Two Cheers for Ben Sasse

In 2016, I wrote in Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse for President. Sasse has done little to endear himself to me ever since. Much of the past four years he has fallen in line with the rest of the GOP and has worshipped at the altar of President Trump.

Today, I rise and give Sasse two cheers for publicly refusing to take a cue from his Republican Senate colleague Josh Hawley of Missouri who plans to challenge the electoral college results in Congress on January 6th. 

In a lengthy Facebook post, Sasse rejected the idea:

The president and his allies are playing with fire. They have been asking – first the courts, then state legislatures, now the Congress – to overturn the results of a presidential election. They have unsuccessfully called on judges and are now calling on federal officeholders to invalidate millions and millions of votes. If you make big claims, you had better have the evidence. But the president doesn’t and neither do the institutional arsonist members of Congress who will object to the Electoral College vote.

Let’s be clear what is happening here: We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage. But they’re wrong – and this issue is bigger than anyone’s personal ambitions. Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.

So why not three cheers? Here's what Sasse argues in his next paragraph:

We have a deep cancer in American politics right now: Both Republicans and Democrats are growing more distrustful of the basic processes and procedures that we follow. Some people will respond to these arguments by saying: “The courts are just in the tank for Democrats!” And indeed the President has been tweeting that “the courts are bad” (and the Justice Department, and more). That’s an example of the legitimacy crisis so many of us have been worried about. Democrats spent four years pretending Trump didn’t win the election, and now (shocker) a good section of Republicans are going to spend the next four years pretending Biden didn’t win the election. 

Sasse is making a false equivalency. While Democrats certainly loathed the idea of a Trump presidency they didn't deny its existence much less attempt to overturn the results of the election. After all, it was none other than Joe Biden who certified Trump's election just four years ago. Biden might not have liked it, but he respected the peaceful transfer of power and therein lies the difference.

The fact of the matter is that American voters chose Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Period. Trump hands the reigns of power to Biden. Instead what we have is a defeated President who won't accept he is defeated and a significant segment of the Republican Party eager to go along with him and the will of the people be damned. 

Now it could be the case that Sasse is making the moral equivalence argument because many Republicans are hostile to the very fact that Biden won the election. For them 2 + 2= 5. Sasse is saying otherwise but is sugarcoating the message by saying Democrats are no better. Democrats certainly don't possess a monopoly on virtue, but they may soon have a monopoly on being the only political political party which accepts the peaceful transfer of power - win or lose.

My disagreement notwithstanding, I do hope Sasse raises many of the same points on the floor of the Senate in the presence of his Republican colleagues who see fit to challenge the results of the electoral college. The question is how many other Republican Senators will be prepared to publicly join him.