U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) discussed congressional dysfunction and voter disengagement across on the country during a recent Ripon Society breakfast meeting.
Sasse, who was elected to the Senate in 2014 after spending more than two decades in the private sector, said that the fact that Washington is broken “is obvious.”
“But the whys of how Washington is broken are different than most people believe,” Sasse said. “They’re different than I believed. I’ve done a lot of crisis and turnaround projects. Usually, if you’re going into an institution that’s broken, you’re not going in unless it’s near bankruptcy, it’s being disintermediated by new technology, there’s been a merger and acquisition, or they’re missing payroll. There’s something fundamentally broken that brings a sense of urgency. One of the strange things about this place is that even though it doesn’t work, there’s sort of an aura around Washington that says, ‘Well you should pretty much still pretend that it works.’”
Sasse said that there’s constantly talk about political polarization — but the larger problem is political disengagement.
“The approval rating of Congress has been bouncing around for the last decade between nine and 15 percent, and yet the incumbency reelection rate is north of 90 percent,” Sasse said. “How does that make any sense? Name any other sector in life where everyone can think you’re failing and there’s almost no chance that you’ll be held to account.”
A lack of accountability in Washington has lead to a lack of trust in elected officials across the United States, Sasse said.
“I think the decline of public trust in institutional life in America in general — but in particular for the institutions in Washington — has a pretty tight correlation with how little accountability there is for the fact that the legislature doesn’t fix much,” Sasse said. “And the legislature doesn’t fix much because most legislative authorities don’t really reside in Congress right now. The president has an ‘I have a pen and I have a phone’ theory of Washington. And the truth is, the bureaucratic agencies and the rulemaking processes are much more significant legislatively than actual legislation moving through the Congress.”