, I mean, yeah, I take your point. I think you're right, except that they'll always have to go to daddy in the federal government for the money. I mean, Bill de Blasio's got plenty of progressive plans he wants to put into place, and I'm sure he's got a lot of city support for that.

But he's got money, so he's going to have to go to the Congress for money. But wouldn't it be better if some of that money actually came to cities and states to make some decisions about as opposed to what happens now in the Medicaid program? Senator Peter Robinson here. By the way, that really, you sort of cut close to the bone when you talk about how late it is when people find out. Rob Long and I are still trying to figure out what we want to do when we grow up. If I can interrupt Peter for just a second here with his Roman references, you know, Caesar and the rest of it. Caesar, if I recall, was a little self-conscious of his hair loss. Well, nowadays, you know, guys, a lot of our identity is wrapped up on our hair. Even then, even now. It's, you know, from how it feels after getting a fresh cut, you know, the way it's perfectly styled before you're going out. We think about our hair. Hey, it happens. It's human. That's why we get into our 20s and our 30s and, you know, we start noticing the first signs of hair loss. It definitely feels like

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Okay, sorry, Peter. Not really sorry because of course they pay the bills and keep the lights on anyway you were saying on on this question of on cities this you know you have it's so much fun talking to you because you're just bursting with ideas and there's so many places so many points of of discussion available. But the cities, I'm sitting here in Palo Alto. Honestly, I don't want more power given to the city council in this crazy place. I'm 30 miles south of San Francisco. The last Republican mayor of San Francisco was George Michaels, if I remember his name correctly. And I only know that because he ran against Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination for governor in 1966. Democrats since then. In Texas, five of the

six biggest cities in Texas are run by Democrats and essentially by Democratic machines. Only Fort Worth has a Republican governor. So when you say, let's give more power to the cities, I say, well, wait a minute, but first let's answer one of these perplexing but almost permanent questions of American life, and that is, why do cities seem so eager to hand themselves over to liberal Democratic machines? Don't you want to answer that question first? Yeah, great question. So let's try to tackle it the way I think the founders would, which is one of the virtues of pluralism, one of the virtues of federalism is not saying that anybody in government does a great job, but differentiated failure is a real opportunity because a lot of those cities are failing, obviously, but they're right now not accountable to anybody for their failure. And if you had people, mayors and governors, more accountable for things like why their

Medicaid programs are so expensive and so unproductive, as opposed to just supplicating before Washington for more money, but still one size fits all programming rules, you'd see, I think, differentiated failures. And there's opportunity in that. Right now, so many of our cities are just terribly governed, but the people don't hold them accountable. I'm going to go back to Rob's point. The fact that Bill de Blasio is a mayor, I mean, the guy couldn't run a bait shop, let alone the greatest city on earth. And the fact that the city of New York doesn't supply better candidates is partly because his job is to do nonsense culture warring, right? Chain up the fences around some playground somewhere and then go and beg Washington, D.C. for more money. And the only thing that happens in Washington, D.C. is a media facilitated argument where Nancy Pelosi can pretend that the way you do good governance, the way you love your

neighbor, the way you demonstrate care and concern for COVID health issues or COVID economics is simply to increase the bidding at $2.5 trillion. Now let's go for $3 trillion. Well, if you really love your neighbor, let's do $3.5 trillion. That's the nature of American governance right now, that cities and states go before Washington, beg, and Washington goes before the media and does almost no policy innovating, but can definitely bankrupt the next generation. We've got to be able to do better than that. So, Senator, there's a larger question here. Just cultural. Something positive? Yeah.

Well, I mean, no, we're going to get negative, and then we can get positive later. If you ask, again, I have zero evidence for this, but that doesn't mean it's not true. And I mean this with all due respect to your position as a senator and the Republican Party in general and American

political leadership, but if you ask the average American to name the five biggest political leaders in America right now, they'll probably hit Trump. rule and American political leadership. But if you ask the average American to name the five biggest political leaders in America right now, they'll probably hit Trump. I mean, Trump's got to be there. Maybe they'll mention Nancy Pelosi, but I would wager a lot of money that the next three or four names that they mention will be cable news television hosts. You know, Tucker Carlson is a brilliant, brilliant broadcaster, very smart guy. I consider him a friend. He's very funny, very smart. He gets about four and a half million viewers at the, you know, that's at the top of his average, I just checked this, gets 1.5 million, which puts her in the Dr. Jill Stein category of cable news hosts. How does the Senate, which used to be the place where big, big figures with big, big thoughts, right or wrong, but giants of American politics. How does it get the microphone

