Ben Sasse

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, one of the fundamental purposes of this body is to debate some of the biggest issues facing this Nation and to do so in an honorable way. The Senate is for debate but not as an abstraction. It is to be addressing and ultimately solving the meatiest challenges the Constitution demands that we tackle. Unfortunately, a great deal of our debate is weak and embarrassing. Much of it falls off the trivial side of the cliff or the shrill side of the cliff. During my time serving Nebraskans in this place, I hope to be aligned with those who want fighting and debating in this place, but it needs to be meaningful fighting. It needs to be honorable, honest debating. To that end, there is a terrific column this week by Pete Wehner in Commentary magazine. Partly because the column is about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at whose desk I intentionally sit, partly because it is about C.S. Lewis, a man whose writings have changed my life, and partly because it is just darn good exhortation to us, I would like to read a portion of this column into the Senate Record today. Wehner begins: While reading Gregory Weiner's fascinating book ``American Burke,'' I came across this comment: ``(Daniel Patrick) Moynihan's intellectual curiosity was such that he gravitated toward thinkers with whom he disagreed precisely because he disagreed with them and could consequently learn from them. This observation reminded me of an incident in 1948 involving C.S. Lewis and Elizabeth Anscombe, a Catholic convert who was considered one of the most brilliant moral philosophers of her generation. Lewis was president of the Oxford Socratic Club, an open forum that met every Monday evening and whose purpose was to discuss the intellectual difficulties connected with religion, and with Christianity in particular. ``In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university-- And, I would add, such as a Senate-- there is always the danger that those who think alike should gather together into `coteries' where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumor that the outsiders say thus and thus,''. . . . The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other groups can say. . . . On February 2, 1948, Anscombe and Lewis debated a portion of Lewis's book ``Miracles,'' with Anscombe reading a paper pointing out ``a fatal flaw in Lewis's argument,''. . . (It was a complicated critique having to do with the conflation of irrational and nonrational factors in belief-formation.) The result of the debate, which Lewis himself felt he lost, was revisions to his book. Anscombe, while not convinced by the changes made by Lewis, did say ``the fact that Lewis rewrote that chapter, and rewrote it so that it now has these qualities, shows his honesty and seriousness.'' That's not all. When Lewis was asked to nominate speakers for the 1951 Socratic Club season, Anscombe was his first choice. ``That lady is quite right to refute what she thinks bad theistic arguments, but does this not almost oblige her as a Christian to find good ones in their place: having obliterated me as an Apologist ought she not to succeed me?'' There is something impressive in the qualities demonstrated by Moynihan and Lewis: a willingness to learn from others, including those with whom we disagree. There is in this an admirable blend of intellectual humility and self- confidence--the humility to know that at best we possess only a partial understanding of the truth, which can always be enlarged; and the self-confidence that allows for refinement and amendment of our views in light of new arguments, new circumstances, new insights. Beyond that, it's a useful reminder that the quality we ought to strive for isn't certitude but to be a seeker of truth. That is, I think, what separates ideologues from true intellectuals. The former is determined to defend a pre- existing position come what may, interpreting facts to fit a worldview that is already well beyond challenge. The latter seeks genuine enlightenment and is eager to discard false notions they may hold--and values rather than resents those who help them on that journey. The purpose of debating, then, isn't so much just to win an argument as it is to deepen our understanding of how things really and truly are. It isn't to out-shout an opponent but, at least now and then, to listen to them, to weight their arguments with care, and even to learn from them. It's worth noting that Lewis warned about simply surrounding ourselves with like-minded people who reinforce our own biases and how debates conducted properly ``helped to civilize one another.'' What a quaint notion. In saying all this, I'm not insisting that everyone you disagree with is someone you can learn from, nor that everyone's views contain an equal measure of wisdom. Some people really don't know what they're talking about, some people really do hold pernicious and false views, and some people really do deserve harsh criticisms. My point is simply that because the pull is so strong the other way--most of us use debates as a way to amplify pre- existing views rather than refine them; try to crush opponents rather than engage and understand them; and focus on the weakest rather than the strongest arguments found in opposing views--the Moynihan-Lewis model is a good one to strive for. Wehner continues: I understand that talking about such things can sound hopelessly high-minded and, for some, signal a mushy lack of conviction. When you're in a political death match with the other side, after all, the idea of learning from it seems either ridiculously naive or slightly treasonous. But of course, this reaction highlights just how much things have gone off track. To be sure, American politics has always been a raucous affair. As Madison put it in Federalist #55, ``Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.'' The question is whether one stokes the passions of the mob or appeals to reason. As someone who doesn't do nearly well enough in this regard, I rather admire the Lewis model. He was a better man, and Miracles was a better book, for having recognized he lost his debate with Ms. Anscombe. For Lewis to then promote her despite having been bested by her was doubly impressive, yet in some respects not surprising. After all, Lewis was a man who cared more about striving after truth than in attending to his pride. He cared more about learning from arguments than winning them. So should we. Again, this was Pete Wehner, Commentary Magazine, with some instructive words for all of us laboring here in this body. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, today I would like to propose a thought experiment. Imagine if President Trump has been propelled into the White House with 300 electoral votes, having won mainly by the force of his personality, by calling BS on this town, and by his promise to ``get things done'' by acting unilaterally. The first 100 days are huge. He signs an order to turn the Peace Corps into stone masons to build a southern wall. He shutters the Department of Education, and by Executive order, he turns the Department of Interior into the classiest oil company the world has ever known. What happens next? Would those who have stayed silent about Executive overreach over the last 7 years suddenly find religion? After years of legislative atrophy, would Congress spring into action and remember its supposed power of the purse? And what about the Republicans? After having raged against a supposedly lawless President, would they suddenly find that they are OK with a strongman President, so long as he is wearing the same color jersey they are? He may be a lawless son of a gun, some would say, but he is our lawless son of a gun. Would the end justify the means? The way Congress thinks and talks about Executive power over the last few years has almost been this sophomoric. It has been based overwhelmingly on the party tag of whoever happens to sit in the Oval Office at any given moment. Republicans, Democrats, us versus them-- these are the political trenches, and the no man's land lies somewhere between this Chamber and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW. When your highest objective is advancing partisan lines on a map, it is easy to forgive a President who oversteps his authority, so long as he is your guy and the one with authority is in your party. This Senator suggests that this is the entirely wrong way to think about this issue. The problem of a weak Congress--which we are--and the growth of the unchecked Executive should be bad news to all of us. But more importantly than us, this should be bad news for every constituent who casts their votes for us under the impression that the Congress actually makes decisions and doesn't just offer whiny suggestions. The shrinking of the legislature in the age of Obama should be bad news for all of us for three reasons. First, we have taken an oath to defend the Constitution, and the Constitution invests the legislature with the legislative powers. Second, the Founders' design of checks and balances actually was and is a good idea. They were struggling to preserve the freedom of the individual and especially of the vulnerable against the powerful-- against those who could afford to hire the well-connected lobbyists. The Founders were equally afraid of the unchecked consolidation of power in a king or in the passions of a mob. They understood that human nature means that those in power will almost always try to grab more power, and that base reality hasn't changed over the last 230 years. Third, under the system that is now emerging, the public is growing more and more frustrated. They think that most of us will be reelected no matter what, and they think that the executive agencies that daily substitute rulemaking for legislating will promulgate whatever rules they want, no matter what, and that the people have no control. People grow more cynical in a world where the legislators who can be fired-- that is what elections are for--have little actual power and a world where bureaucrats, who have most of the actual power, cannot be fired. It is basically impossible for the people who are supposed to be in charge of our system to figure out how they would throw the bums out. They ask: Where is the accountability in the present arrangement? Allow me to be clear about two issues up front. First, this Senator believes that the weakness of the Congress is not just undesirable; it is actually dangerous for America and her future. Second, this Senator thinks so not because I am a Republican and we have a Democrat in the White House; rather, I think this because of my oath of office to a constitutional system, and I will continue to hold this view, having taken this oath, the next time a Republican President tries to reach beyond his or her constitutional powers. Despite these two strongly held views, though, in this series of addresses on the growth of the administrative State and more broadly on the unbalanced nature of executive and legislative branch relations in our time, my goal will not be primarily to advocate. My first goal is just to do some history together. My goal is primarily to describe how the executive branch has grown and how Presidents of both parties are guilty of it. But it isn't just that Republicans and Democrats are guilty of trying to consolidate more power when they have the Presidency, although that is true; it is a one-way ratchet. It is also true that Republicans and Democrats are to blame in this Congress for not wanting to lead on hard issues and take hard votes, but rather to sit back and let successive Presidents gobble up more authorities. My goal is to give all of us who are called to serve in this body a shared sense of some historical moments, how we got to this place where so much of the legislative function now happens inside the executive branch, and to convince my colleagues of both parties that we have to take this power back, regardless of who serves in the White House and what party they are from. So how did we get to the place where so many giant legislative decisions are now made inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and in the dozens of alphabet soup agencies? To understand that, we have to look briefly at the Founders and what they were trying to accomplish. These were educated men who had studied all forms of government throughout human history. They had a worked-out theory of human nature. They knew that we are created with inherent dignity worthy of respect, that our rights come to us from God via nature, and that government doesn't give us rights; government is just our shared tool to secure those natural rights. At the same time they knew that we also have a disposition to self-interest and a capacity for evil. They observed it throughout all of human history, rulers trying to consolidate more power for their own ends, and this is obviously dangerous. One of the lessons they drew from their rich historical understanding was the importance of keeping three main functions of government separate. As Montesquieu wrote: ``All would be lost if the same man or the same body of principal men, either of the nobles or of the masses, exercised these three powers: that of making the laws, that of executing public resolutions, and that of judging the crimes and disputes among individuals.'' The separation of powers could not, of course, be absolute, for the branches had to work together, each power had to counterpose one another. The key was to divide the power among different institutions while ensuring that those institutions could act together as a coherent whole on the basis of what they call ``mixed government.'' The Constitution that emerged from the Founders' debates and deliberations intentionally enshrines the separation of the powers, and this was a direct result of the Founders' study of human nature and their conclusion that that nature was relatively constant. Men everywhere tend to aggrandize power and to use it for selfish ends. When power checks power in the government, the people are better protected. As Tocqueville said when he studied America: Their more constrained government leaves them more room for civil society. We have a limited government because we mean to enable nearly limitless--that is, more free families, more free inventors, more free churches and synagogues, more free not-for-profits, more free local governments, and so on. If you have to describe the essence of the American government in one sentence, Lincoln, to paraphrase, would say, it is ``of the people, by the people, and for the people.'' Americans believe that we are free, endowed by our Creator with unalienable--that is unchangeable and untouchable--rights. That is opposite of everything the world had ever held in government until 1776. This is what American exceptionalism means--not that there is something unique about Americans distinct from people in any other place, but that the American idea is premised on rejecting the idea that the King is the one who is free. The King, after all, had an army, and you didn't, and he could use his power however he wished. His subjects--remember they were not called citizens; they were subjects-- were dependent. If they wanted to open a business, to start a church, to publish a book, then they needed to ask the King for permission. All that was not mandatory was forbidden unless the King gave you an exception, unless the King gave you a carve-out, unless the King gave you a waiver. In America, the opposite was to be true. You are born free, regardless of where you are from or who your parents are, regardless of your bank balance or the color of your skin. In America, if you want to preach a sermon or write a piece of investigative journalism, if you want to say that your elected leaders are losers, if you want to invest in a new app or launch a nonprofit, you don't need the King's permission, for you are free. About 100 years ago, this idea and our system of separation of powers came under attack. There are three or four large reasons why the era of urbanization, industrialization, and then progressivism and the rise of specialized experts called our constitutional system of limited government into question. We will tackle some of those topics after the holidays. But for now, it is sufficient to say that the Presidency began to grow larger in the first two decades of the 20th century, and the Congress began to lose some of its powers. It happened because Presidents of both parties were willing to overreach and because the Congress was willing to underreach, to retreat from that field of competitive ideas, to retreat from our constitutional commitments. For every TR--Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican--there is an FDR, a Democrat. This should not be a partisan issue, for both sides have been guilty of extensive executive branch overreach. Meanwhile, the professional legislators realized that permanent incumbency is easier if you cede control rather than lead, if you decide not to take the hard votes but just quietly ask the executive branch to make the decisions unilaterally. Today many in my party argue that no President has ever even contemplated what President Obama regularly does. That is actually not true. Whatever one might think of President Obama's gobbling up of powers, his theories are not at all new. His theories date back to the Progressive Era's disdain for limits of the Constitution, and this is especially evident in the self-conscious Executive expansionism of Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican, and Woodrow Wilson the Democrat. After the holidays, we are going to spend a little time exploring both of these men and their attempts to marginalize and to intentionally ignore the Congress to--as TR put it--``greatly broaden the use of executive power.'' I hope that this look at the rise of the executive branch and its legislating over the next number of months will contribute to the efforts of all of us here together who want to recover and safeguard that constitutional vision. But in historical terms, the Congress, in the age of Obama, is very weak. This isn't about the current majority leader, and it isn't about the most recent previous majority leader. It is much bigger than that. This institution is arguably the weakest it has been relative to the executive branch at any point in our Nation's 2\1/2\ centuries. Others interested in the history of this special place might argue that there is some other moment with greater relative weakness than this current moment. We should have that debate, for we should be discussing how and why this institution became so weak. We should stop pretending--the constant exaggeration around here as people fake it, pretending that some tiny procedural vote that didn't pass somehow still changed the