[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 1 (Tuesday, January 3, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S13-S17]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         FAREWELL TO THE SENATE

  Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I rise to speak from this floor for the 
last time. Serving the people of Nebraska as their Senator has been a 
unique honor, and I will remain grateful for all that I have learned 
from the folks who do more to feed the world than any people anytime or 
place in all of human history, quite literally.
  I know that I speak for my team as well--some here on the floor for 
the first time, some in the Gallery--in saying to Nebraskans: Thank you 
for these 8 years--8 years of us getting to be a part of a team much 
bigger than just ourselves. That is a special privilege, and none of 
the 32 of us now on the team, and the dozens who have already departed, 
take that for granted, and so we say thank you to Nebraska.
  Running for office is a dangerous business. In asking someone to give 
you their vote, you are asking them to give you their trust, to put 
their trust in you that you will rightly prioritize and sequence their 
long-term interests.
  You are asking them to trust your judgment, your conscience, and your 
common sense.
  Our wrestling together--Nebraskans and me--over the last 8 years has 
had some marked ups and downs, as you gave me victories in all 93 
counties when I ran for office the very first time in my life in 2014 
and then made me the most censored public official in the history of 
Nebraska over the next 6 years; but then proceeded, 2 years ago, to 
reelect me again, again winning all 93 counties and securing the most 
votes of anyone in the history of our State. Many times it felt like a 
noogie and a slap and a head butt and a hug all at once.
  Besides my State and my wonderful staff, I obviously want to thank my 
family--my three ladies and Breck--not just for supporting and 
encouraging me but for charging out to embrace learning across all of 
Nebraska with me--visiting all 93 counties many, many times; climbing 
all over combines and tractors; learning so much about cattle and pigs 
and seed corn. My kids can tell you more about artificial insemination 
and how to turn a breeched calf that you wouldn't be able to eat again 
for 72 hours.
  They got to know a beautiful State from east to west, from city to 
country, and from old to young. They have

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seen and learned more about--and respected--and learned to do more hard 
work. Ours is a special State.
  Breck, our youngest, got to feed 2,000-pound bulls with names like 
Petrone. He got to bring home stray dogs and ranch animals, with or 
without permission. He got to live off of an RV for about 16 months, 
which I will now confess, given that there probably is less regulatory 
reach, that we probably violated a good bit of code on that RV.
  He got to stand with me dozens of times as we sent soldiers off and 
welcomed soldiers home to the running embrace of their families.
  Alex, our middle daughter, has given so many tours of this Capitol, 
and she knows the stories of our country and the tributes etched and 
strewn throughout this building, to people who preserved a Republic. 
These are experiences that bore a hole in her soul as she grew, and 
though she knows that America is imperfect, she knows to never take it 
for granted.
  Corrie, our eldest, had a chance just this last summer to join me at 
the Polish-Ukrainian border, joining groups who were visiting soldiers 
in hospitals who had given their limbs to defend their homes, coloring 
and drawing pictures with orphans whose parents won't come back because 
of an evil man who thinks he can seize land that is not his. She drank 
vodka with Ukrainian officers.
  And most importantly, Melissa, I have missed hundreds and hundreds of 
family dinners, both the good and the bad, the tears and the laughter 
at that table, and I want to thank you for loving me, for forgiving 
me for those missed dinners, for your giant brain and your bigger 
heart, for your conviction and your love of passing on an inheritance 
of liberty to the next generation, and for a shared growth mindset.

