GOP Establishment Calls for New Candidate to Challenge Trump… This Is NOT Good

GOP Establishment Calls for New Candidate to Challenge Trump… This Is NOT Good

Ben Sasse has been extremely outspoken about his distaste for presumptive nominee Donald Trump, but what he’s doing now is arching eyebrows.

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From The Daily Caller:

Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse, a reliable critic of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, wants to draft “an honest leader” to run as a third party candidate for president.

In a lengthy Facebook post referring to Trump and Clinton as “dishonest,” Sasse wrote: “So…let’s have a thought experiment for a few weeks: Why shouldn’t America draft an honest leader who will focus on 70 percent solutions for the next four years? You know…an adult?”

Sasse didn’t specifically name anyone. And the father of three seemed to suggest he doesn’t want to be the candidate. “Such a leader should be able to campaign 24/7 for the next six months,” he wrote. “Therefore he/she likely can’t be an engaged parent with little kids.”

The senator also suggested he doesn’t mind if a consensus candidate isn’t a conservative purist.

“Although I’m one of the most conservative members of the Senate, I’m not interested in an ideological purity test, because even a genuine consensus candidate would almost certainly be more conservative than either of the two dishonest liberals now leading the two national parties,” he said.

Here is what Sasse outlined:

Imagine if we had a candidate:

…who hadn’t spent his/her life in politics either buying politicians or being bought

…who didn’t want to stitch together a coalition based on anger but wanted to take a whole nation forward

…who pledged to serve for only one term, as a care-taker problem-solver for this messy moment

…who knew that Washington isn’t competent to micromanage the lives of free people, but instead wanted to SERVE by focusing on 3 or 4 big national problems,

such as:

A. A national security strategy for the age of cyber and jihad;

B. Honest budgeting/entitlement reform so that we stop stealing from future generations;

C. Empowering states and local governments to improve K-12 education, and letting Washington figure out how to update federal programs to adjust to now needing lifelong learners in an age where folks are obviously not going to work at a single job for a lifetime anymore; and

D. Retiring career politicians by ending all the incumbency protections, special rules, and revolving door opportunities for folks who should be public “servants,” not masters.

This really shouldn’t be that hard.

The oath I took is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. In brief, that means I’m for limited government.

And there is no reason to believe that either of these two national frontrunners believe in limiting anything about DC’s power.

I believe that most Americans can still be for limited government again — if they were given a winsome candidate who wanted Washington to focus on a small number of really important, urgent things — in a way that tried to bring people together instead of driving us apart.

I think there is room – an appetite – for such a candidate.

What am I missing?

Do you agree with Sasse?

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