world. We should stop pretending omnicompetence across huge expanses of often unknowable executive branch governmental action. Voters--better, citizens--don't believe us. The lobbyists don't believe it either. They are willing to fake it with you, but they don't really believe you, which is why so many lobbying firms today are expanding most of their efforts in the regulatory--not the legislative--lobbying space, for that is where the action is. It would be far more useful in this body--not to mention far more believable to the people who we work for--for us to learn to talk openly about how and why this once powerful and still special body became so weak. Congress is mocked, and we should tackle the hows and whys, for the people are not wrong. We should stop this trend, and the first step toward that would be to better understand and to more openly admit the nature of the problem. I planned this series on the growth of the executive branch for early in 2016 because it would be healthy for the Senate and for our broader public to be wrestling with the duties and constitutional authorities in advance of November's Presidential elections before we will know which party will win. We need to have this conversation now precisely because we don't know which party will win. Let me be realistic for a minute. I hope it is not pessimistic, but I will be realistic. I actually don't think there is much will in this body to do things like recovering the power of the purse. And even if there were, the will to get beyond R's and D's, shirts and skins Kabuki theatre, as we drift toward a parliamentary system with ``winners take all'' in the executive branch--the actual act of trying to recover power, the power of the purse and the legislative powers that the Constitution vests in this body--would be very difficult at a time when the public is so cynical and so disengaged because of how dysfunctional this institution is. I think that the Democrats are likely only to recover a sense of their article I powers if they are looking at a President Trump or a President X or a President Y or whoever the scariest candidate might be to the Democrats. Similarly, I think the Republicans are most likely prone to forget most of their concerns about Executive overreach if a Republican does defeat Secretary Clinton in November. I will just end with two brief stories. In the first, FDR was frustrated with the Supreme Court, so he had a solution. He would just pack the Court. Who could stop him? He had control of the Congress, after all. Well, someone did stop him--Senate Democrats who cared about the Constitution and their oath stepped up. In one of the other great instances of this place just saying no, regardless of party, LBJ--arguably the most powerful leader until the last 10 years in the history of the Senate, the most powerful leader this place had ever known in his age--became VP and said he would essentially remain majority leader of the Senate at the same time. Again, it was Democrats in this body who said no based on their constitutional responsibilities, not their partisanship. These were men and women who cared more about their country and more about their Constitution and more about their oaths than their party. I think that all of us in both parties should look to those examples and again be talking in the future about how we emulate them and recover the responsibilities of this body.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. SASSE. Yes.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, earlier today it was reported that the President's Deputy National Security Adviser was asked about my call that the President and the administration speak clearly about the nature of the enemy we face--about my call that we be honest with the American people and with ourselves about the fact that we are at war with militant Islam, we are at war with jihadi Islam, and we are at war with violent Islam. In response, the White House was quoted in the World-Herald this morning as saying this: Our strong belief is to not treat these ISIL terrorists as leaders of some religious movement. Even if you have a derogatory adjective attached to it--radical Islam or Islamic extremism--essentially you are saying they are the leaders of a religious movement. And that is what they want. They want to be seen not as terrorists and killers and thugs, as the president said, but as leaders who speak on behalf of religion. And that is why we have not identified them as the enemy in this effort. This is lunacy. First, while the White House is insisting that no one use the word ``Islamic'' or note any connection between the war that we are facing and some subset of Islam--even as the White House insists that no one use the word, their own preferred adjective, ``ISIL'' or ``ISIS,'' begins with an ``I.'' Every fourth grader in America can deduce without any assistance from Vanna White what the rest of the word that begins with an ``I'' is. Yet the White House insists that no one should use the word. They are dealing with a world they wish were so, as opposed to the world with which we are called to struggle. The world in which we live is a world where we are going to be facing a decades-long battle with militant Islam, with jihadi Islam, with violent Islam. We are obviously not at war with all Muslims, but we are at war with those who believe they would kill in the name of religion, and the White House insists that we muzzle ourselves and not tell the truth. Second, the White House's logic for why we shouldn't tell the truth to the American people or to ourselves is because the leaders of ISIL supposedly want to be identified with a religious movement. The leaders of the ISIL movement and the broader jihadi movement that is trying to kill Americans and all those who believe in freedom and in open society--the leaders of this movement also want to be martyred. Isn't the President's position that we should not kill them because they desire to be martyred? This is lunacy. We have to speak the truth not because it alone will somehow diminish ISIS or ISIL, but because speaking the truth is actually the only way we can begin to develop policies that will not lead to more failed States in the Middle East, which are producing the terror training camps of next year. Despite the fact that we are actually and obviously at war with militant Islam, there is a terrible leadership vacuum in this country. The American people know this, and, frankly, those of us who are getting our classified briefings and having to engage the leadership of our national security and intelligence communities know this leadership vacuum exists. Those who are trying to keep Americans safe--there are many wonderful, freedom-loving civil servants fighting to protect our kids, and they know and experience this vacuum of leadership every day. This vacuum is felt outside the beltway and everywhere in America, as is obvious in many of our towns. But even more dishearteningly and more dangerously, it is increasingly obvious to the professionals working in our intelligence community and in our national security structure that this vacuum is harming our national security and our intelligence community as they try to fight for our freedom. Here is why this matters. This vacuum prevents them from doing their jobs. They have no strategy to deploy, they have no rational policy to implement, and they have been asked to defeat an enemy that their Commander in Chief refuses to name. This is lunacy, it is absurd, and it is unacceptable. Mr. President: Please lead. I yield the floor.

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question? Do you believe there is any connection between our enemy and Islam?

Mr. SASSE. Do you believe there is any connection between our enemy and Islam?

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question at some point?

Mr. SASSE. It doesn't need to be now.

Mr. SASSE. Thank you, sir, and the Senator from New Mexico. Thank you for letting me get in. I know we don't have a lot of genuine open debates around here, so I want to be honest. This is a little bit awkward to delicately step onto the floor. I was listening to the debate. I wasn't planning to speak, but I thought I would ask the question. I think the pay-fors in ObamaCare are problematic across the board. I am not a particular defender of any of these pay-fors, but I would ask sincerely, Why would you two be interested in prioritizing changing the tax deductibility or the limits for people who already have tax-protected insurance, but we are not talking about any sort of tax break for the small business people who have none? The simple fact is we have the particular problems we have in America in health care because of wage and price controls at the end of World War II, where if an employee could get an extra dollar of wages, they would clearly be taxed, but if they got an extra dollar of benefits through their large employer group, that would be tax-free. That is limitless, but that tax benefit only applies to people who are in large groups. If you are in a small business, you don't get any deductibility. I am not disagreeing with the specific policy you are advocating, but I would ask why would we prioritize this policy when there is no conversation happening on the floor for all the small business men and women in America, the farmers and ranchers who get absolutely zero tax protection? I am trying to understand the prioritization.

