So I finally got around to reading this guy's inaugural speech on the Senate floor. Have to admit, I like what I read. Certainly his idea of restoring the Senate to what it once was is just an ambition at this point, but I hope he gets it back to where he wants it to be.

Some excerpts for your consideration and as always, emphasis is mine

Thank you, Mr. President. I rise to speak from the Floor for the first time today. I have never been in politics before, and I intentionally waited a year to speak here.

I want to talk today about the purpose of the Senate, about some of the historical uses of the Floor of this special body, and about what baby-steps toward institutional recovery might look like.

Before doing so, let me explain briefly why I chose to wait a year since Election Day before beginning to fully engage in Floor debate.

I’ve done two things in my adult worklife: I’m a historian by training and a strategy guy by vocation. Before becoming a college president, I helped over a dozen organizations find strategies to get through some very ugly crises. One important lesson I learned over and over is that, when you walk into any troubled organization, there is a delicate balance between expressing human empathy and yet not passively sweeping hard truths under the rug. On the one hand, it is absolutely essential to listen first, to ask questions first to learn how a broken institution got to where it is — because there are reasons. Things drift and fray for reasons; people rarely set out to break special institutions they inherit.

Still, empathy cannot change the reality that a bankrupt company is spending more to build its products than customers are willing to pay for them; a college with too few students is not only out of money but out of spirit; a charity that cannot persuade enough donors to invest in its cause might not have the right cause.

This is the two-part posture I have adopted in my rookie year. Because of this goal of empathetic listening first, of coming to sit and privately interview many of you — and also because of a pledge I made to Nebraskans in deference to an old Senate tradition — I have waited.

But please do not misunderstand: Do not confuse a deliberate approach with passivity. I ran because I think that the public is right that we as a people are not tackling the generational crises that we face: We don’t have a long-term foreign policy for the age of jihad and cyberwar; our entitlement budgets are completely fake; we are entering an age where work and jobs will be more fundamentally disrupted than at any point since hunter-gatherers first settled in agrarian villages. And yet we don’t really have any plans. I think the public is right that we as a Congress are not shepherding the country through the serious debates we must have about the future of this great nation.

I will outline the key observations from my interviews of you another day. For now let me flag the painful, top-line take-away: 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.

And if I can be brutally honest for a moment: I’m home basically every weekend, and what I hear — and what I’m sure most of you hear — is some version of this: A pox on both parties and all your houses. We don’t believe politicians are even trying to fix this mess. To the Republicans, to those who claim this new majority is leading the way: Few believe that. To the grandstanders who use this institution as a platform for outside pursuits: Few believe the country’s needs are as important to you as your ambitions. To the Democrats, who did this body harm through nuclear tactics: Few believe bare-knuckled politics are a substitute for principled governing. And does anyone doubt that many on both the right and the left now salivate for more of these radical tactics? The people despise us all.

I therefore propose a thought experiment: If the Senate isn’t going to be the most important venue for addressing our biggest national problems, where is that venue? Where should the people look for the long-term national prioritization? Or, to ask it of ourselves, would anything be lost if the Senate didn’t exist? Again, this a thought experiment, so let me be emphatically clear: I think a great deal would be lost if the federal government didn’t have a Senate — but game out with me the question of “Why?” What precisely would be lost if we had only a House of Representatives, rather than both bodies? The growth of the administrative state, the fourth branch of government, is increasingly hollowing out the Article I branch, the legislature — and many in Congress have been complicit in this hollowing out of our own powers. So would anything really be lost if we doubled-down on Woodrow Wilson’s impulses and inclinations toward administrative efficiency by removing much of the clunky-ness of legislative process?

.........Six-year terms; representation of states, not census counts; nearly limitless debate to protect dissenters; no formal rules for political parties. What then is the answer to the question, “What is the Senate for?” Possibly the best shorthand is: “To shield lawmakers from obsession with short-term popularity to enable us to focus on the biggest long-term challenges our people face.”

Why does the Senate’s character matter? Precisely because it is meant to insulate us from short-termism. This is the point of the Senate. This place is built to insulate us 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.

.......Okay, so this might not be the Senate’s finest hour. But isn’t the dysfunction in here merely an echo of the broader political polarization out there? It’s an important question: Isn’t the Senate broken merely because of a larger “shattered consensus” of shared belief across our land?

Surely, this is part of the story. But there is more to say:

First, the political polarization of the country (outside Washington) is often overstated. We could talk about the Election of 1800, the run-up to the Civil War, the response to Catholic immigration waves, the bloodiest summers of the Civil Rights movement, or the experiences of returning soldiers from Vietnam if you want to talk about high-water marks of polarization.

Second, civic disengagement is arguably a larger problem today than is polarization. It isn’t so much that most regular folks are locked into predictably Republican and Democratic positions on every issue; it’s that they are tuning us out altogether. And despite the echo chambers for those of us with these jobs, are we aware that the Pew Research Center notes that the total 24-hour viewership of CNN, Fox, and MSNBC is only between 1.8 and 2 million? That’s it.

.......There are good and bad reasons to be unpopular. A good reason would be to suffer for waging an honorable fight for the long-term that has near-term political downsides — like telling seniors the sobering truth that they’ve paid in far less for their Social Security and Medicare than they are currently getting back.

But we all know deep down that the political class is unpopular not because of our relentless truth-telling, but because of politicians’ habit of regularized pandering to those who already agree with us. The sound-bite culture — whether in our ninety-second TV stand-ups in the Russell rotunda, in our press releases, in the habits honed in campaigns — is everywhere around us.

This is the very reductionism — the short-termism — that this institution was explicitly supposed to guard against. The “Senate” is a word with two meanings — it is the 100 of us as a group, a community, a “body” (that’s an important metaphor); and it is this physical chamber. The Senate is what we call this special room in which we assemble to debate the really big things.

..........Mr. President, I mentioned that I’ve done two kinds of work before coming here: historian/college president and crisis turn-around guy. While they might seem quite different, both depend on a certain kind of deliberation, a kind of Socratic speech.
Good history is good story-telling. And good story-telling demands empathy; it requires understanding different actors, differing motivations, competing goals. Reducing everything immediately to good and evil is bad history — not only because it isn’t true, but because reductionism is unpersuasive; it is boring. Good history, on the other hand, demands that one talk socratically — that one can present alternate viewpoints, not strawman arguments.

Similarly, can you imagine a business strategist who presents just one idea, and then immediately announces that it is the only right idea, the only plausible idea? How would companies respond? They would fire that guy. A good strategist, by contrast, puts the best construction on a range of scenarios; and outlines the best criticisms of each option, including especially the option he or she wants to argue for most passionately. And then one assumes that your competitors will upgrade their game in light of your opening moves. This is again a kind of socratic speech.

But bizarrely, we don’t really do this very much here. We don’t have many actual debates. This is a place that would be difficult today to describe as “the greatest deliberative body in the world” — something that has often been true historically. 

Socrates said it was dishonorable to make the lesser argument appear the greater — or to take someone else’s argument and distort it so that you don’t have to engage their strongest points. Yet here, on this Floor, we regularly devolve into bizarre partisan-politician speech. We hear robotic recitations of talking points.

Well, guess what: Normal people don’t talk like this. They don’t like that we do. And, more importantly, they don’t trust us because we do.

It’s weird, because one-on-one, when the cameras are off, hardly anyone here really believes that senators from the other party are evilly motivated — or bribed — or stupid. There is actually a great deal of human affection around here — but again, that’s in private, when the cameras aren’t on.

There's a lot more too this speech and highly recommend reading the entire thing.