how do you do that?

The guy on morphine shouldn't articulate some grand theory of social change, but if we do succeed at saving the Republic, I think it'll be because we solve the problems.

You're naming a second one.

I said, we need to, in an age of ubiquitous digital information, We have to have people who have the ability to turn things off and do long form deliberation.

So how do you still read and think and deliberate in a world where you got Vegas in your pocket? But the second one is exactly what you're saying right now.

We have to have a wave of institution foundings.

And when you think about the transition from agrarian America to industrial America, urban America from 1870 to 1920, it seemed like America was going to die between 1870 and 1890.

Like, are there fixes that you feel like we're exhausting all the bad options and eventually we'll land on the good one?

All right

... en route to a big answer.

Uh, first day, uh, in office, January 3rd, I think, uh, 2015, I introduced a term, a constitutional amendment for term limits, uh, on senators.

Um, that's not the most important thing, but it's what I went with first because, as a believer in the George Washington Cincinnatus tradition, I think a professional ambitious class to go to Washington, the center of the world, and stay forever, I'm saying center of the world cynically.

Uh, for Dodge County, Nebraska zip code 68025 on the north banks of the Platte River, where I sit today, that's the center of the world, brother.

Um, the, I think a two-term limit on the Senate would me-mean a much healthier institution.

And actually, if I could just amend the Constitution straight up, I might do, um, one 10 or 12-year term.

... and what is your prayer practice and do you believe in petitionary prayer, and how has your health situation affected your prayer?

The pain started in the fall of 2025.

I did sprint triathlons, and I was training for a sprint triathlon.

I would bike with a 45-pound vest on at the beginning, which is just incredibly stupid posture to have your back at this angle wearing a weight vest and riding a bike.

It makes no sense.

And I never deliberated on it.

I just started doing it.

And then all of a sudden I ended up with all this abdominal pain and all this back pain.

So we're incredibly grateful for this trial medication that he's doing pretty well at six months.

Sasse recently sat down with CNN's Jake Tapper for an emotional interview on his life and death.

I didn't have a plan for the fact that I don't wanna raise my kids in Washington, DC, um, and yet I don't like the idea of being gone all week nights, and so I, I didn't think it through enough.

And y- it's also what you spent your time doing in the Senate that was also a problem when it came to thinking about how much you missed your family, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I, I wanna say it delicately, um, 'cause I've been too harsh about the Senate sometimes in how I say it.

On weeks when 40% of my hours would go to intel and national security stuff, I would think it was often worth it to go through some of the costs at home.

But on weeks when intel would only be 10 or 15%, then I was like, "Well, most of the rest of this stuff is theater." Like, I, I, I wanna be clear, lots of good and well-meaning people in the Senate, but it's not an institution that works, and there are lots and lots of people who wanna pretend that being a senator is really cool, and it's a great title, and you're powerful.

And that doesn't mean we're doing enough work for the American people.

And if you think from first principles, it's not so difficult to see through so much of the flimflam of what's happening in our world today.

Well said.

I will not go to one of my hobby horses, which is the shortening of attention spans.

We know we have tons and tons of data about the growing illiteracy in our time and place.

Um, but I will go back to Bob.

You mentioned the Lord's Supper.

Um, one of the things that we lacked this morning, since we're not a particularized congregation, is we didn't get to celebrate the Lord's Supper.

And that, I think that injects a different atmosphere into, into the way we live.

And as you can see, cancer has certainly taken its toll physically on him.

I, I, I have a great hospice doc who told me early on, she goes, "When you're dying of an abdominal disease, you got an algorithm of four variables.

You got, um, pain from tumors.

You got nausea from drugs and tumors.

You got a constipation to diarrhea continuum.

And you got an energy fatigue dimension." And she said, "Any of those problems, if you tell your doc you have a problem, they'll say there's a drug for that, and there's definitely a drug for that, and it might screw up the other three, so you gotta manage the, the algorithm." It's like-

So you're like an alchemist now.

Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm a druggie.

I recently sat down with him and his family to talk about his faith and about coping with the thought of leaving this mortal coil.

And I felt the heaviness of death being terrible, and obviously not wanting your wife to go through being widowed or your kids to be orphaned, to lose their dad.

Um, but I, I just felt at peace that, um, death is real.

I've always known we're all on the clock, and to get a finite number felt horrible, but not surprising.

There is that pain that you already acknowledged.

100%.

My wife and I have been married 31 years, and have been, you know, good friends for a year and a half, two years longer than that.

I am sad for what she'll experience during a period of grieving and transition.

But, but o- on balance, I certainly think this is something that as an American and as a Christian, I, I am, I am rejoicing this year and will be especially joyful on, on July 4th.

So well said.

Um, I'll just, uh, do some popcorn additions.

Uh, no, no modifications or tweaks, but just in addition, um, kingdom of the left hand, kingdom of the right hand, um, and, uh, the humility with which we as believers should hold to any governmental system.