back? Well, by turning off the cameras. I mean, because right now, the main thing that happens in the Senate every day is people troll for soundbites. That is the number one job of the United States Senate. And there isn't a Madisonian deliberative body anywhere in American political life right now. If, you know, the great secular motivators are money, sex, power, and fame, right? It'd be wonderful if virtue and altruism and service were also high on the list. But if you want to look at secular motivators, they're money, sex, power, and fame. If you ask the average American voter, why do they think D.C. doesn't work?

The answer will probably be some version of everybody's so power hungry they can't cooperate. That's not actually the problem. It would be much healthier if the people who worked there actually were interested in power. They're not. They're mostly interested in fame. They mostly want to play pundit. And so it means that the main things people propose are things that don't really have a chance of passing, but when they fail and when they have their, their soundbites, you know, like every day is a bad Kardashian episode. It's never really, there's never, there's never Webster like debate going on. It's want to be, it's never a good Kardashian episode, right? People with hair and teeth as bad as I have, just miscast for reality TV, trying to fail in grand theatrical

ways, play acting, so they can go on TV that night and scream about how we want to demonize the other side. Here's the truth. Executive overreach has grown in American political life every decade since FDR. I'm one of eight out of a hundred. The Senate has never been a politician before. When I ran from 2013 to 14, I lived on a bus for 16 months. I talked every day about Obama's executive unilateralism and his executive overreach. And the more I've looked at it, looking history past and looking from Obama to Trump president, the reality is every single decade, the executive branch has more and more hyperactive overreach compared to what the founders wanted. That's really chiefly a symbiotic side effect of legislative underreach, right? The legislature doesn't actually want to solve big problems because the people who are there

mostly want to keep that job forever. They don't want to go back home as Cincinnati to their, you know, Mount Vernon, living in the place where their family and friends are. They want to go to D.C. because there's cable outlets there that can get you on New York TV every night and they want to stay. And the best way to stay is never to do hard stuff. Nobody's ever mad at you. They are, but it's genericized anger at failing to deliver. They think that people will be mad if you make a trade-off choice that might solve a problem, but somebody is dissatisfied with that outcome. And so we've got to tackle that problem. We've got to make the Senate, the Congress as a whole, but especially the Senate, a deliberative institution again. And the desire would be

to admit that Tucker's monologues are way better than any senator can give. Let him do them, and the Senate should do longer-term work. So, Senator Peter Robinson here, here's what I'm trying to figure out. You will have an answer to this, so I'll keep the question short. How did this happen? Back when I was mentioning earlier, I've got my youngest daughter starting at Dartmouth, as it happens, where I was 40 years ago, and we've been texting back and forth about, and she's going to take Govey III, the American political system. Well, I can remember being in her position. And when a senator would show up to speak on campus, it was a big, big deal.

A member of the United States Senate. This is how old I am and how but john sparkman who was uh he was um adley one in one i think he was at least even running mate once john sparkman of alabama as i recall and it turned out a crowd of students because he was a senator and now they're so and now they're so debased they show up on podcasts and they show up on podcasts exactly but. But how did the Senate cede this control? If you just think back to the 80s, Bob Dole was a major figure. Chairs of committees were major figures. They could get stuff done. Now, you may push back at this, but I would argue that the senators, at least on the conservative side, who can get stuff done, I would name Rob Portman. I would name you. I'd name John Hoeven. And none of you shows up on Fox News at night.

And I'm pretty sure I know why. If I were one of the young producers who was booking senators, you guys are too thoughtful. You have too many ideas you're too slow for the audience you're not inflammatory enough well i guess i i can see how you want to change the senate to reverse it but how did it happen in the first place that the senate gave up these this wonderful position in american life being a senator was like being being a prince instead of king but you still had enormous influence. You led a wonderful life. How did it happen? Yeah, thanks for a great history question. By the way, everybody else

should call Peter out on this, though, because there were way too many implicit Dartmouth references there. I mean, just everybody he's name-dropping is a green guy, right? Oh, that's true. I forgot, of course. Sorry. Yeah, I think the single most important book on this was written before it was even true yet, right? Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Public Discourse in the Age of Television is about 30, 35 years old book, but it predicted that we were going to do this, that we were going to have reality TV presidencies, because we decided that the immediacy of media consumption was more important than a limited government that didn't pretend

