An oil painting by Italian Baroque master Caravaggio shows the risen Christ guiding a man's hand into an open wound at his side, as two men look on with fascination. Only after putting his hand into Jesus's side does Saint Thomas believe what the apostles said about Jesus's resurrection. In a passage from Saint John's Gospel, Jesus says: "Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed."
This particular passage resonates with Ben Nelson, a conservative Democrat who served as governor of Nebraska from 1991 to 1999 before serving in the U.S. Senate from 2001 to 2013. It's a story about how people come to doubt things they cannot see. "We've become sophists," Nelson says from his Omaha home, "which is worse than skepticism." In his fine new book Death of the Senate: My Front Row Seat to the Demise of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body (Potomac Books, 2021), Nelson situates the decline of bipartisanship within broader trends of declining trust in government, erosion of rules and norms, and perceptions of inauthenticity among a new generation of elected officials. The lack of authenticity seems to bother him the most. "People don’t want somebody playing a role," he says, going on to explain how creeping doubts in a politician's trustworthiness can undermine public confidence in the institutions that politicians lead. “We don’t have to keep changing our points of view.”
Earl Benjamin Nelson was born in 1941 and grew up an only child in the southwestern corner of Nebraska. He hunted rattlesnakes to protect the family dog, Spot, and earned an Eagle Scout before moving to Lincoln and launching his political career. As governor, he cut government spending, lowered taxes on the middle class, and lobbied then-Senator Bob Dole to introduce legislation curbing the federal government's practice of imposing "unfunded or underfunded" mandates on State and local governments. Over 12 years in the Senate, Nelson continued to stake out centrist bargaining positions that reflected the interests and opinions not of party leaders but the people back home in Nebraska. He accepts the characterization that he was the Joe Manchin of his era, albeit "not with quite as much publicity about it." We spoke with former Senator Nelson about what he calls the "death" of the Senate, as well as the trustworthiness of elections and elected officials. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
What is the Death of the Senate?
The Senate is in a declining role from what it was intended to be, the world’s greatest deliberative body. If the Senate continues to go the direction it is going now, it will die as the Senate we’ve known. It might be 100 members in a purely partisan way, like the House of Representatives, which is not a deliberative body. My contention is that this was not the original intent for the Senate, which needs to consider issues in an open way. Take a look at the House of Representatives. Only occasionally will someone cross over on a controversial issue, as happened recently with respect to the infrastructure legislation. That act of bipartisanship or cooperation is the exception, not the rule, for the House. You don’t have to be a constitutionalist to believe that we ought not change the role of the Senate. We have found ways over the years to make the body work in a way the framers intended.
What might be the next Death of the Senate? There is the push to eliminate the filibuster, for example.
That’s it. They’ve already stabbed it by taking out the filibuster with respect to nominations, which Senator Harry Reid led in 2013. Mitch McConnell extended it very ill-advisedly to the Supreme Court in 2017. Two of the three newest members of the Supreme Court would not have been able to get a supermajority vote in the Senate. So, you see it turning into 100 members of a body, and the filibuster wouldn’t be the final blow, but it would be significant.
What else?
Beyond the filibuster? I think another issue is continuing to be too partisan and listening too much to the majority and minority leaders. Each one of those leaders is elected by their peers. And so, what the peers give, the peers have the power to take away. I didn’t take orders from Tom Daschle or Harry Reid. The longer you’re there, the more important seniority becomes. Committee assignments are determined on basis of seniority and of course people want those positions. But my orders came from the people of Nebraska. I can tell you Joe Manchin isn’t taking orders from anybody other than the people back in West Virginia. Whether you agree with him or not, it’s more important to Manchin that the people of West Virginia and people across the country agree with what he’s doing than the Democratic leader. We need the Senate to be a vital part of our deliberative process.
You describe how to be successful in the Senate, saying one must be “honest, trustworthy, and authentic.” Have these values become quaint?
Hope not. Not unless we’ve all gone to Hollywood where you take a new role every day. If you’re into filmmaking, you can be anybody you want, whenever a new role comes along. My dad said he’d seen more bad people act nice than good people act bad. Now, we have seen some of this, people taking on different roles and playing to the crowd, and that’s because we have people in politics who do not feel comfortable in their own skin. I might not be good at being myself, but I’d be worse at being somebody else.
