Benjamin E. Sasse: I don't think we do a great job in America any more...

While Admiral Neffenger is an impressive man, it is naive and dangerous to pretend installing one director can heal what ails TSA, the Department of Homeland Security needs to admit that it has a crisis of bureaucratic complacency - lacking an overarching vision and coherent measures of success and failure.

Benjamin E. Sasse

tsa success men

I think I'm one of five people in the Senate who's never been a politician before. And now that I am a politician, what I find weird about it is that I respect myself less.

Benjamin E. Sasse

politician people thinking

I think the category of perpetual adolescence, it's a new thing, and it's a dangerous thing. Adolescence is a pretty glorious concept. It's about intentionally transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Being stuck in adolescence - that's a hell. Peter Pan is a dystopia, and we forget that.

Benjamin E. Sasse

childhood forget thinking

Let's be clear: Has the U.S. ever made any mistakes? Of course.Is the U.S. at all like [Vladimir] Putin's regime? Not at all.

Benjamin E. Sasse

putin regimes mistake

So [Vladimir] Putin is a mess. He's committed all sort of murderous thuggery, and I am opposed to the way Putin conducts himself in world affairs, and I hope that the president also wants to show moral leadership about this issue.

Benjamin E. Sasse

moral-leadership issues president

D.C. is known as Hollywood for ugly people.

Benjamin E. Sasse

ugly-people ugly people

What happens in Senate fight club stays in Senate fight club.

Benjamin E. Sasse

fighting

I didn't go to Harvard because I thought they had good academics. I went because they had crappy enough sports so they'd let me play.

Benjamin E. Sasse

let-me enough sports

It's not natural to have to suffer when we work. We're made to be productive, and yet the world we live in, there's a whole bunch of suffering. And what they need to understand as 10-year-olds, so that when they're 15 and slightly less protected, and when they're 20 and they're moving into a truly semi-independent state, they need to have experienced that memory of persevering and having gotten through hardship.

Benjamin E. Sasse

suffering memories moving

Once we affirm the goal of trying to make sure that you don't have jihadis infiltrating terrorist flows, we need to make sure we're doing it in a thoughtful way that's thinking about the 10 and 15 and 20 years long battle we're going to have against jihadists.

Benjamin E. Sasse

thoughtful years thinking

The U.S. affirms freedom of speech.[Vladimir] Putin is no friend of freedom of speech.

Benjamin E. Sasse

freedom-of-speech no-friends speech

[Vladimir] Putin is an enemy of the free press. The U.S. celebrates free press.

Benjamin E. Sasse

putin celebrate enemy

[Vladimir] Putin is an enemy of political dissent. The U.S. celebrates political dissent and the right for people to argue free from violence about places where our ideas are in conflict.

Benjamin E. Sasse

political people ideas

There is no equivalency between the United States of America, the greatest freedom loving nation in the history of the world, and the murderous thugs that are in [Vladimir] Putin's defense of his cronyism. There's no moral equivalency there.

Benjamin E. Sasse

thug united-states america

In the American constitutional system of three different branches, conflict - and I mean that peaceful, vigorous debate - it's a feature of our system, not a bug. We need less all-or - winner-take-all politics.

Benjamin E. Sasse

peaceful different mean

People think if they voted for somebody, they should reflexively defend everything they do or say. And if you voted against somebody, you should just as reflexively oppose everything they do or say. It's not very helpful. What's more constructive for our kids is to go on a case-by-case basis, evaluating particular policies.

Benjamin E. Sasse

kids people thinking

We should vigorously debate policy differences. We have too much all-or-nothing in American politics.

Benjamin E. Sasse

debate differences too-much

The president is the president. And every American, regardless of who you voted for, if you voted for Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Donald Duck, I don't really care. We should all hope that the president does a good job, that he's surrounded by wise counselors, that he advances U.S. interests.

Benjamin E. Sasse

ducks wise jobs

I don't understand what the president's [Donald Trump] position is on Russia. But I can tell you what my position is on Russia: Russia is a great danger to a lot of its neighbors, and [Vladimir] Putin has as one of his core objectives fracturing NATO, which is one of the greatest military alliances in the history of the world.

Benjamin E. Sasse

russia military president

The real number of the US' obligations, unfunded obligations that we're passing on to our future generates is more like $70 trillion to $75 trillion. The vast majority of that is health entitlements - Medicare, Obamacare, Medicaid. There's also Social Security, interest on the debt. But fundamentally, health entitlements are the thing that will bankrupt our kids. We need to fix that for the long-term.

Benjamin E. Sasse

real passing-on kids

I don't think we do a great job in America any more of distinguishing between campaigns and governance. We live in an environment that's all campaign all of the time and it's helpful, now that we've moved beyond a campaign and an election to get into a governance posture.