that the center of your life and your consciousness, certainly not your entertainment interest, should be in Washington, D.C., but Washington should help maintain a framework for ordered liberty so families and neighborhoods and firms and entrepreneurial, token billion, not-for-profits could solve the real problems of community and productivity, right? And instead, what happened is D.C. embraced, with the rise of television in general and then cable television and now Twitter embrace a greater desire for ephemeral, immediate popularity as opposed to stable, long-term power. We romanticize, of course, how much Congress used to get done. But the reality is, in the early Cold War, 1945 to 1970-ish, lots and lots of stuff happened

in American public life that had debates that would last a decade. The civil rights debates took too long to get to fruition, but D.C. did really important stuff about civil rights. The Great Society programs did things in the mid-60s that I don't like because I don't think they're solvent for the number of workers per retiree we have. But if you look at the places where they were later revised in the 1980s, we went from defined benefit to defined contribution retirement accounts with IRAs and 401ks. It dealt with the transience of jobs becoming more rapid or the duration at a firm becoming shorter.

Our health care problems are overwhelmingly driven by the fact that we don't have portability of benefits in healthcare. You can't take your insurance with you if you change jobs or geographies. And people don't really want to solve the health insurance problem. They want to have an issue to grandstand about and demonize people about on cable TV. And I think one of my other proposals in the Wall Street Journal op-ed is that we ought to consider a constitutional amendment for a single Senate term, but of 12 years. So you're not raising money all the time as a member of the Senate. You'd get elected one time or you'd get appointed by your state legislature one time, and then you'd go back to your life at the end of your term limit. Those people would have a different kind of incentive. It wouldn't be about short-term ephemeral retweets or cable news hits. It would be about what are

the two or three big things we should get done as a Congress this decade. Right now, the Congress hasn't gotten anything done for decades, but every single day, people pretend good versus evil, heaven and hell are going to arrive based on some soundbite and some hearing in the Senate. It's not ever going to produce an actual result. Senator Peter here one more time. Rob wants to come back. Everybody loves talking to you, so I'm just, this will be me for the last one, and I'm going to ask one more history question. This is a great big pompous one, so mock it at will, but it runs as follows. Even a sketch of the history of Rome shows that the Senate was very important during the Republic, and that it began to, as it ceded influence and power to the executives, so to speak, you get Augustus and then principate and so forth and you by the time you're in the second century or so there's just no going back you have the feeling that it's just all inevitable that the senate they enlarge the box it's just nothing but an honorific uh and there's no way

to reverse it it's just this kind of slow-rolling political tragedy, really. Okay, do you really believe that you could put together a coalition, you could convince Mitch McConnell to put together even a kind of sense of the Senate vote, a resolution on getting cameras out of that chamber? Do you really believe there's a way back? Or is this, Ben Sasse, a noble cri de coeur, a noble attempt to fight a kind of useful retreat? Fair question. So, first of all, putting it in the context of the decline of Rome does feel too grandiose, but I don't think you're wrong about the fact that something really special was lost, and we are losing some really special things. We haven't done

basic civics in this country for 50 years, right? The average high school junior, senior, I don't know what the current number is, but it bounces around, would get a 50% grade on the citizenship test that new citizens, when they're naturalized, average a 98.5, 99% graduation rate on that test. So our kids are being raised with amnesia and orphanhood about what America means. Why do we have limited government? We have limited government because we believe in the universal dignity of everybody created in God's image. And we think that our rights, freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, redress of grievances, these are pre-governmental rights. They flow to us from nature. And government is limited because we don't want to encroach upon that grand dignity of all 330 million Americans. If you believe that, then it makes sense,

it follows, that you would care about both vertical and horizontal separation of powers. And so the legislative executive distinction that you talk about evaporating here is a really, really bad idea, because individuals may act more expeditiously than committees, but groups deliberate more effectively than an individual. An individual can make a dumb decision that a committee of thoughtful people shouldn't make that same mistake. There's wisdom in the deliberative process. We just don't have any institution to deliberate right now. And as the legislature has, as you rightly say, hunted power to the executive branch for decades, lots of these people are more interested in their partisan identity.

