This article is slated to run in our May-June print issue later this year. We decided to share it sooner in light of the remarkable interview Ben Sasse gave to Sola Media’s Know What You Believe podcast, hosted by Michael Horton. Watch that interview below, then read on to learn more about the faith and principles that guided Sasse’s work in Washington.
On August 27, 2018, two days after Senator John McCain died of brain cancer, Senator Ben Sasse posted a photo of the two of them: Sasse wearing athletic shoes, red shorts, and a white T-shirt, McCain wearing a suit and holding a traditional black leather briefcase. The two appear to be laughing. Sasse captioned the photo, “This looks like a nice picture. In reality, he’s calling me ‘stupid ba—rd’—again.”
That image captures the essence of both senators. McCain, traditionalist to the core despite his reputation as the “Maverick” of the senate and his often foul mouth. Sasse, who called himself the second or third most conservative senator and was a self-deprecating and humorous politician who took his oath seriously but never took himself too seriously.
The subtext of the photo, in the aftermath of McCain’s death and at a time when McCain had become persona non grata with many on the right for his refusal to revoke Obamacare a year before, signaled who Sasse is. Despite the pressure from President Donald Trump and the MAGA wing to shun McCain, Sasse was showing him respect.
On December 23, 2025, Sasse made an announcement. “This is a tough note to write,” he posted on X, “but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.”
The loss of Ben Sasse—though, to quote Monty Python, which I think he’d appreciate, he’s not dead yet—is the loss of a rare breed in today’s politics, the principled conservative uninterested in populist trends on the right and, like McCain, driven by a set of internal principles. Many had hoped to see Sasse return to politics when the populist fever breaks. To know he won’t be here for that moment is a tragedy.
In his first speech on the Senate floor, in November 2015, Sasse essentially gave a lesson on the constitutional order and on the abject failure of modern-day Congress to assert its authority against the administrative state and the executive branch. It’s a remarkable speech, given only after he’d spent a year in the chamber and spoken with many of his colleagues to understand what was going on.
No one in this body thinks the Senate is laser-focused on the most pressing issues facing the nation. No one. Some of us lament this fact; some are angered by it; many are resigned to it; some try to dispassionately explain how they think it came to be. But no one disputes it.
As a result, he also said, “The people despise us all.”
The point of the Senate’s long terms, Sasse concluded, is to “shield lawmakers from obsession with short-term popularity to enable us to focus on the biggest long-term challenges our people face.” And the character of the chamber matters, he explained, “precisely because it is meant to insulate us from short-termism … from opinion fads and the short-term bickering of 24-hour-news-cycles. The Senate was built to focus on the big stuff. The Senate is to be the antidote to sound-bites.”
related
This would become the message he repeated again and again and again while serving that institution. It’s not merely an indictment of a certain kind of short-term thinking by the Senate; it’s an indictment of the character of our politicians, who come to the chamber not actually to serve their people and solve problems but to leverage the platform, cling to power, reach other offices—governorships, the presidency—or position themselves to serve on high-paying corporate boards when their terms ended.
He similarly criticized Senate process during the controversial nomination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, arguing that “every confirmation hearing is … an overblown, politicized circus” because the constitutional system—and particularly the I-alone-can-fix-it style of the modern presidency—is in shambles.
How did we get here and how do we fix it? I want to make just four brief points.
Number one: In our system, the legislative branch is supposed to be the center of our politics.
Number two: It’s not. Why not? Because for the last century, and increasing by the decade right now, more and more legislative authority is delegated to the executive branch every year. Both parties do it. The legislature is impotent. The legislature is weak. And most people here want their jobs more than they really want to do legislative work. And so they punt most of the work to the next branch.
The third consequence is that this transfer of power means that people yearn for a place where politics can actually be done. And when we don’t do a lot of big actual political debating here, we transfer it to the Supreme Court. And that’s why the Supreme Court is increasingly a substitute political battleground. It is not healthy, but it is what happens and it’s something our founders wouldn’t be able to make any sense of.
And fourth and finally: We badly need to restore the proper duties and the balance of power from our constitutional system.
Sasse made these comments in November 2018. He won reelection in 2020, and then—in a move that shocked many—in October 2022 announced he would leave the Senate in January 2023 to become president at the University of Florida.
On Sasse’s last day in the Senate, Republican leader Mitch McConnell praised his knowledge and skill on a range of issues, but most of all his passion for “things that bear directly on the future of the American experiment.”
In his own farewell address to the Senate, a speech filled with biblical references, Sasse returned to his theme of limited, constitutional governance. The founders wanted “senators, and presidents who thought of DC as a temporary stay,” he said. “Washington is a place to do a good bit of neighbor loving work, but then to go back home to the more permanent work of life-and-flesh-and-blood whole communities.” Sasse was leaving Congress to do just that.
It’s not entirely surprising that Sasse would leave the Senate for academia. He had left public life under the George W. Bush administration, having served as an assistant secretary in the US Department of Health and Human Services for academic life 12 years earlier. He’d overseen an overhaul of Midland University in Nebraska. But his exit from the Senate seems as tinged with grief about the state of our politics—something Sasse articulated from day one of his time serving there—as about a sense of fit or calling.
If you spend nine years challenging colleagues to be the grownups in the room and do their jobs, reminding them that the Constitution gives them authority to restrain other branches, reminding them they serve the people (and it’s not the other way around), and if you feel like Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill every day and starting the next in the same place—well, when the governor of Florida calls and says, “I have a wonderful plan for your life,” you can’t judge the man for taking it.
At the University of Florida, Sasse helped launch the Hamilton School, a new program focused on civic and classical education. Many conservatives and Jewish groups lauded him for how he handled campus demonstrations after October 7, 2023: He had, essentially, a zero-tolerance policy on antisemitism. But his stint at Florida would be short-lived.
In July of 2024, Sasse announced he was stepping down from the presidency at the university due to his wife’s health and the needs of his family. “I need to step back and rebuild more stable household systems for a time,” he wrote. “I’m going to remain involved in serving our UF students—past, present, and future—but I need to walk arm-in-arm with my dearest friend more hours of every week.”
Earlier in 2025, he announced he was serving as a fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank aligned with the Sasse’s principled conservatism. And then a few months later, he discovered he has pancreatic cancer and likely won’t survive it.
So who is Ben Sasse? A senator who wanted his colleagues to take their eyes off the next election and focus on the American people instead, each of whom is made in the image of God. A college president pushing against academic trends making the Western tradition and the American story villainous. A man who steps away from a prestigious job to care for his wife at a moment of crisis, displaying the essence of “Love your wives as Christ loved the church” (Eph. 5:25, NCV).
And, if you read his announcement of his own terminal disease, you see a man ready to face death with courage and faith.
It’s a grim metaphor, but Sasse is one of a dying breed. Conservative people of principle—people committed to classical liberalism and the Judeo-Christian Western tradition—are vanishing from the public sphere.
They may return, and in the meantime—in this mean time—let’s be thankful for Sasse’s witness. That said, I repeat myself: He’s not dead yet. And I pray he’s getting better.
As he fights, Christians can share his hope, and everyone can witness as he testifies to it. As he put it in his announcement about the cancer, “We hope in a real Deliverer—a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place.” True, “the eternal city—with foundations and without cancer—is not yet,” Sasse continued, but already, “the people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned….For to us a son is given (Isaiah 9).”
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must nevertheless be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country,” and it is “indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.” It is men like Sasse who made it indispensable, who kept our institutions grounded in a moral and ethical tradition that made democracy make sense.
Correction (February 23, 2026): A prior version of this article misstated the location of Midland University.
Mike Cosper is senior director of CT Media.
