Living in a republic demands a great deal of us.

Among the responsibilities of each citizen in a participatory democracy is keeping ourselves sufficiently informed so that we can participate effectively, argue our positions honorably, and hopefully, forge sufficient consensus to understand each other and then to govern.

Democrats have bad ideas and Republicans have no ideas.

Nebraska Republicans believe that Nebraska Democrats love their kids, and I believe we can have a constructive conversation with everybody.

The people I like most are the people who are principled enough on both the right and the left to believe it is their duty to advocate, even though they may lose, and are not committed to their incumbency over the future of America.

Obamacare is a big deal to me. It's terrible legislation.

I believe zealously in conservative ideals, but Nebraskans want people who get things done, not just those who scream at each other.

I'm a right-wing conservative.

Keeping our agricultural sector strong and secure should be a bipartisan concern.

Farmers and ranchers need long-term certainty about who they will be able to sell to and under what terms.

Subsidies and bailouts cannot compensate for uncertain or permanently diminished market access.

The USMCA is a good deal for American agriculture.

Modern technology gives us surprising glimpses into human development. It helps us plan for and celebrate new life.

Abortion is emotional and difficult to discuss.

Planned Parenthood can't hide their sickening abortion business behind a 'safe, legal and rare' slogan.

In America, we divide federal power between the legislative, executive and judicial branches so that no one holds too much power. This is sixth-grade civics: Congress writes the laws; the president executes the laws; and the courts apply those laws fairly and dispassionately to cases.

Members of the Supreme Court have lifetime tenures because they're not supposed to do politics.

Congress is where Americans are supposed to have our big, messy political fights. That's because the people who make the laws need to be hired and fired by the people. Don't like the laws? Fire the lawmakers.

Courts do not make the law.

Government never adapts quickly to new challenges, but our slow-footedness on cyber is unparalleled.

Since arriving in Washington in January 2015, I have pushed for a strategic framework that clearly articulates how we'll tackle threats in cyberspace.

The nature and scope of security threats in the cyber era are four-dimensional compared to the early nuclear age.

There were giant scale barriers to becoming a nuclear power, whereas launching a cyberattack requires only some coding capability, a laptop and an Internet connection.

My grandma was a child of the Depression, and knew the tragedy of having her home outside Diller was destroyed by a tornado.

We must repeal Obamacare, but even more, we must replace the worldview that underlies and enabled it.

The first time I began to really think about politics was in fifth grade, during President Reagan's first term.

The American work ethic is, thankfully, still deeply engraved in rural Nebraska souls. This is who we are, and we here in Nebraska have far more to teach Washington, D.C. than Washington, D.C. has to teach us.

I think we should have a universal, a shared cultural or societal goal, of universal health insurance coverage. That's completely different from saying the government can solve all of those problems, or that it can micromanage every aspect of the health delivery system. I think we know that it can't do that.

We should be reforming our entitlement programs to empower people.

I think Medicaid harms people.

I think most Americans believe in a basic social safety net.

Our pandering politicians compete to add names to the dependency of entitlement rolls instead of evaluating the success of these programs by how many people leave the dole and are restored to an independence. And these bulging entitlements are saddling our offspring with unsustainable generational debt.

I'm often asked by search committees for public and private universities to help them think about how to find their next president.

As a former college president, I am well aware that every university is a complicated ecosystem, not a linear widget factory.

An institution of higher education is a partnership among students and alumni, faculty and administrators, donors and trustees, neighborhoods and more, to build a community - and a culture.

From the first-year students' fall orientation to the board's annual budget-approval meeting, everything a healthy college does requires a shared sense of mission.

It doesn't matter whether the challenge we face is large or small, whether it's a statewide disaster or a crisis just on our own block - Nebraskans face it with courage, goodwill, and the unwavering conviction that we are part of one community of neighbors and friends.

Every day, across our state, we see grit and resilience.

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.

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.

Good history is good story-telling. And good story-telling demands empathy; it requires understanding different actors, differing motivations, competing goals.

In policy arena after policy arena, Democrats respond to every failure of clunky government by proposing the addition of still more layers to 1960s-era bureaucracies as they break down.

Republicans must sell a big-cause, problem-solving vision - low-ego and happy-warrior in tone.

We must energetically tackle the significant problems the voters rightly want Washington to be addressing.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence did not pledge their fortunes and sacred honor so the federal government could play 'helicopter parent' to a free people. They saw government as our shared project to secure liberty, doing a few big things and doing them well.

Obamacare has eliminated choices for millions of families, suffocated patient-centered medical innovation, and moved the United States closer to European-style centralized planning.

We must not extend nor expand Obamacare. We need a completely different solution to help those caught in the Obamacare snare.

We cannot let Obamacare expand geographically by setting up state exchanges, nor can we extend Obamacare's unlawful subsidies.

Obamacare cannot be fixed and Republicans must not extend this disastrous legislation.