  I know you will kick my butt if I tear up.
  Melissa and I, as Nebraskans, understood from day 1 on the campaign 
bus back in 2013, never planned to spend a lifetime in Washington. That 
is not what our Founders envisioned for the people they would send to 
the Federal city. They envisioned, rather, Congressmen, Senators, and 
Presidents who thought of DC as a temporary stay, Washington as a place 
to do a good bit of neighbor-loving work but then to go back home to 
the more permanent work of life in flesh-and-blood, whole communities.
  Americans in the 1780s, in their canon, actually knew well the story 
of Cincinnatus--they named some towns after him--who took up the burden 
of power in a shaky Rome, then exercised it responsibly to restabilize 
things, and then laid it down again to go back to his vegetable garden, 
which was the real world.
  Our Founders envisioned citizens who would govern themselves, not be 
governed by a distant imperial city; who would, as George Washington 
said--and then repeated here as we recite every year in the Washington 
Farewell Address--that folks would ``sit safely under his own vine and 
fig tree'' again.
  We are a long way from that picture, of course. The vast majority of 
Americans now say it feels like we are in decline; 80 percent of folks 
on the left, north of 80 percent of folks in the middle, and fully 90 
percent of folks on the right tell pollsters that they think the 
country is not just headed in the wrong direction but perhaps 
permanently in decline.
  I am going to argue in a moment against the pessimism of our age, but 
we should first acknowledge that there are legitimate, big reasons that 
people are worried--fatherlessness, the epidemic of opioids, the deaths 
of despair, the loss of community, the foreign policy humiliation, the 
ugly inflation. It feels like we are inundated with terrible news. At a 
time when folks feel so disoriented, when the future seems obscure, 
when danger seems to be signaled from every direction, it is not 
surprising that false prophets of power would suggest that the only 
answer is more centralized power--I alone can fix it.
  It is not surprising that five of the richest counties in the Nation 
now are the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia that touch Washington, 
DC--a city that has an entire industry that has grown up around the 
sprawling bureaucracy and its permanent political class. We seem to be 
in the process of exchanging a Republic of self-governing citizens and 
the virtues of federalism, in which States would tussle and compete, 
with the vices instead of administrative centralization, in which 
experts from Washington, DC, who don't have to stand for reelection, 
would try to impose uniform rules on a diverse continental nation of 
330 million people. It seems so obviously silly.
  We seem to be on a foolhardy path of trading the vigor of civic 
pluralism and consensus building with the disease of ``my way or the 
highway'' political zealotry. But we get distracted by the differing 
flavors of the zealotry. We get captivated by the declining brands 
``Republican'' and ``Democrat,'' and we regularly think that the 
problem in the city might actually be that the policy divides are taken 
so seriously that the deep divide is red jersey screaming versus blue 
jersey screaming. That would be a mistake. It would be to misdiagnose 
what is actually happening in our time. For the prophets of despair, 
both right and left, are actually telling Americans a really similar 
story, and the story is this: We are weak. Whether they stand on my 
side of the aisle or the other side of the aisle as they yell, the 
political addicts who prize short-term power over long-term dignity and 
liberty are the ones who now dominate the Nation's conversation, and 
their story is roughly symmetrical: You are getting victimized by the 
other team. The things that are wrong are coming from the politicians 
on the other side. The Nation is in decline. Give us more power, for we 
alone can fix it.
  On the left, media personalities and activists often weirdly and 
ahistorically denounce the idea of America itself, calling the Founding 
racist and our institutions unjust. To them, our history is exclusively 
a story of victimhood and a narrative of oppression. There can be no 
redemption, no progress, and no hope. Political zealots on the left 
don't see much of anything worth conserving in America, and if you 
disagree with them, it must be because you are an irredeemable 
deplorable, clinging to some phobic backward-looking vision. There is 
no possibility of honest disagreement.
  But on the right now, too, victimization is a story we trumpet. 
Demagogues denounce the idea that there could be anything left to 
conserve in America. According to these zealots, we lost the idea of 
America long ago, and it is naive to think it could be recovered. It is 
much better to burn things down than try to rebuild. Cynicism is 
supposedly cool. They shout that persuasion can't work, and the left 
will turn us into their victims if we don't stop them first. Persuasion 
is a crutch for the weak, for those who are too cowardly to fight.
  The particular policy agendas obviously differ, but ultimately the 
message of all politics-first folks is basically the same: The only way 
to put an end to the culture war is to move beyond the outdated idea of 
a limited Constitution and instead grab more power for the good guys 
while there is still time. The left's plan is more unelected, 
unaccountable bureaucrats. The right's plan is now to give similar 
kinds of power to a strong man. But, ultimately, there is not much 
difference between these so-called plans. Anti-pluralists are against 
dissent. They are against minorities. They are against diversity. They 
are against place. They are against liberty and human dignity.
  The factions differ on who should be Caesar, but beyond that there is 
much on which they agree.
  They salivate on the idea of chaos in our disrupted age that can be 
the excuse for seizing more power. They foment anger and fear because 
they think if we are angry and scared enough, we will assent to some 
Caesarist solution.
  These factions are dangerous, to be sure, but here is what we fail to 
appreciate most of the time: They are factions and they are small and 
they command nothing like majority opinion. When they appear to win, 
what they are really only doing is putting together a temporary 
majority coalition of folks, temporarily, who are disgusted by the 
other side's arrogant overreach. That is why in every midterm 
election--or almost every midterm election--for three decades now, we 
have seen a new President 2 years into his term lose the Congress.