Mr. SASSE. I thank the Senator. I think we all know we need to do genuine health care reform sometime soon in the future because the reality is, the No. 1 driver of uninsurance in America is not preexisting medical conditions, although we all should empathize with the 4 million of the 320 million of us in America who have uninsurable preexisting medical conditions, but we are dealing with something on the order of 70 to 80 million Americans in a given calendar year who pass through a period of uninsurance, and the vast majority of them are uninsured because of our insurance pooling arrangements that are still an artifact of the 1940s and 1950s, where people had one job for decades at a time. When I was a college president, until a year ago coming to join you all here, and I would shake kids' hands at graduation when they walked across the stage, they were not going to just change jobs, they were going to change industries three times in their first decade postcollege. The No. 1 driver of uninsurance in America is job change. These kinds of policies that we are debating on the floor today make it harder to create portable health insurance plans that go with people across job and geographic change, which is actually what is driving the uninsurance in America. I thank the Senator for allowing me to sneak in for a minute. I am a rookie learning my way around here, but I was on the floor listening to your debate. Thank you for the opportunity.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 15 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I rise to speak about San Bernardino, about the decades-long fight that our free society faces, and about our dangerous unwillingness to tell the truth about the nature of this battle--about who our enemy is. We are at war. The American people already know this. Our enemies obviously knows this. It is only this town where our so-called leaders dawdle and bicker, pander and misprioritize. It is only this town that seems confused. Washington ignores what it cannot escape, and that is both a tragedy and a crisis, for it is impossible to win a war when one does not even admit that one is in a war. Let's start by admitting that this war is different from most of the wars of the past. This is not about borders or territory. This is not about gold or other material goods. We typically think about state actors--about traditional governments going to war with traditional governments. In this war, however, the enemy includes many state actors, many armed groups who are developing global reach in this flatter, technologically linked world. Our enemy is merciless and barbaric. They are willing to kill people who are not on traditional battlefields. They will kill noncombatants. They will kill women and children. They will kill at holiday parties and restaurants, at Jewish delis and sporting stadiums. Just as sad as the evolution of our enemies, though, this war is hard for the American people to get their heads around because we have so much confusion right now--so much drift, so much orphanhood--not just about our enemies but about exactly who we are and about exactly what we are fighting to defend. This body, the Congress, tries to do far too many things, and we do very few of them well, but when there are really important tasks that we should be tackling, well then folks seem to be unable to muster the energy or the courage or the time or the will to focus diligently on the task before us. Today we have such a big task before us, and I will humbly suggest that before another person in this body or another member of the national media stands up to scold the American people about how they could possibly entertain voting for candidate X or Y, perhaps we should look in the mirror at why so many of our people are running to demagoguing leaders. Do Senators really not understand what is happening? Did anyone really not see this coming? I think it is obvious why the people are doing what they are doing--because they get so little actual leadership out of this town, out of either end of Pennsylvania Avenue and out of either political party. Make no mistake, there were some genuinely dreadful things said on our national stage yesterday, but they were almost completely predictable. Did anyone really not see this coming? Why is it that these words are so attractive to so many? Why do they find so many followers? Because they are comforting to a people who are scared. They are food to a people who are starved for leadership. Sunday night was a desert. Monday night was a flood. Neither are what our people need or really what they, at their best, want, but don't be surprised that a people being misled by a political class that is in denial about the nature of the fight we face--don't be surprised if these people come then quickly to desire very different, much more muscular words and utopian pledges. This town's conversations are so often so completely disconnected from the people. Do you want to know what people calling my office and stopping me in the grocery store--since Paris and now since San Bernardino--want to talk about? They want to talk about what Sharia law is and how many Muslims actually believe in it. It is a fair question for moms to ask. They want to talk about American exceptionalism. They want to know what we are for, what we are against, and what do we unite around. We should talk more about these things. For a minute tonight let's just step briefly beyond the media cycle and look at where we stand. This is a clash of civilizations. This is a fight between free people and a totalitarian movement. Let me say clearly that recognizing a clash of civilizations is not at all to want one, but recognizing one is simply the truth in this matter. We are free and our enemies hate it. They hate that my wife leaves our house and drives. They hate that my daughters know how to read. They hate that we decided where we would go to church on Sunday. They hate us not because of any particular thing we have done by omission or by commission; they hate us because of who we are. They hate us because we have a Constitution that enshrines these freedoms, and this is the Constitution that we should be uniting around--uniting to defend. We should fight to defend the framework that has secured the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, the freedom of the press, and the freedom of assembly for all Americans for 200 years--not initially successfully judging every man by the content of his character instead of merely the color of his skin but eventually guiding us beyond this original American sin and toward a more perfect union. This weekend I went to San Bernardino. My wife and I laid flowers at a memorial that has popped up on a sidewalk outside the site where 35 of our neighbors bled this week; 14 of them ultimately died in this massacre. We talked to our American neighbors there in a neighborhood that should not be part of a war zone, but that neighborhood will now forever be a battlefield memorial. Some of the people grieving there wondered aloud to us: Why are our politicians so small, so mealy- mouthed? One marine asked my wife if Washington really even cares about the victims of jihadi attacks like this. One woman asked why no one in Washington seems to be a full-throated lover of America. They are wrong, of course, about the caring and the loving. There is a lot of care and love, but they can be forgiven for wondering why we are so unable to be full-throated about the big things. We owe it to those who died this week, and to their families, to be clear and truthful about the nature of this conflict. We owe it to those 14. We owe it to their families, we owe it to the service men and women in uniform who are fighting abroad right now to defend our freedoms, some of whom will come home in caskets, and we owe it to the families of those who have not yet died--but who will--in the next jihadi attack on our homeland, for it is coming. All adults know that the next attack is coming. You don't need to see the classified briefings that some of us see to know the future is dangerous. The San Bernardino 14 will not be the last Americans to bleed and die in our homeland because we are a free society. So we should tell the truth about the enemy we face. We should tell the truth about them, and we should dig down deep to be honest not only about them but about who we are. We should now reaffirm our core values that unite us as a people. We are not at war with terrorism, which is just a tactic. We are not at war with some empty sociological label called radicalism or extremism, as if it has no connection to belief or ideology. We are not just at war with ISIS, though we are obviously at war with ISIS, but there will be another group that will raise the black flag of death long after ISIS has been routed out of Iraq and Syria. This is not about workplace violence, this is not about global warming or gun shows. This is not about income inequality. This is not about some kid from a broken home somewhere in the Middle East, as tragic as broken homes are both at home and abroad. Again, against a whole load of hand-wringing mush, we need to remember that this attack, and know that our next attack, is not because of anything we have done wrong. This is about who we are. This is about the nature of freedom. Who are we? We are a people, 320 million of us, who unite around the Constitution and the First Amendment that guarantees the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, the freedom of the press, and the freedom of assembly to all Americans of every creed and every tradition. I am a Christian. I am not a Muslim. I am also