British poet John Donne urged us not to ask for whom the death knell sounded, because it sounds for us all. And every time it sounds, it signals that a little bit of mankind has been lost.
Perhaps the Nebraska Republican Central Committee should remember that when it convenes Saturday. The state party’s top leaders are expected to consider a motion to censure one of its top members, U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse.
His offense? Voting with the Democrats to convict former President Donald Trump following the Senate’s show trial for Trump’s impeachment.
One of the most conservative members of the Senate, Sasse is now one of the darlings for the left because he did what everyone knew he would do, or should have known. A Never-Trumper from the start, Sasse publicly didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and didn’t again in 2020. Now the left considers him a hero for jumping ship, but it’s easy to be a hero when the other side doesn’t have the votes. Sasse rightly stated that had the subject of the impeachment been a Democrat, the votes would have been reversed. That’s because what’s going on here isn’t a search for truth, but a political power grab and he decried the ‘tribalism,” that passes for debate in Washington these days.
So it’s not like he didn’t vote his convictions. He just refused to, as he put it, “bend the knee to one man.”
So for that, the state party risks joining the left’s cancel culture—attempting top silence those with whom it disagrees.
We have quoted William F. Buckley before in saying that the left touts its belief in expressing divergent thought, until it learns that there actually are divergent thoughts.
The state Republicans can take a step toward actually encouraging open dialogue on divergent views by voting down the motion to censure.
Otherwise, it risks burying a little more of what makes, or made, America the world’s beacon of freedom.