  Why does this happen every cycle? It isn't because the Congress is 
suddenly

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popular. It is because the President, who usually won a ``lesser of two 
evils'' election in the eyes of the American public, then populated his 
White House with foolish folks who believe that they were elected with 
a sweeping mandate to transform America and they prompted backlash.
  It is also the single-most obvious and important explanation of what 
happened in 2016. Historians are not going to look back on 2016 as 
about who won. What happened in 2016 was a race to the bottom by 
statistically the two most unpopular majority party candidates in the 
history of polling. One guy won simply because he was the second-most 
unpopular person in the history of polling. Go to any corner bar, and a 
supermajority of Americans already know this. By the way, we roughly 
did the same thing again 4 years later. Forget the nonsense about a new 
FDR administration. America elected a new guy because they were sick of 
the old guy. This is also the most basic and obvious explanation for 
the crap show that is happening at the other end of this building right 
now. Nancy Pelosi's party, quite obviously, lost a referendum on the 
stewardship of the House of Representatives 60 days ago, but no one 
won, least of all Kevin McCarthy. Nobody in America is crying out for 
ambition for ambition's sake.
  So let's restate this overreach and repulsion hypothesis in a more 
positive way, because it turns out that the American people are quite 
ahead of the political classes. It turns out that the American people 
don't like political addicts. They don't like political zealotry. This 
is good news. To quote one correspondent to my office, literally this 
week, ``the Senate today reminds me of a lunchroom full of insecure 
adolescents trying anything and everything to get attention--not 
everybody, of course, but the loud ones. But most of us eventually 
learn to grow up. Let's hope that someday the electorate kicks the 
Senate out of its extended puberty by letting folks know that mooning 
each other really isn't that cool.''
  Nebraskans have a way with words.
  Stated with a few less naked-butt examples, here is the good news 
that we need the ears to hear. Americans overwhelmingly don't want 
power to be at the center of our shared experience. They don't want a 
leftwing nanny state telling them how to live, and they certainly don't 
want a rightwing potentate promising to crush all of our so-called 
``domestic enemies.''
  We want America to be America again.
  Americans don't believe the Constitution is obsolete. They don't 
believe that principled pluralism can't work anymore. They don't accept 
the notion that we are all so weak that we have no agency.
  Yes, it is true that it is hard to look away from the addictive 
horror of the 24-hour news cycle. Rubbernecking is deep inside all 
humans. But what the zealots preaching Jeremiah's doom and decline 
don't understand, even about America's history or about Americans' 
preferences, is that, despite some of the pessimism of our uncertain, 
technologically disrupted moment, Americans are fundamentally grateful 
to be here in the greatest nation the world has ever known. We are 
optimists by the miracle of our birthplace.
  We know that politics won't save us, but that doesn't mean that we 
are hopeless. It just means that we know that what is best about 
America comes from outside the centers of power, same as it ever was.
  We need to regain our bearings and to recall our original 
construction and our architecture. We don't need Americans to be 
confident about self-governance for men and women who have been given a 
Republic to hold. We need to be able to see clearly the three immense 
and enduring reasons for our hope: the Constitution, our institutions, 
and, most fundamentally, the people themselves.
  The U.S. Constitution is the greatest political document ever 
written. The central forming principles that undergird it, the 
universal dignity of human beings, and thus the rejection of absolute 
power, because souls cannot be compelled by force--this is the soul of 
America. When the country is at its best, we are making good on that 
promise, and no country has been more blessed with wise political 
arrangements than we--the separation of power both vertically and 
horizontally. It is a glorious inheritance, and despite attacks by 
demagogues, the Constitution endures.
  At the convention in Philadelphia, George Washington called this 
document the ``standard to which the wise and the honest can repair.'' 
So long as the Constitution endures, we too can repair and recover and 
hope again in this system.
  The second reason for our hope: Americans are institution builders. 
Building is in our DNA. We have built towns on the frontier, railroads 
across the continent, Hoover Dams and Empire State Buildings. But, more 
importantly than this important physical architecture and 
infrastructure, we built the human institutions that support and 
sustain us across institutions and generations.
  We know that we are weak and fragile on our own, but the bonds of 
community enable us to flourish. Our institutions are the vital centers 
of our life together. Small and large, local and national, temporary 
and enduring, institutions are the gathering places where we find what 
we need to keep going: the churches that serve the needs of their 
communities, the schools that sharpen the minds of the next generation, 
the businesses that keep our households up and running, the Little 
Leagues, the ballet troupes, the Fourth of July parades, the Christmas 
carolers, the million and one other associations, organizations, and 
clubs and groups through which we live and pass along our life 
together.
  When our institutions are withering, America withers. But when our 
institutions bud anew, America is alive and new again. That is why 
America will always belong to the doers, not the whiners. America 
belongs to the man in the arena willing to spend himself in a worthy 
cause. America belongs to the parents who eat on the go so their kids 
can eat at the dinner table. America belongs to the inventors and 
innovators whose garage tinkering changed the world. America belongs to 
the neighbors who see someone in need and go out and launch a soup 
kitchen and a clothing drive and an after-school tutoring program. They 
don't wait for this city. They move.
  We have not thrived for two centuries because of power at the top and 
in the center. We have not thrived chiefly because of who was in office 
or because of the rules and regulations that are handed down from 
Washington. Rather, we have thrived because of the diversity in every 
city, in every town, and in every neighborhood. Though different, you 
find this sameness: the people who don't want to be served but to 
serve, those who are not taking but giving, those who are not tearing 
down but building up. This is who Americans are, and it is a humble and 
beautiful thing for all of us to be a part of together.
  And here is thus the third reason for hope--the American people 
themselves--for America does have a civil religion. It isn't a precise 
theology, but it is, instead, a shared anthropology. It is about people 
important enough and with enough dignity that the state is not allowed 
in our system to get in the way of each of our individual needs to make 
sense of mortality and the afterlife, to make peace with God, and to 
consider carefully how we would redeem our days, for those days are 
numbered and finite.
  Ultimately, then, our system, our faith in the Constitution and in 
our institutions flows from what we believe in common about people 
themselves and the universal dignity that the 330 million of us possess 
from our Creator, for we are one of a kind. You can come from anywhere 
in the world and be one with us.
  Wild and wonderful and unlike any other country the world has ever 
known, we are equally characterized by a spirit of association and a 
spirit of enterprise. We have the audacity to be optimistic, even when 
things are the bleakest. We are brash and loud and reckless--kind of 
insane, to be honest. But there is a special vigor. We are the kind of 
people you want with you when things go sideways. We are the kind of 
people the world wants with it when things go sideways, the kind of 
people who get the job done and keep our word. That is who we are as 
Americans, far before the less important question of our policy debate 
preferences and what color partisan jersey we wear.