in this life an American, and I have taken an oath of office to the Constitution, and so, as an American, I stand and defend the rights of American Muslims to freely worship even though we differ about important theological matters. In America we are free to believe different things and to argue about those beliefs. It matters what you think about the nature of God, about revelation, and about salvation. It matters what you think about Heaven and Hell. In fact, it matters so much and we think these things are so important that you couldn't possibly solve any of them by violence. America is about the right to argue about our differences with our neighbors but to make those arguments free from violence. We, in this land, under the constitutional creed, come together as a community of Americans to unite around core American values: freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly. So now, as it is emphatically and indisputably clear, that we are not in a war with all Muslims, let us tell the truth that we most certainly are at war with militant Islam. We are at war with violent Islam. We are at war with jihadi Islam. We are at war with those who believe in killing in the name of religion. This is, in fact, precisely what America means. It is about being free to raise your kids, free to build a corner store, and free to worship and to assemble without the fear of violence. We can argue about religion because many of us do disagree, and then we come together as Americans to protect and defend each other against religious killing. There are many hand-wringers in Washington who refuse to name the enemy we face. They refuse to admit we are at war with militant Islam, with jihadi Islam, with violent Islam. They dance around platitudes and offer empty labels hiding behind a worry--an understandable worry--that Muslims in America could face backlash. I share this fear, and I believe that telling the truth about who is and who is not our enemy is actually the one sure way of avoiding that danger. I think those who are refusing to tell the truth about our enemies, those who will nonsensically claim that the next jihadi attack is somehow just another random case of workplace violence are making the backlash far more likely, not less likely. Here is how I think the backlash actually happens: The people who are supposed to be laser-focused on defending the American people--that is us--mouth silly platitudes that show we are either too weak or too confused to keep our people safe. Then, a megalomaniac strongman steps forward and starts screaming about travel bans and deportation and offering promises to keep all of us safe, which to some--and I think actually to many more than those of us in this body seem to understand--sounds much better than not being protected at all. You want to stop a backlash against American Muslims? Then stop lecturing Americans that they are supposedly stupid to be frightened about jihadis who actually do want to bomb their kid's sporting event and instead use your pen and your phone as Commander in Chief to start telling us what your plan is to actually find and kill those who want to do us harm. Start telling us what your actual plan is to have a Middle Eastern map that isn't generating more failed states year over year that become the terror training camps of next year. This country invented religious liberty. This is the most tolerant Nation the world has ever seen. Our people need a little less elite sermonizing about tolerance in our communities and a little more articulation of the shared constitutional principles around which we are united and a lot more articulating of an actual battle plan to win the war that is going to be ours for the next many decades. If you are worried about backlash--if you are worried about the obviously over-the-top rhetoric from unserious Presidential candidates--perhaps it will be useful for those of us who have the actual job of protecting the Constitution to tell the truth. We should be clear about who we are and about the freedoms we stand for, and we should be clear about those who would try to kill us because we believe in these freedoms. We are at war with militant or jihadi Islam, but we are not at war with people who believe in the American creed, which includes the right of people--every people, every faith tradition--to freely worship, to freely speak, to freely assemble, and to argue. We are not at war with all Muslims. We are not at war with Muslim families in Lincoln or in Dearborn who want the American dream amid our pluralistic society for their kids, but we most certainly are at war with those who want to spread a variety of Islam that aims to motivate the killing and the freedom-taking of other Americans. This fight will be decades long, and we will win it, but we will not win it by denying that the fight exists. We will not win it by being unclear about who we are and who they are. We will win it instead by being clearer about both who they are and who we are. We will win it by reaffirming our core constitutional values. We will win it because of who we are: a people who believes in freedom and a people who is willing to fight and even to die to preserve a free society for all Americans. Macbeth includes that aching line: ``Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.'' The context is an aimless people, drifting from who they are, drifting toward nihilism signifying nothing. This should not be us. This cannot be us. For America does signify something--something special. America is the belief that everyone-- Christian, Jew, Muslim, Black and White, man and woman, rich and poor, fifth generation, first generation--everyone is endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. Our government is our shared project to secure and safeguard those rights. Our Constitution--our shared creed--gives us a framework for that order of liberty. When politicians--whether incumbents who seem to have forgotten their oaths or candidates trying to run merely on the bluster of their personality--don't talk about the Constitution, when they don't defend first principles, when they refuse to prefer substance over sound bites, when they nonsensically say either that our enemy has nothing to do with Islam or conversely that every Muslim is to be prejudged guilty--well, then our national conversation crumbles into sound and fury. That is not us, for we are Americans. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I rise to speak from the floor for the first time. I have never been in politics before, and I intentionally waited to speak here. I wish to talk about the historic purposes and uses of the Senate, about the decades-long decline of the legislature relative to the executive branch, and about what baby steps toward institutional recovery might look like. Before doing so, let me explain briefly why I chose to wait a year since election day before beginning to fully engage in floor debate. I have done two things in my adult work life. I am a historian by training and a strategy guy by vocation. Before becoming a college president, I helped over a dozen organizations through some very ugly strategic crises, and one important lesson I have learned again and again when you walk into any broken organization is that there is a very delicate balance between expressing human empathy on the one hand and not becoming willing to passively sweep hard truths under the rug on the other. It is essential to listen first, to ask questions first, and to learn how a broken institution got to where it is because there are reasons. People very rarely try to break special institutions that they inherit. Things fray and break for reasons. Still, empathy cannot change the reality that a bankrupt company is costing more to produce its products than customers are willing to pay for them, that a college that has too few students is out not only of money but out of spirit. This is the two-part posture I have tried to adopt during my rookie year here. Because of this goal of empathetic listening first and interviewing first and because of a pledge I made to Nebraskans--in deference to an old Senate decision--last year I have waited. Please do not misunderstand. Do not confuse a deliberate approach with passivity. I ran because I think the public is right that we are not confronting the generational challenges we face. We do not have a foreign policy strategy for the age of jihad and cyber war, and our entitlement budgeting is entirely fake. We are entering an age where work and jobs will be more fundamentally disrupted than at any point in human history since hunter-gatherers first settled in agrarian villages, and yet we do not have many plans. I think the public is right that the Congress is not adequately shepherding our Nation into the serious debates we should be having about the future of this great Nation. I will outline the key observations from my interviews with many of my Senate colleagues in summary form on another day, but for now let me flag just the painful top-line takeaway. I don't think anyone in this body truly believes we are laser-focused on the greatest challenges our Nation faces--no one. Some of us lament this fact, some of us are angered by this fact, some of us are resigned to it, some try to dispassionately explain how we got to the place where we are, but I don't think anyone actually disputes it. If I can be brutally honest for a moment, I am home basically every weekend, and what I hear every weekend, I think, are most of the same things most all of my colleagues hear every weekend, which is some version of this: a pox on both parties and all of your houses. We don't believe