Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse formally resigned from the U.S. Senate on January 8, 2023 to serve in his new role as president of the University of Florida.
In a December 5 letter, Sasse outline the terms of his departure from the legislature and said he was “thrilled to join Gator Nation in February”, adding, “very excited about the work ahead. Melissa and I have had the great honor of serving Nebraskans in the Senate these 8 yrs — I will finish out the upcoming lame duck session and resign in the first week of January”.
During his goodbye speech last week on the Senate floor, Sasse slammed his critics for allowing the Senate to become “increasingly beholden to special interest groups, including social media mobs, advocacy organizations, small-dollar donors and cable hosts”.
“Each of us knows 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. When we’re being honest with each other, which usually means when on one of the very rare occasions where 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”, Sasse said.
Former President Donald Trump celebrated the news when it was first reported back in October.
“Great news for the United States Senate, and our Country itself. Liddle’ Ben Sasse, the lightweight Senator from the great State of Nebraska, will be resigning. If he knew he was going to resign so early in his term, why did he run in the first place? But it’s still great news! The University of Florida will soon regret their decision to hire him as their President. We have enough weak and ineffective RINOs in our midst. I look forward to working with the terrific Republican Party of Nebraska to get a REAL Senator to represent the incredible People of that State, not another Fake RINO!” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social account.
Sasse did vote to impeach Trump during his first impeachment trial and during a campaign call with constituents in October 2020 he shredded him.
“The way he kisses dictators’ butts. I mean, the way he ignores the Uighurs, our literal concentration camps in Xinjiang. Right now, he hasn’t lifted a finger on behalf of the Hong-Kongers”, the senator said, The Washington Post reported.
“The United States now regularly sells out our allies under his leadership, the way he treats women, spends like a drunken sailor,” he said. “The ways I criticize President Obama for that kind of spending; I’ve criticized President Trump for as well. He mocks evangelicals behind closed doors. His family has treated the presidency like a business opportunity. He’s flirted with white supremacists”.
In May, Donald Trump criticized Sasse and said it was a mistake to endorse him. “He’s bad news, Ben Sasse”, Trump said during a tele-rally. “He begged for my endorsement, the day after he started hitting me and we hit much harder than he knows how to hit”.
Most recently, Sasse was part of a group of Republican and Democrat senators who reached an agreement on reforms to the Electoral Count Act.
It was announced on Wednesday that the group has agreed on reforms on the 1887 law that governs how Electoral College votes are counted, which came under scrutiny after the 2020 presidential election, NPR reported.
The group was led by Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Democrat West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a press release from the senators said.
Included in the group were Republican Sens. Sasse, Rob Portman, Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, Thom Tillis, Shelley Moore Capito, Todd Young, and Lindsey Graham, along with Democrat Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, Jeanne Shaheen, Mark Warner, Chris Murphy, Ben Cardin, and Chris Coons.
“From the beginning, our bipartisan group has shared a vision of drafting legislation to fix the flaws of the archaic and ambiguous Electoral Count Act of 1887”, they said. “Through numerous meetings and debates among our colleagues as well as conversations with a wide variety of election experts and legal scholars, we have developed legislation that establishes clear guidelines for our system of certifying and counting electoral votes for President and Vice President. We urge our colleagues in both parties to support these simple, commonsense reforms”.