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That is who we are as American pluralists, and that is why recovery 
from our current messes is not only possible but likely.
  But recovery comes with preconditions, and it comes only if we 
acknowledge the truth that the outrage-and-fear industrial complex 
wants to obfuscate, and that is that the zealots and the tribalists and 
the grandstanders and the very online political addicts, they will not 
fix anything. They won't because they can't. Recovery can come only 
from civic pluralists.
  Policy debates obviously matter, but the most important divide in 
American life today isn't red versus blue; it is pluralist versus 
political zealot. Recovery will come only from the pluralists, and here 
is what it will look like: citizens who resist the temptation to reduce 
fellow Americans to caricatures of political affiliation.
  Recovery requires investment in things that outlast partisan 
preference. We must steward the age and play our small but vital part 
in the work of self-government because, yes, policy matters; and, yes, 
there must be important and vigorous debate; and, no, being polite for 
the sake of being inoffensive isn't the highest good; and, no, mushy-
middle ``Kumbayaism'' will not be a strategy.
  But more than debates about policy, we need Americans to believe they 
can build again. We need to believe that loving your neighbor is more 
important than the policy disagreements. We need to be invested in 
those actually central institutions that make the Nation vibrant.
  And this is why the Senate matters so much. For the Senate doesn't 
build the other institutions, but more than any other single 
institution, more than any other place, more than any other room--more 
than any other room--this body, this place, and this floor has a 
special place to play in advocating for all of those other institutions 
where people actually break bread and provide care to the dying. The 
Senate has a special role to play in America's recovery.
  Senators, colleagues and friends, each of us knows that this 
institution doesn't work very well right now. Each of us knows that we 
should be taking a look in the mirror and acknowledging that lives 
lived in a politicized echo chamber are unworthy of a place that calls 
itself a deliberative body, let alone the world's greatest deliberative 
body. Too many of the so-called ``debates'' here aren't debates at all, 
not in the way that Webster or Clay, Dirksen or Chase Smith could even 
recognize.

