Nebraska GOP senator Ben Sasse is set to retire from the Senate before the end of the year in order to serve as president of the University of Florida.
The deal isn't finalized, but Sasse told National Review in a brief phone interview on Thursday afternoon: "On Sunday night, [the university's] board chair flew up and walked me through how they had had a search committee meeting that ended last week and that there was a 15-0 vote on the search committee to deputize him to pursue just me" to serve as president.
Sasse, who formerly served as president of Midland University in Nebraska, was reelected in 2020 and still has four years left in his current Senate term. Why leave now?
"I honestly think this is the most interesting university in the country right now," said Sasse. "I think it’s the most important institution and the most dynamic state in the union."
Sasse said that he had "been courted by a lot of universities about presidential vacancies for a couple of years and never really [taken] them seriously" until now. He spoke, among other things, about the university’s "board and faculty that’s just incredibly entrepreneurial;" its plans to build new campuses and programs; its hospital system (the second largest in the state); and its having “the largest supercomputer on an academic campus on earth.”
What does he say to Nebraskans disappointed by his decision to leave the Senate without serving out the entirety of his second term? "Nebraskans have well understood that I didn’t expect to be in politics as a lifelong calling. I need to get back to building stuff," Sasse said. "The best picture in the dome of the U.S. Capitol is Washington surrendering power."
During his first term, Sasse often expressed disillusionment with politics and sometimes his own party, leaving many to wonder why he was even pursuing a second term in 2020. Sasse told me in 2019 one reason he was seeking another term was that he had a "calling" as "a Tocquevillian or a principled pluralist or a constitutionalist" to fight on behalf of that faction within the conservative coalition, which he had come to realize was smaller than he once thought. Asked how he squares that 2019 comment with his early departure from the Senate, Sasse said on Thursday that "Tocquevillian society is about building things. The center of America really isn’t political power. . . . I think the University of Florida is better positioned to build than any university in America right now."
"The Senate is a very important institution, and I’m incredibly grateful for a lot of the people that I get to serve alongside here," Sasse said. "But frankly, I think one of the most basic things we can do to reinvigorate this place is to say that people ought to only be here for a time and then get back to building stuff."
Sasse was one of only seven Republican senators to vote to convict former president Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial in February 2021, but he said on Thursday that "the impeachment vote has exactly zero to do with this." Sasse, with Trump's endorsement in 2020, won his primary with 75 percent of the vote and out-ran Trump in the general election (despite Trump's pre-election anger with Sasse).
Sasse said Thursday that the timing of the announcement, a month before the midterm elections, was out of his control and was mostly a function of the university's search process. If all goes as planned, Sasse intends to announce in mid-November that he will resign 30 days later, giving the state's governor time to select a replacement.
 |
No comments: