Christmas merriment this year was tinged with sadness as we learned of former Sen. Ben Sasse’s advanced cancer diagnosis. In a lengthy social media post on December 23, he let the world know that he is “gonna die.”
First elected to the Senate in 2014, Sasse’s congressional tenure was defined by reason and integrity in a political era rife with anything but. His service was not perfect, to be sure—no one’s is—but it was perhaps perfectly emblematic of the sentiments and sensibilities of us Trump-skeptical conservatives unwilling to shed the conservative part of that label.
Citing the dysfunction and increasing irrelevance of the Senate, Sasse left Congress nearly three years ago to serve as president of the University of Florida, a post he held until stepping down in July of 2024. And while there are still good men and women serving in our nation’s capital, his departure felt like the last gasps of an ill-fated attempt to turn the clocks back to a saner time. Throughout the political turbulence of this past decade, Sasse had consistently pointed the way, in word and deed, to an alternative path.
After being sworn into office in early 2015, Sasse waited nearly a year before delivering his maiden speech on the Senate floor, spending his first several months in Congress studying how the institution worked and not rushing in with uninformed remarks. The American people “despise us all,” Sasse concluded. The speech pulled no punches—he called his colleagues out for “not doing the job we were sent here to do”—but its aim was reform, not retribution. Politicians stand on their soapboxes every day and denounce the very institutions they serve while offering no clear vision for how they might be restored. Sasse wanted something more. He endeavored not only to show that the Senate was broken, but that it was essential for it to focus on long-term issues like foreign policy, entitlement reform, and job disruptions rather than political personalities and brinkmanship.
The idea that Congress wasn’t functioning as intended certainly didn’t start with Sasse, but his speech came at a particularly precarious time. He spoke in November 2015, just five months after Donald Trump had launched his first campaign for president. Had the Senate taken Sasse’s warnings seriously that long-term thinking was disincentivized by behaviors like incessant fund-raising, ubiquitous cameras, and constant travel, the upper chamber may have been more institutionally equipped to deal with cult-of-personality politics both parties have cultivated in the executive branch. Instead, the Senate was ill-equipped to handle the storms of demagogic populism.
Sasse tried again to highlight the desperate need for reform during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2018. Today, those hearings are remembered primarily for Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegations against the prospective justice and Kavanaugh’s self-proclaimed penchant for beer. Before the circus kicked off, however, Sasse used his opening remarks to deliver a civics lesson and critique the politicization of such proceedings—a far cry from the self-aggrandizement and political posturing that is typical in such settings. He argued that the Senate’s “advice and consent” role had withered away in favor of lawmakers treating nominees as political enemies—or saviors. His target was not the Republican or Democratic Parties, but rather the incentive structures that rewarded social media soundbites and outrage bait over careful consideration of a nominee’s merits.
The Supreme Court’s role had expanded significantly in recent years, with the body tasked with settling increasingly monumental political questions as the legislative branch abdicated its constitutional responsibilities. As a result, both parties had come to view the fight for every Supreme Court seat as increasingly existential—leading to bitter, theatrical confirmation processes.
But this status quo didn’t need to continue in perpetuity. Invoking an old Schoolhouse Rock cartoon, Sasse warned that we’d forgotten the basics: Congress writes laws, the president enforces them, the courts interpret them. This system of checks and balances, developed by the Founders, is not a mere suggestion; it is the most effective, tried-and-true means of dividing the powers of government and reducing political vitriol.
Such vitriol peaked on January 6, 2021. In a prophetic social media post one week before the Capitol riot, Sasse warned that, by joining the president in rejecting the results of the 2020 election, too many of his GOP colleagues were “point[ing] a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.” Sasse maintained that many of these Republicans didn’t actually believe the election was fraudulent, but by supporting such claims rhetorically, they were looking for “a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage.”
“If we normalize this,” he continued, “we’re going to turn American politics into a Hatfields and McCoys endless blood feud—a house hopelessly divided.” Sasse did his best to avoid normalizing such behavior, becoming one of a handful of Republican senators who voted to convict Trump weeks after the events of January 6 and bar him from holding elected office again, while most of the conference punted on that responsibility.
Sasse’s note on his cancer diagnosis sounds like it was written for a different era. It’s candid (“death is a wicked thief, the bastard pursues us all”), rejects superficialities (“not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength”), and unapologetically orthodox (“We hope in a real Deliverer–a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place”).
Missing from the post were any hints of vindictiveness or complaints about the unfairness of the world. There were no attempts to convince readers he had been right all along; there was no chest-thumping about all of his successes or his accomplishments. Instead, Sasse used his plight to remind others of the obvious, albeit haunting, truth: “I already had a death sentence before last week too—we all do.”
The philosopher Roger Scruton once wrote, “The loss of religion makes real loss difficult to bear; hence people begin to flee from loss, to make light of it, or to expel from themselves the feelings that make it inevitable.” With his diagnosis, Sasse is doing the opposite, tackling the reality of his situation head-on while pointing readers to what is sustaining him. “As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come,” he concluded. “Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective.”
Hope is powerful. If it can buttress the spirit in the face of eternity, it can certainly provide the strength to fight for temporal reforms despite disheartening setbacks. The state of our politics and political institutions is worse now than when Sasse delivered his maiden speech in the Senate. Without hope we might demand some assurance of success, or cling to the delusional vanity of short-term gains. Sasse points the way to a path not taken. It’s a difficult path, to be sure. It doesn’t guarantee your best life now, or policy wins. But it does fill the soul with a joy that even death can’t take away.