And again, I want to say ideologically, I'm one of the most conservative members of the Senate, but I'm not a partisan person. I don't think either of these parties are very interesting. They're both decrepit. They're spent. These are exhausted parties that don't have a lot of ideas. And most people in the Congress are more party hack than they are, as the founders would have assumed, jealous for their prerogatives of their institution of government because they want to preserve that separation of powers, especially between the legislative and the executive. So I think recovery is essential to recover so much of the grandeur of American life. And what I'm trying to do is start a conversation or move into public a conversation that a lot of senators will admit in private, which is that it's a pretty

dysfunctional institution. And we should have a big menu of potential levers to pull on. I'm a happy warrior about the American idea and the fact that it would be a tragedy to not pass on to our kids what we've inherited from our grandparents. But, you know, we haven't been doing that civics. And so we're going to need to go back to the drawing board to make sure people understand why we have this separation structure we have. Hey, Senators, Rob, again, I just have two questions. One of them is, are you nuts? One of the things you suggest in your piece is, and I'm quoting now, senators should live, eat and meet in dormitories when the Senate is in session. It's hard to demonize people you spend time with every day.

OK, fine. Who's your roommate? I sleep in my office already. For me, the sacrifice here is not great. I'm a weekly commuter. I live in rural Nebraska and we've got three kids and I go back and forth every week already. But I'll tell you, besides the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is a very healthy group of adults, there are no cameras there, and people actually wrestle through a lot of big problems pretty effectively. I think it's the only committee that works, and I think it's obviously connected to the lack of cameras.

Most committees you wouldn't want to have no transparency. We're dealing with classified information. So what you'd want is audio of the hearing and you'd want immediate written transcripts. The camera going away would help. caucus. There are 11 R's and 7 D's who work out every day. And the 18 of us who are in the gym together, and there's nobody else in there, tend to have a lot harder time lying about each other and about each other's motives because we're friends. As you age and you suffer in there, and breaking bread has that effect on people. I think obviously one of the problems of the Senate today is that people are fleeing from campus as fast as they can every day to get to K Street and get paid by lobbyists to have dinner with them, right? I mean, they're not being bribed.

I don't mean to say that. But the fundraising burden is about the number one existential burden most people feel. We should have term limits, but we should also just create incentives for senators to be trying to work through actual problems together as opposed to just go raise money and get on cable. Okay, so I accept that. Now, I can't let you go. I know you've got to run, but I can't let you go without asking a really sort of tacky election 2020-related question. Nebraska's got, you know, hinky electoral vote situation where there's two kind of upper grabs, and people are now, that is the state we're in, in the political season, where we're sort of, people are trying to parse and figure out and

predict where those two are going to go. What do you think is going to happen in Nebraska in November? You know, so you're right. Nebraska and Maine are the only two states that don't do winner-take-all electoral college. Our congressional districts determine how our electoral votes go, and President Obama won Omaha. And so, you know, Biden has been competing hard and his team campaigning in Omaha. I think that Biden's previously 10 or 11 point lead over Trump in Omaha looks to me, I haven't seen any current polling the last two or three weeks, but it looks to me to be more like seven-ish now than 10 or 11. But I would say Nebraska's overwhelmingly a red state and Omaha leans blue. I'm spending a lot of my time trying to help Don Bacon,

our really good retired Air Force general, who is just finishing his term in the House of Representatives and running for re-election against a Nebraska version of AOC. We have a socialist running to be the Democrat to represent Omaha. So I'm spending a lot of time with Congressman Bacon's team in re-election effort. So that's an Omaha implication where I'm spending my time. But I just want to reiterate that I think the most important election in America in 53 days, whatever our right math is, is for the United States Senate. Because I think the Senate is about a 50-50 coin toss. And if the Democrats win, and if they get over 52 or 53, and they end the filibuster, I think they will try to radically change American life. Your listeners know this,

but I don't think the average voter, median voter, understands that the size of the Supreme Court is a simple statute. It's not in the Constitution. It was six at the founding, and it became seven in the early 19th century, and it became nine about 100 years ago. I think you could see a world where the Democrats would have 13 or 15 people on the Supreme Court by a year from today if they ended the filibuster and then just changed the law that defines the composition size of the Supreme Court. And then the nuttiest stuff that you see happening on American campuses right now, this totally anti-American idea that speech and violence are the same thing. So the American political system exists to protect you from violence so that you can

debate with your friends and neighbors and even opponents. That's how much dignity we people think people have, that debates matter. Debate is not speech. Violence is not speech. Violence is not speech. And that craziness on campus, I think you'd see that in the courts if the Dems were able to bust the filibuster and pack the court. And so that's where I'm spending most of my time campaigning with my colleagues in Montana and Iowa and Alaska, et cetera.