  When we are being honest with each other, which usually means when we 
are in one of the very rare occasions when cameras aren't present, we 
all know that a big chunk of the performative yelling that happens here 
and in every hearing room is just about being booked for even more 
performative yelling at night on TV. It might feel good temporarily--a 
little dopamine hit to fire off a clever tweet or get booked on a 
supposedly prime spot--but, honestly, almost nobody is watching, and 
the share is getting smaller. Run the numbers; 99 percent of political 
tweets come from 5\1/2\ percent of Americans. The prime-time lineups of 
the three biggest cable networks almost never hit 2 percent of the 
public. So much of the performative BS that happens around here is 
about getting invited on shows that don't have an audience. These 
small, narrowly-targeted programs run on outrage. It is infotainment 
fuel. Nobody goes viral for talking about policy tradeoffs, and hardly 
anyone gets booked for a nuanced debate. It is performative, and it is 
beneath the calling of those called to serve in this place.
  A lot of us, behind closed doors, when the cameras are off, say we 
want a different Senate. We want a place that prioritizes long-term 
legislation that looks at the Nation's most fundamental challenges. A 
lot of us want an institution that takes seriously the rise of an 
expansionistic, militant, imperialist China, and debates are the best 
paths to attacking that challenge. And that does happen, but it happens 
in the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is both good but also a 
cautionary tale about our more fundamental problem.
  Intel works largely because we have no cameras there to reward 
performative grandstanding. Intel works because it is classified and 
because it has the excuse of being classified.
  So where will the meaningful, beyond-tribal debates about the 
hollowing out of local communities, about the increasing depths of 
despair? Where will we debate how we can more effectively address the 
crisis of family formation and the crisis of our long-term debt?
  What we say we want and what we actually do here are worlds apart. 
Senators get cowed by threats from social media mobs, advocacy 
organizations, small-dollar donors and cable hosts. Senators learn when 
they are up for reelection that they are supposed to have kept their 
heads down, not rocked the boat, not talked about long-term issues, and 
take the path of least resistance to surviving the next election cycle. 
And that is making this body increasingly irrelevant, something none of 
us actually want.
  But there really is no substitute for the Senate. If recovery is 
going to come, it will mostly be built in local institutions in a 
million different ways, but the Senate is an essential ingredient to 
enabling that. No other place can serve the purpose of this room.
  Some people including, weirdly, some who serve in this body, think 
that the public square has migrated online, that you can substitute 
debate of humans who actually know each other and take a long-term 
perspective with social media and with tweets. They are lying to 
themselves. Twitter is awesome for sports, to be clear, but if it 
serves any broader public purpose, it is basically just a public 
reminder of the lunatic asylum that is potential in all social 
contagion.
  Digital space cannot recreate what this Chamber does, and hard 
thinking can almost never happen in 280 characters. We have always had 
angry people, and we have always had crazy people; but what is new in 
our time is that those who are politically addicted in being more 
willing to shout down more balanced people have new tools at their 
disposal to privilege the politically abnormal over the normies. It 
would be a disastrous mistake for the Senate to give similar, 
disproportionate voice to the loudest and the angriest, not just 
because the Founders created this institution largely as a warning 
against the dangers of zealous faction but, also, simply because the 
data clearly shows that the angriest are not at all representative. 
Most of our constituents don't like the loud and the angry. We are a 
bell-curve nation, and a tiny, tiny share at each extreme of the tail 
is getting almost all of the attention.
  At one level, I am just making a boring, mundane argument for a 
certain kind of moderation, but I don't chiefly mean policy moderation. 
Let there be debates across the continuum from far left to center left 
to center right to far right. Debate policy with vigor. But we need a 
different kind of moderation. We need a Senate that is characterized by 
tonal and dispositional moderation, and tonal and dispositional 
moderation flow chiefly from humility and wisdom and from an awareness 
that we are ensouled and that souls cannot be coerced. A government 
that recognizes and respects us as souls should elicit from each of us 
great gratitude.
  In this moment, what we need as a nation, more than anything else, is 
more gratitude, not more grievance. We Americans have been given so 
much to be thankful for. We are blessed with a limited government that 
exists to protect historic freedoms, stuff unprecedented on the world 
stage--the free exercise of religion, free speech, free assembly, a 
free economy. There are real injustices in America's past and in our 
present, and we cannot and should not overlook them. But the answer to 
injustice is never wallowing in or trying to inflame victimhood. The 
heroes of American history--the folks whom we have put in marble all 
around this Capitol--know that this country gets to write its own 
destiny. Generation after generation fought to make this a better and a 
freer and a more just place, and theirs is the example that we should 
follow. Folks like Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther 
King--they were too busy building. Let the same be said of those who 
would aspire to serve in this place. Let the Senate be the Senate 
again.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  (Applause.)

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  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.

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