We should fight to preserve and defend, uh, an ordered public square, an ordered liberty, because love of neighbor requires us to want to see evil restrained and to see people of, um, faith and conviction, um, able to assemble with co-religionists.

We believe precise, angular, true things about the God who speaks and saves, but we don't think that the sword is meant to be used to defend or advance truths that speak to souls which cannot be compelled.

And so I think, you know, one humble way to approach this is thinking about Aristotle's, in some sense, six regimes.

Great book

[laughs]

There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

I, I think you're spot on that the debate about UBI, I think, is nearly inevitable, um, unless we just don't even get to have the debate 'cause we just drift straight into everybody being on welfare.

Um, and I think that's disastrous for human anthropology and for human souls.

I think it's disastrous for a free republic.

Um, but I, I do think it's the conversation that's coming soon.

And so the overly simplistic debates about the digital revolution and the jobs apocalypse are sometimes just optimism versus pessimism, or accelerationism versus safetyism.

[laughs]

[laughs]

I thought it was just, "Sasse, get your ass out of bed." Um, but I, I do think there's a wisdom in thinking about the day, the week, the month, the season, a lifetime in chunks, and, you know, I-My dad was a football and wrest...

Sorry, I got a little bit of pukes.

Um, [clears throat] It's okay.

My, my dad was a football and wrestling coach, but everybody else in my family was on the farm.

So we didn't live on the farm, we lived in town, but I had to go out and work grandparents' and aunts' and uncles' farms in the summer.

So I grew up working on the farm even though I wasn't raised there physically.

What are things that you would spend your day thinking about or dealing with that you now in hindsight realize, "I didn't need to think about or worry about that or do any of that at all"?

Don't

rationalize.

Don't get into bitterness and self-pity.

Do everything you can in prayer to simply say, Lord, I'm just going to take the next step.

I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm going to trust you.

I'm going to take the next step, and every day I'm just going to go through my paces.

I'm going to go through the normal things that I always did as a Christian, but in suffering I don't feel like doing.

But even in that context, advice you might have for parents who are facing something similar or, you know, are hitting that moment where we got to talk about grandma and grandpa is, And, of course, it's always age appropriate, but how open should we be? How open have you been with your kids with what's facing you?

[clapping]

I think it's terrible policy.

But either way, whether we end up with UBI or we don't, Americans are going to need better habits than we have right now.

So whether we end at the sunny uplands of abundance or the hellscape of an actual jobs apocalypse, we're going to need better habits in either scenario to help our people, our citizens, and our republic thrive because virtue has always been at the heart of what it takes to keep a republic.

To borrow Lincoln's metaphor, it's the golden apple in the silver frame.

Politics, the silver frame, is the stuff we do to secure our rights through ordered liberty.But life, the daily stuff that's made up of community, affections, and habits, that's the golden apple at the center.

The state's job isn't to define that, but it's to secure the preconditions, the silver frame, that enable all the little platoons and communities to pursue the golden apples.

[laughing]

Hmm

...

in a way for me is how well the Intelligence Committee often does work in the Senate.

And so to me, a lot of friends in the Senate, a lot of well-meaning people of the Senate as aspirationally the world's greatest deliberative body, and it should be that, but it's not that.

And so when you ask why isn't it that, some of it's the intractable nature of entitlement expansions.

We've almost never rolled back an entitlement expansion in US history with the one sort of partial exception of the Gingrich, um, Clinton deal in the middle of the 1990s.

It was in the midst of a bunch of budget surplus, and it was folks who were largely non-voters because it was a welfare reform program.

What are you learning about, uh, about this from the patient side?

If Congress is looking at the wrong things, what is it missing?

We are living through a digital revolution, which is both glorious and horrific at the same time.

Because what, what the digital revolution does is it accelerates almost everything about the human experience.

Anything that can be reduced to a series of steps, which is most economic activity, is gonna be routinized and become really, really cheap, really fast, and really ubiquitous.

We've never lived in a world where twenty-two-year-olds couldn't assume that the work they did, they would be able to do until death or retirement, and we're never gonna have that world again.

And Congress doesn't talk about any of those kind of most fundamental issues.

The disruption of work, for good and for ill, should be front and central.

And I wonder why you think God has put you to this test.

Right.

Um, the tribalism of, you know, 2020 or even 2017 wasn't as apparent in 2015, but it was bubbling up fast.

And people involved in politics love to do nutpicking about the crazy people at the other end of the continuum that aren't in their party, and there's a lot of truth to that, but it's a-Definite subordinate story in my mind to the big things that are really happening.

And so I, in that speech, I just kinda wanted to contrast the idea that the public approval numbers for Congress bounced around between 9 and 15%.

When you ask people objectively what do they think, they think everybody here is bad at the job.

It isn't that Republicans are right that Democrats stink and Democrats are right that Republicans stink, it's that these institutions are not working very well at all.

And so the historian in me says 75 or 100 years from now when you look back on our moment, we're not gonna talk about politics at all.

What, what do you think?