Preach. Exactly. I'm not sure you got the memo. Speech is violence and silence is violence as well. And actual violence is not violence either. I, too, look forward to a Supreme Court having to adjudicate through that particular philosophical morass. But let me get more pretentious than Peter Robinson when it comes to Roman history. Impostor.

No, it is. No, it can be done. It can be done, Peter. Tiberius, we know, retreated from Rome and went to his via and just hung out there and governed from a distance. Would President Sasse move the locus of the federal government to, I don't know, Nebraska, so that a more sensible mentality, not infected by the Covidian swamp and the political swamp, might work its way into the culture. Of course, I jest, but there is something about D.C. that's so seductive to everybody

that all of the ideas that you've given us in this podcast are fantastic ideas, and we would profit from them, including, you know, of course, the sitcom version of all the senators living together. That's where we want the cameras, by the way. Not in the Senate. We want a Big Brother-style show about the senators living together. That's where we want the cameras, by the way, not in the Senate. We want a Big Brother-style show about the senators living together. But the D.C. culture itself is so comfortable to those who are there, aside from the fundraising. Why would they? Let me put it this way. Do you actually think that there is a sufficient well of civic interest in

the political class these days to do something that would fundamentally transform the country for the better at the expense of their own fame and cushy positions. Yeah, I mean, Tom Coburn was one of the great men of the Senate, one of the tragedies of his death, besides just a guy dying way too early and his family's losses, that he was working on an Article 5 convention of the states to look at some reform issues that could bubble up from the bottom. Because I think you're right. I mean, a constitutional amendment to have a single Senate term of 12 years or even the more traditional version of the proposal, stay six-year terms but have a two-term limit

in the Senate, most of these people are never, ever going to consider voting for something that would limit their power and their addiction to Washington. But the public does understand now that the five richest counties in America at a median per capital level, the five richest counties in America are the five counties of Maryland and Virginia that touch Washington, D.C. That would completely flabbergast the founders. And so I think that, you know, one of the debates that historians are going to be having 30 and 50 years from now is what happened in American political life in the moment in which we're living. And I think that Donald Trump is far more a consequence of how broken D.C. is than a cause of the chaos through which we're living. I think the 2016 moment is a

consequence of the public saying, hold up, this stuff doesn't work. And we're not satisfied with the level of governance we're getting. And one of the things I don't think we do well is we just tend to think about the political spectrum on a right-left continuum. We've got sort of an x-axis from progressivism on the left and then center-left, centrism, center-right, and whatever a far-right end of the continuum might be defined as now. I think we need to add a Y-axis to our analysis, and it should go from politically addicted at the top to healthy middle-brow people in the middle to politically disengaged at the bottom. And I just don't think we're doing a good enough job in our analytics of what's happening of recognizing that weirdos in the upper left, sort of neo-socialist, and kind of weirdos in the upper right, you know, people wanting to compete for a legacy of Trumpism, but as

instant reality TV, something that looks like an idiocracy movie trailer. Those two ninths, I want to say quadrants, of the former McKinsey BCG guy, I don't know what I call them, but the one ninth at the upper left, the AOCs of the world, and the one ninth at the upper right, that's less than 14% of America. The reality is less than 14% of America pays attention to politics on a daily basis. What's happening is that the middle, and I say this as a very conservative guy, but the middle is being crowded out on both dimensions. The middle is being crowded out on an ideological dimension on our x-axis, but on the y-axis, people who engage in politics a little bit, you know, an Eisenhower-y and one-shear-for-politics kind of perspective,

that's actually the basic American way to say government matters, policy matters. Obviously, it matters that we adequately fund our troops and defend against a world that is dangerous and where the wilderness returns. Governance matters, but politics should not be the center of your life. It should not be the center of your entertainment interests. It should not be your primary community. The enemy of my enemy is my friend is a crappy way to actually find friends. Like your neighborhood and your church and your work and your football loyalty should beat all that. And middle-brow people are being crowded out. And I think because the weirdos, because political addicts are so loud, we act

