{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.sasse.senate.gov//public/index.cfm/in-the-news?ContentRecord_id=3B916528-DF0C-4E70-AE18-42071CEFAB8E", "Sasse challenges Senate to do its job", "2015-11-04", "2015", "2015-11", "Republican", "House", "NE", "Ben Sasse", "S001197", "www.sasse.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "by Don Walton,Lincoln Journal Star\r\nSen. Ben Sasse challenged the Senate on Tuesday to heal itself, stepping back from partisan wrangling and reluctance to tackle the nation's deepest problems because of fear of losing re-election.\n\"The people despise us all,\" Sasse said in his first Senate floor speech, delivered one year after he was elected as Nebraska's freshman senator.\n\"And why is this? Because we're not doing the job we were sent here to do.\n\"I'm home basically every weekend,\" Sasse said, \"and what I hear, and what I'm sure most of you hear, is some version of this: A pox on both parties and all your houses. We don't believe politicians are even trying to fix this mess.\"\nSasse said he ran for a Senate seat last year \"because I think that the public is right that we as a people are not tackling the generational crises that we face.\"\n\"We don't have a long-term foreign policy for the age of jihad and cyberwar; our entitlement budgets are completely fake.\n\"We are entering an age where work and jobs will be more fundamentally disrupted than at any point since hunter-gatherers first settled in agrarian villages.\n\"And yet we don't really have any plans,\" he said.\n\"No one in this body thinks the Senate is laser-focused on the most pressing issues facing the nation. No one.\"\nSasse said meaningful debate on those issues could be a beginning.\n\"The Senate was built to focus on the big stuff,\" he said. \"The Senate is to be the antidote to sound-bites.\"\nBut the sound-bite culture has invaded the Senate chamber, Sasse said, and \"radically reduce(d) so many debates to fact-free zones.\"\n\"We don't have many actual debates,\" he said. \"We regularly devolve into bizarre partisan-politician speech. We hear robotic recitations of talking points.\"\nSasse said he recognizes that a call for more honest Socratic debate \"runs the risk (of) being written off as overly romantic, as nave idealism,\" especially when you rank 99th in Senate seniority.\nBut, he said, \"I believe that a cultural recovery inside the Senate is a partial prerequisite for a national recovery.\"\n\"This is not a call for less fighting, but for more meaningful fighting,\" he said. \"This is a call to be for things that are big enough that you might risk your re-election.\"\nSasse has been talking privately with individual senators on both sides of the partisan aisle during the year to gather their perspective in advance of his first floor speech.\nIn coming months, Sasse said, he plans to deliver a series of floor speeches about what he described as \"the historic growth of the administrative state.\"\n\"Republicans and Democrats are both to blame for grabbing more power when they have the presidency,\" he said.\n\"And Republicans and Democrats are both to blame in the legislature as well 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.\"\r\nRead the full article at theLincoln Journal Star.", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.sasse.senate.gov//public/index.cfm/in-the-news?ContentRecord_id=3B916528-DF0C-4E70-AE18-42071CEFAB8E"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.0343990288674831, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}