that the politicians are even trying to solve the great problems we face--the generational problems. To the Republicans, those of us who would claim that the new majority is leading the way, few people believe it. To the grandstanders who would try to use this institution chiefly just as a platform for outside pursuits, few believe that the country's needs are as important to you as your own ambitions. To the Democrats who did this body great harm through nuclear tactics, few believe that bare-knuckled politics are a substitute for principled governing. Who among us doubts that many--both on the right and on the left--are now salivating for more of these radical tactics? The people despise us all. Why is this? Because we are not doing our job. We are not doing the primary things that the people sent us here to do. We are not tackling the great national problems that worry our bosses at home. I therefore propose a thought experiment. If the Senate isn't going to be the venue for addressing our biggest national problems, where should we tell people that venue is? Where should they look for long-term national prioritization if it doesn't happen on this floor? To ask it more directly of ourselves, Would anything really be lost if the Senate didn't exist? To be clear, this is a thought experiment, and I think that many great things would be lost if the Senate didn't exist, if our Federal Government didn't have the benefit of this body, but game out with me the question of why. What precisely would be lost if we only had a House of Representatives, a simple majoritarian body instead of both bodies? The growth of the administrative state, the fourth branch of government, is increasingly hollowing out the Senate and the entire article I branch, the legislature. Oddly, many in the Congress have been complicit in this hollowing out of our own powers. Would anything really be lost if we doubled down on Woodrow Wilson's obsession and inclination toward greater efficiency in government, his desire to remove more of the clunkiness of the legislative process? What would be lost? We could approach this thought experiment from the inside out and ask: What is unique about the Senate? What can this body do particularly well? What are the essential characteristics of just this place, which has often been called the gem of the Founders' structure. What was the Senate built for? Let's consider its attributes. We have 6-year terms, not 2-year terms, and the Founders actually deliberated about whether Senators should have lifetime appointments. We have proportional representation of States, not of census counts, reflecting a Federalist concern that we would always maintain a distinction between perhaps agreeing that government has a responsibility to address certain problems and yet guarding against a routinized assumption that only a centralized, nationalized, one-size- fits-all government could tackle X or Y. Third, we have rules designed to empower individual Senators, not to the end of obstruction but for the purpose of ensuring full debate and engagement with dissenting points of views, for the Founders didn't share Wilson's concern with governmental efficiency, they were preoccupied with protecting minority rights and culturally unpopular views in this big and diverse Nation. Fourth, we didn't even have any rules in this body that recognized political parties until the 1970s. There was merely an early 20th century convention that gave right of first recognition in floor debate to the leaders of the two largest voting blocks. We have explicit constitutional duties related to providing the Executive with advice-- it is a pretty nebulous thing--about building his or her human capital team and about the long-term foreign policy trajectory of this Nation. Six-year terms, representation of States, not census counts, nearly limitless debate to protect dissenting views, almost no formal rules for political parties, what does all this add up to? What is the best answer to the question, What is the Senate for? Probably the best shorthand is this: to shield lawmakers from obsession with short-term popularity so we can focus on the biggest long-term challenges we face. Why does the Senate's character matter? Precisely because the Senate is built to insulate us from ``short-termism.'' That is the point of the Senate. This is a place built to insulate us from opinion fads and from the bickering of 24-hour news cycles. That is the point of the Senate. The Senate is a place to focus on the biggest stuff. The Senate was built to be the antidote to sound bites. I have asked many of you what you think is wrong with the Senate. What is wrong with us? As in most struggling organizations, in private it is amazing how much common agreement there actually is. There is so much common agreement about what around here incentivizes short-term thinking and behavior over long-term thinking, behaving, and planning. The incessant fundraising, the ubiquity of cameras everywhere that we talk, the normalization over the last decade of using many Senate rules as just shirts-and-skins exercises, the constant travel--again, fundraising--meaning, sadly, many families around here get ripped up. That is one of the things we hear about most in private in this body. This is not to suggest that there is unanimity among you in these private conversations. The divergence is actually most pronounced at the question of what comes next and whether permanent institutional decline is inevitable in this body. Some of you are hopeful for a recovery of a vibrant institutional culture, but I think the majority of you, from my conversations, are pessimistic. The most common framing of this question or this worry is this: OK. So maybe this isn't the high moment in the history of the Senate, but isn't the dysfunction in here merely an echo of the broader political polarization out there? It is an important question. Isn't the Senate broken merely because of a larger shattered consensus of shared belief across 320 million people in this land? Surely that is part of the story, but there is much more to say. First, the political polarization beyond Washington is so often overstated. We could talk about the election of 1800, the runup to the Civil War, the response to Catholic immigration waves at the beginning of the last century, the bloodiest summers of the Civil Rights movement, the experience of troops returning from Vietnam, if you want to mark some really high-water marks of political polarization in American life. Second, civic disengagement is arguably a much larger problem than political polarization. It isn't so much that most regular folks we run into back home are really locked into predictably Republican and predictably Democratic positions on every issue, it is that they tuned us out altogether. Despite the echo chambers of those of us who have these jobs, are we aware that according to the Pew Research Center, the 24-hour viewership of CNN, FOX, and MSNBC is about 2 million. That is it. Third, one of our jobs is to flesh out competing views with such seriousness and respect that we, the 100 of us, should be mitigating, not exacerbating, the polarization that does exist. This is one of the reasons we have a representative rather than a direct democracy. Fourth, surveys reveal that the public is actually much more dissatisfied with us than they are even scared about the intractability of the big problems we face. Consider the contrast. Somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the country think the Nation is on a bad track; that the experiences of their kids and grandkids will be less than the experience of their parents and grandparents. That is bad. Consider this: Only 1-in-10 of them is comforted that we are here doing these jobs. Let's be very clear what this means. If the American people were actually given a choice to decide whether to fire all 100 of us and all 535 people in the Congress, do any of us doubt at all what they would do? There are good and bad reasons to be unpopular. A good reason would be to suffer for waging an honorable fight for the long term that has near-term political downsides, like telling seniors the truth that the amount they have paid in for Social Security and Medicare is far less than they think and far less than they are currently receiving. That would be a good reason to be unpopular, but deep down we all know the real reason the political class is unpopular is not because of our relentless truth-telling but because of politicians' habit of regularized pandering to those who most easily already agree with us. The sound-bite culture, whether in our standups for 90-second TV in the Russell rotunda or our press releases or what we all experienced on our campaigns--both for and against--the sound-bite culture is everywhere around us. We understand that, but do we also understand and affirm in this body that this place was built expressly to combat that kind of reductionism, that short-termism? The Senate is a word with two meanings. It is the 100 of us as a community, as a group, as a body--that is an important metaphor--and it is this room. This is the Chamber where we assemble supposedly to debate the really big things. What happens in this Chamber now is what is most disheartening to a newbie like me. As our constituents know, something is awry here. We, in recent decades--again, this is a body and not just us but what we have inherited--have allowed short-termism and the sound-bite culture to invade this Chamber and to reduce so many of our debates to fact-free zones. I mentioned that I have done two kinds of work before coming here. I was a historian/college