like they are really most of the system. They're not. I tell you, as a guy who spends a lot of time doing field work in Nebraska, I drive a garbage truck, I work tree services, I'll harvest a wheat field, I do ag manufacturing. When you get around regular people working their jobs every day, their interests in politics are much more mature. They're simpler. Washington should do a handful of very small number of definable things and do them better than it's done. And I think the reaction against the system that we saw in 2016 is probably going to have coming reactions in the next five or 10 years that are at least as big. We just can't predict which next reality TV show star, Oprah, you know, becomes president next. We, I think we should recognize that D.C. is not responsive. And when D.C. isn't responsive,

there will be consequences in the political system. And it'd be great to get in front of that in a deliberative way. Right. When you talk to people out there who are doing actual work, like picking up something heavy from here and putting it over there or driving a large piece of machinery and try not to go into the... Yes, they've got stuff to do so they don't fixate on these ridiculous little minutiae of politics that people who saturate themselves with cable news do. But for the rest of them, symbolic information managers who don't actually have to sweat for anything, they've got a lot of time to replace good old fashion religious urgings with politics.

And politics is the worst religion ever. It's the absolute worst. You don't actually have to do anything other than embody a set of ideas that have been handed to you by the priests that tell you that if you believe these things, you go to some sort of secular heaven. So you're right. I agree. And the sooner we take politics off the religious scale, regretter. I like your Y axis, though, because it does remind us there are so many people who are being squeezed up and down because they're being identified as a Nazi or a commie if they don't believe this. And it's rational, smart, historically grounded voices like yours that we love.

And we know you probably have to get back to the world's greatest deliberative body and blow on that saucer in which the passion is cool. Right. So we should probably get back to the world's greatest deliberative body and blow on that saucer in which the passion's cool, right? So we should probably get back to work. As we close, let me just underscore, you have the best line of our 45 minutes together. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't give him that. Let the man speak. Let the man speak. We should part with a joke or with something about Nebraska football, but let's part with a joke or with something about Nebraska football, but let's part with this. Politics is a really crappy religion, right? Because there's never actually any forgiveness. There's never any grace. There's never any Eucharist. There's never any table. There's never anything shared. It's just more ranting. And the weirdos who think you can replace deliberation with ranting,

they're not serving my neighbors. They're not serving the people in Nebraska. We got to do better than that. No, and it's got the, it's, it has no redemption and it has the worst songs ever. You go to church, you get near my God to the, you get something good. You go to their church and the oldest thing they got is if I had a hammer, you know, okay, you need to go to the store, buy a fricking hammer. How hard can it be? Senator Sass, thanks so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. Yeah, well, you know, if there are 13 Supreme Court justices or 12 or 15, however many they want to do, I can't wait for some law to be passed in the Supreme Court to find it for non-constitutional reasons, but because it's

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Sometimes, as much as we would love to talk for nine hours, it just doesn't work out that way. Rob's gone. He evaporated. Scotty beamed him up about 10 minutes ago. Peter's now on the pad waiting to go down himself. Of course, I can sit here and do this all day, but the guy's got a scamper off. So we're going to do that, Peter. It's been a pleasure.

And wherever you're going to, have fun. Have a good weekend. Be warm and safe in California. And I can see Rob disappearing over the horizon to an important business phone call. And Peter's off. Here's why I'm – thank you very much, James. I'm going to drop off now. People should know that we had to shift the usual recording time to accommodate Senator Sasse, and Rob and I just butted up against our schedule. Here's why I'm living for next week. We get back to the Lilacs post of the week.

Oh, yes, we do. We're two weeks behind that, and I've got some corkers to share with you, because as ever, the Ricochet members deliver every single day in the member feed on the main page. Go there, ricochet.com. Peter, it's been fun. There's a little girl awaiting. Waiting there all alone. Yes, Betty. Where the cuckold birds are so many. Among the sunflowers I long to roam. Ah, sing it, boy. In the sand hills of old Nebraska That's my home, sweet

home There are lots of songs to sing about the Wabash about Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas But the sand hills of old Nebraska are dear to my heart, don't you know

Ricochet! Join the conversation. Yes, let's do it pretty, my boy Play the guitar I'll play it pretty now. In the sand hills of old Nebraska That's where the tall corn grows There's a little girl awaiting Waiting there all alone

where the cuckoo birds are so many