But Nebraska is a high trust state, much higher than most of the country. What advice can an ex-politician from Nebraska offer politicians from other parts of the country?
Those three concepts that we just discussed. If people don’t believe you are who you say you are, then that’s going to be a problem. People don’t want somebody playing a role. We don’t have to keep changing our points of view. Politicians modify their positions to pick up bigger percentages of support, knowing they may pick up or lose some people, but you have to be a person of substance and do the right thing. I was always interested in having one Nebraska come together like a large family.
Let’s talk about elections. You write that Bush v. Gore was a harbinger of political activism that has dominated the ensuing years. Do you wonder if contested elections are the new normal?
I think we’re in a very bad time, a very difficult time for our country. Whether you believe the Big Lie or you’re propagating the Big Lie, that’s bad. There’s been the development of “alternative facts.” We cannot come to a common set of facts anymore. I do not think that President Bush or Vice President Gore or President Obama thought that blue was green or anything like that. Those politicians could agree on a common set of facts, in my opinion. So, I’ll ask you who was the common candidate in 2016 and 2020? Who has tried to undermine election results in both those presidential cycles? It’s pretty clear what’s happening and we don’t have to think very hard about who is responsible for sowing distrust in elections. I’m not going to say that there aren’t some Democrats who’ve done this as well, but they’re not the main instigators of it. If you tell a lie big enough for long enough, a certain percentage of the American people will buy that lie. But we dodged a bullet in the coup.
Political philosopher Kevin Vallier has written that government has fallen into a type of “trust trap,” where politicians campaign against trusting government, which begets further distrust once they win election and hold office. Do you agree?
President Biden is the same today as the first time I met him. He is authentic. I think he struggles at times to get it right because it’s very difficult. He worries about what is undone when he does something. It’s a constant challenge. You worry about what you’re doing but you’re worried about getting it wrong, too. As for President Trump, I’m not sure he knows what he is. He assumes whatever role he has to serve and perform. I suppose there’s always an element of that when you get involved in a political party. Personally, I was and I am pro-life. I was in support of guns, and I still support guns.
If there is a “trust trap,” can you point to a time in recent history when voters began to lose their faith in government?
I think this began trending with political out-groups around 2008, 2009. The country went through a very, very difficult time, and many were not able to feel confident and settled in the government and the future of the country. We were entering the Great Recession. First came TARP and bailing out the banks. Some people said “don’t bail out the banks,” but we didn’t want to deal with the opposite and its consequences. Then it was bail out General Motors. That was controversial, but if we hadn’t bailed out GM, then we’d still be dealing with the bankruptcy. The options were not great. Were we going to give up major manufacturing in the United States so we could take in more vehicles from international plants? What else were we going to do? I will say that spending, once it reaches a certain level, traumatizes people. That’s what Joe Manchin has been dealing with, trying to get something in that budget that it’s not traumatic to people. I think this all started around 2008. You’ll notice there was a lot less of the loud crowd complaining about spending during the Trump era.
How do you mean spending “traumatizes” people?
The big spending figures scare people. The fire blazes and somebody stokes the fire.
Back to your book. “Nobody expected me to win, and I never expected to lose.” You wrote this about running for governor the first time. Explain your mindset.
Because I thought I was running the best campaign. I thought that I was reaching out to people across the state of Nebraska. One Nebraska. Come together. Stop fighting over whether we’re rural or urban. Think about things in terms of yourself, your family, your neighbors and community. I thought I had a way to make the thing work for everybody. My re-election four years later garnered a huge majority, and I started out with hardly any name recognition but a commitment to get it done. I ran against an incumbent in that race but felt I understood what the job would consist of. I had told my wife before we got married that one day I was going to run for governor. That was my goal, but she doubted whether I would really follow through on it.
You write about late West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd. You note he began his career as a segregationist. But by the time you met him, Byrd was fiercely devoted to protecting the Senate. Redemption was the theme of that passage. Do we allow redemption today in politics?
We’re less willing to recognize redemption. We’re less willing to accept it. We’re Doubting Thomas’s out of the Bible, about whether people really have changed to the point that they’re redeemed. We’ve become sophists, which is worse than skepticism. For me, you have to find out if someone is authentic in their conversion, and I knew that was the case with Robert Byrd. You can’t just change your mind on that issue; you have to change your heart. He couldn’t have been in the Senate all those years unless he was authentic.
John Waters and Neil Hassler are writers in Nebraska.