president and crisis turnaround guy. Although they sound very different, they actually have a lot of similarities because they are both driven by a kind of deliberation, a Socratic speech. Good history is good storytelling, and good storytelling demands empathy. It requires understanding different actors, differing motivations, and competing goals. Reducing everything immediately to good versus evil is bad history--not only because it isn't true and because it is unpersuasive but because it is really boring. Good history, on the other hand, demands that one be able to talk Socratically so you can present alternate viewpoints, not straw-man arguments, and explain how people got to where they are. Similarly, can you imagine a business strategist who presents just one idea and immediately announces that it is the only right idea, the only plausible idea, and every other idea is both stupid and wicked? How would companies respond to such a strategist? They would fire him. A good strategist, by contrast, puts the best construction on a whole range of scenarios, outlines the best criticisms of each option, especially including the option you plan to argue for most passionately, and then you assume that your competitors will upgrade their game in response to your opening moves. This is a kind of Socratic speech. But bizarrely, we don't do that very much around here. We don't have many actual debates. This is a place that would be difficult today to describe as the greatest deliberative body in the world, something that was true through much of our history. Socrates said it is dishonorable to make the lesser argument appear the greater or to take someone else's argument and distort it so that you don't have to engage their strongest points. Yet here, on this floor, we regularly devolve into a bizarre politician speech. We hear the robotic recitation of talking points. Well, guess what. Normal people don't talk like this. They don't like that we do, and more important than whether or not they like us, they don't trust our government because we do. It is weird, because one-on-one, when the cameras are off, hardly anyone around here really thinks the Senators from the other party are evil or stupid or bribed. There is actually a great deal of human affection around here, but again, it is private, when the cameras aren't on. Perhaps I should pause and acknowledge that I am really uncomfortable with this as an opening speech. It is awkward, and I recognize that talking honestly about the recovery of more honest Socratic debate runs the risk of being written off as being overly romantic and naively idealistic. To add to the discomfort, I am brand new to politics, 99th in seniority, and occasionally mistaken for a page. But talking bluntly about what is not working in the Senate in recent decades--not just this year or last year--but talking bluntly about what is not working around here is not naive idealism; it is aspirational realism. Here is why. I think that a cultural recovery inside this body is a partial prerequisite for a national recovery. I don't think that generational problems such as the absence of a long-term strategy for combatting jihad and cyber war, such as telling the truth about entitlement overpromising, and such as developing new human capital and job retraining strategies for an era of much more rapid job change than our Nation has ever known--I don't think that long-term problems such as these are solvable without a functioning Senate. And a functioning Senate is a place that rejects short-termism, both in substance and in tone. The Senate has always had problems. This is a body made up of sinful human beings, but we haven't always had today's problems. There have been glorious high points in the Senate. There have been times when this place has flourished, and I believe a healthier Senate is possible again. But it will require models and guides. To that end, I have been reflecting on three towering figures over the last half-century who used this floor quite differently than we usually use it today, and who thereby have much to teach us. Before naming them, let me clarify my purpose. I don't think there is a magic bullet to the restoration of the Senate. My purpose in speaking today is really just to move into public conversations I have been having with lots of you in private as I try to define a personal strategy for how to use the floor. I want advice, and I am opening a conversation on how to contribute to the broader theme. There are many of you here who want an upgrading of our debate, of the culture, of the prioritization, and of our seriousness of what are truly the biggest long-term challenges we face. Two weeks ago, in a discussion with one of you about these problems, I was asked: So you are going to admit our institutional brokenness and issue a call for more civility? No. While I am in favor of more civility, my actual call here is for more substance. This is not a call for less fighting. This is a call for more meaningful fighting. This is a call for bringing our A game to the biggest debates about the biggest issues facing our people and with much less regard for 24-month election cycles and 24-hour news cycles. This is a call to be for things that are big enough that you might risk your reelection over. So let's name the three folks who have something on which to instruct us because they brought a larger approach to the floor. First, I sit quite intentionally at Daniel Patrick Moynihan's desk. The New Yorker who cast a big shadow around here for a quarter century famously cautioned that each of us is entitled to our own opinions, but we are most certainly not entitled to our own set of facts. He read social science prolifically and sought constantly to bring data to bear on the debates in this Chamber. Like any genuinely curious person, he asked a lot of questions. So you couldn't automatically know what policy he might ultimately advocate for because he asked hard questions of everyone. He had the capacity to surprise people. We should do that. Second, in a time when circling partisan wagons and castigating the opposing party feels reflexively easy, we can all benefit from reading again Margaret Chase Smith's heroic ``Declaration of Conscience'' speech on this floor in June of 1950. The junior Senator from Maine was a committed anti-Communist. She was also called the first female cold warrior in the Nation. For her, that meant not knee-jerk opposition to competing views but rather the full-throated defense of what she called ``Americanism.'' She defined it as ``the right to criticize; the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest; and the right of independent thought.'' Senator Smith was rightly worried about Alger Hiss and the infiltration of the State Department by actual Communist spies. This was actually happening. So for her, grandstanding and lazy character smearing were not only dishonest, they were distracting and therefore inherently dangerous. Thus, the freshman Senator--at this point she was the only woman in the body--came to the floor to demand publicly what she repeatedly sought unsuccessfully in private from Joe McCarthy. Was there any evidence for all of these scandalous claims? Think of that. As a committed truth-teller, she was willing to challenge someone not just in her own party but someone with whom she had lots of ideological alignment. She wanted to reject straw-man arguments and disingenuous attacks. Because of that moment, 4 years later the Senate would censure McCarthy and banish McCarthyist tactics from this floor. Finally, and for my purposes today most importantly, I would like us to recall Robert Byrd, one of the larger figures in the two-and-a-half- century history of this body. As a historian, I have long been a student of the West Virginian, troubled though he was. We sometimes conceive of our role today here as merely policy advocates--as those who argue for our respective party's position on short-term policy fights, and that is sometimes important, but that is only one of our roles, for we don't have a parliamentary system and we don't have one on purpose. With Moynihan and Margaret Chase Smith, we also need to contextualize our debates about our largest national challenges with facts and data. We need to agree on what problems we are trying to solve before we bicker about which programs would be more or less effective toward those ends. We need to challenge those in our own party not to construct straw-men arguments with those we are debating. But there is something else we need as well. Beyond policy advocating and policy clarifying, we need an overarching shared narrative of what America means. We need to pause to regularly recall the larger American principles that bind us together-- our constitutional creed, our shared stories, and our exceptional American commitment to a dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all 320 million of our country men and women. We all know in our marriages that sometimes the only way around a small disagreement is to pause to embrace again our larger shared commitments and our history. We need more of that here. We need to be able to more often agree on some big things before we get to the work of honorably disagreeing about smaller things. One of the important legacies of Senator Byrd--and again this is no commentary on other aspects of his messy past--but one of the important legacies of Senator Byrd is that he forced this Senate to grapple with our history, with the 100 of our specific duties, and with the unique place in the architecture of Madisonian separation of powers that this body and this body alone sets. To return to