Ben Sasse

There's no Democratic and Republican seats or gyms or coffee shops at the Supreme Court. Every American should be able to celebrate the fact that we aspire to nine justices who are looking to defend our rights and to defend the Constitution, not to advance policy preferences.

The longest-term thought many people have in D.C. is how can I be sure I don't do anything that so annoys either my base or my general electorate that I might not be able to get my job back? I don't think that's the right way to think about it.

Look at trade and automation: two competing but slightly overlapping forces in the shrinking of the duration of jobs right now. We have to be able to talk honestly about how disrupted this world is going to be, and it is crazy to mislead people and say we're going to bring back all of the big factory jobs by creating a protectionist regime.

Persevering and getting through hardship makes you tough, and at our house we celebrate stitches. As long as we didn't do permanent damage to their spine that's going to have lasting effect, we applaud and celebrate stitches at our house.

Rising political tribalism, shamelessly exaggerating our opponents' claims or behavior, is leaving us vulnerable: No one loves America's internal fighting - and our increasingly siloed news consumption - more than Vladimir Putin.

Obamacare arrived also because Republicans failed to persuade the public that we could address the avalanche of problems government had already created by decades of interfering with the health-care market.

I'm often asked by search committees for public and private universities to help them think about how to find their next president.

Congress is where Americans are supposed to have our big, messy political fights. That's because the people who make the laws need to be hired and fired by the people. Don't like the laws? Fire the lawmakers.

Among the responsibilities of each citizen in a participatory democracy is keeping ourselves sufficiently informed so that we can participate effectively, argue our positions honorably, and hopefully, forge sufficient consensus to understand each other and then to govern.

Our pandering politicians compete to add names to the dependency of entitlement rolls instead of evaluating the success of these programs by how many people leave the dole and are restored to an independence. And these bulging entitlements are saddling our offspring with unsustainable generational debt.

My wife, Melissa, and I, together with our neighbors, try to create experiences for our kids that build character. We want our kids to exercise their muscles and their minds.

I'm from a farm town that when I was a kid was about an hour outside of Omaha.