our thought experiment, do we think the Founders would have regarded a 9-percent congressional approval rating--a stunning level of distrust in representative government--do we think they would have regarded that as an existential crisis? Is it conceivable we can get away with just drifting along like this or must we fix it? Count me emphatically among those who think we need to fix it. We should not be OK with this. If we are going to restore this place, part of it will center on recovering the executive-legislative distinction. The American people should be demanding more of us as legislators, and they should be demanding more of the next President as a competent administrator of the laws that we pass. This is possible only if we again recover a sense of our identity that has some connection not just to Republican and Democrat but to the Constitution's article I legislative duties and some tension on purpose with the duties of the article II executive branch. Everything cannot be simply Republican versus Democrat. We need Democrats who will stand up to a Democratic President who exceeds his or her power, and I promise you that I plan to speak up the next time a President of my party seeks to exceed his or her legitimate constitutional powers. Despite all of his other failings, Robert Byrd labored hard to mark these nonpartisan lines, and we should too. To that end, in the coming months I plan a series of floor speeches on the historic growth of the administrative state. This will not be a partisan effort. It will not be a Republican Senator criticizing the current administration because it is Democratic. Rather, it will be a constructive attempt to try to understand how we got to the place where so much legislating now happens inside the executive branch. Our Founders wouldn't be able to make sense of the system we are living right now. This kind of executive overreach came about partly because of a symbiotic legislative underreach. Republicans and Democrats are both to blame for grabbing more power when they have the Presidency. Republicans and Democrats are both to blame in this legislature for not wanting to take on hard issues and to lead through hard votes but rather to sit back and let successive Presidents gobble up more and more power. We can and we must do better than this. A century-long look at the growth of executive branch legislating over the next many months will be an attempt to contribute to the efforts of all here, both Republicans and Democrats, who want to see the Senate recover some of its authorities and to recover some of its trustworthiness in the eyes of the people for whom we work. Each of us has an obligation to be able to answer this question: Why doesn't Congress work and what is your plan for fixing the Senate? If your only answer to this question is to blame the other party, then you don't get it, and the American people think you are part of the problem, not part of the solution. This institution wasn't built for the two political parties, and this institution wasn't built just to advocate policy X versus new policy Y for next month. We must serve as a forum for helping our Nation understand and navigate the hardest generational debates before us. Our ways of speaking should mitigate, not exacerbate, the polarization that does exist. As was well said around here last week: We will not always agree--not all of us, not all of the time. But we should not hide our disagreements. We should embrace them. We have nothing to fear from honest differences honestly stated . . . [for] I believe a greater clarity between us can lead to greater charity among us. Again, saying that we should be reducing polarization doesn't mean we should be watering down our convictions. I mean quite the contrary. We do not need fewer conviction politicians around here; we need more. We don't need more compromising of principles; we need a clearer articulation and understanding of the competing principles so that we can actually make things work better and not merely paper over the deficits of vision that everyone in the country knows exist. We should be bored by lazy politician speech. We should be bored by knee-jerk certainties on every small issue. We should primarily be doing the harder work of trying to understand competing positions on the larger issues. Good teachers don't shut down debate; they try to model Socratic seriousness by putting the best construction on their arguments, even and especially to those on which they don't agree. Our goal should not be to attack straw men but rather to strengthen and clarify meaningful contests of ideas for the American people. Representative government will require civic reengagement. Our people need to know that we in this body are up to the task of leading during a time of nearly universal angst about whether this Nation is on a path of decline. A 6-year term is a terrible thing to waste. A 2-year term requires hamster-wheel frenzy; our jobs do not. I think we can do better, and I pledge to work with all of those who want to figure out how. Thank you, Mr. President. (Applause, Senators rising.)

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I want to thank my friend and colleague Senator Scott for his leadership in protecting many Americans and small businesses from more needless suffering under ObamaCare. While I am glad for this outcome, a piecemeal approach to this terrible law is less valuable than a strategic approach. We must help the millions of other victims who are already suffering or will soon suffer from the law's flawed policies but lack an effective lobbying voice. In the future, we should set the stage for a serious repeal and replace debate by delaying Obamacare's onerous burdens, rather than merely working to make a terrible law 12 percent less bad.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, as many of my colleagues, on both sides of the aisle, have noted, today's vote on the President's deal with Iran is one of significant consequence. The American people deserve an up- or-down vote on the deal itself. I spent the day sitting on the floor of the Senate, listening to my colleagues debate the technicalities of the President's Iranian nuclear deal. This has been a lawyerly dispute, with arguments all over the map. I, like the vast majority of the American people, believe that this is a terrible deal. It has blown up the sanctions regime that brought Iran to the table. It floods Tehran's coffers with more than $100 billion that will almost certainly finance the killing of innocents around the world. The verification efforts place all of the burden on the United States and our allies, leaving Iran free to delay, disrupt, and deny inspections. The deal even allows Iran to advance its ballistic missile programs and to stockpile uranium. It is simply a bad deal and the American people know it. I went to Embassy Row and stood before the old Iranian Embassy to the United States, a building which was abandoned on April 7, 1980. And what the American people understand--and what Washington, DC, does not seem to understand--is that the technicalities of this deal, though important, are not the central question. The central question is this: Why was that embassy abandoned April 7, 1980? It is because in 1979 there was an Islamic revolution in Tehran, and the mullahs that came to power are theocratic hardliners that believe they have a divine mandate. Their divine mandate is to export Islamic law and tyranny across the Middle East, across North Africa, and beyond. The tyrants who rule Iran today believe they have a divine mandate to annihilate Israel. For 36 years we have had a bipartisan consensus in our country that the world's largest state sponsor of terror should never be allowed to become a nuclear-threshold state. Sadly, the administration has abandoned that bipartisan consensus in the fanciful, imaginary dream that they are going to transform Iran's theocratic hardliners into moderates that will no longer oppress religious minorities, women, homosexuals, and others within their country. The administration believes that the Iranian regime will no longer try to spread destabilization and fund terrorism across their region and across the globe. And this presents dire, but foreseeable consequences. The administration's deal with Iran will set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East--one of the world's most volatile regions. Billions of dollars in sanctions relief will be available to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and its terrorist proxies to spill innocent blood and destabilize Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. Either of these developments is serious enough on its own. Taken together, we have an unacceptably high probability for regional conflicts that could quickly spiral into nuclear events. We have to take this seriously; but, as the outcome of this vote is likely to demonstrate, we are not. The American people are more serious than Washington DC. The American people aspire to a day when that old and crumbling embassy is reopened, but not by the ruling theocratic mullahs. Instead, we can only accept a nation that believes in human flourishing and in the dignity of their own people, a government that repudiates the goal of annihilating Israel and the spreading their Islamic revolution across the Middle East. I am grateful that the American people are more serious than Washington DC, but, it is not too late. I urge you to vote against the President's deal with Iran. It is not in our national security interest, and it is surely not in the interest of our friends in that most dangerous region on the face of the earth.