Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb), elected a year ago today, decided he would first consult his colleagues and former senators extensively about the way the Senate works.  Today, having talked at length to more than half of them, including the leaders of both parties, he is set to deliver his initial speech.

Sasse’s theme is that the Senate has strayed from concentrating on big issues. It’s been distracted by the sound-bite culture of today’s news cycle…

What major problems are insufficiently addressed?  “I’d put national security at the top of the list,” he said in the interview.  Three others: the rising cost of entitlements, the jobs market in the fast-churning economy, and “the crisis in civil engagement.”  Civic disengagement, he says in his speech, “is arguably a larger problem today than is polarization.  It isn’t so much that regular folks are locked into predictably Republican or Democratic positions on every issue,” he says. “It’s that they are turning away from politics altogether.”

Sasse argues for “a kind of Socratic speech” in which senators “will upgrade their game” through debate with each other.  “But bizarrely, we don’t really do this here very much,” he says.  “We don’t have many actual debates. This is a body that would be difficult to today describe as ‘the greatest deliberative body in the world’ – something that has often been true historically.”

His speech will highlight three former senators as guideposts for the future:

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a Democrat who delivered the oft-cited exhortation that everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts. Before lawmakers can debate the best solutions to the nation’s problems, Sasse says, they need to agree on the problem itself and the relevant data surrounding it.

— Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, a Republican who showed her willingness to take on her own party when she called out fellow GOP senator Joe McCarthy for his tactics. Sasse wants less tolerance in Senate debate for straw man arguments, even if that means members calling out others from their party.

— Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a Democrat who was devoted to the Senate, its history and its powers. Sasse will call for more focus on the body’s constitutional authority, which he says has been slipping away over the years. One reason he cited for that is a committee structure that has remained largely the same, even as the federal government has grown tremendously in size and scope.

The chamber was unusually full for a floor speech, with a strong contingent from the Republican Conference, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., listening as Sasse admonished the state of the Senate.

Roughly a dozen Democrats were also on hand, with one Democrat even sitting on the Republican side. Sen. Thomas R. Carper, D-Del., sat directly in front of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. When Carper ducked out of the chamber as Sasse was still talking, the two nodded at each other, and Carper gave Cruz a friendly tap on the leg with his notebook…

Sasse said he did not believe, through conversations with many of his colleagues, that there is a “magic bullet” to bring back the Senate of yore, but he issued “a call for more meaningful fighting,” in his speech, also saying that an all-too-familiar criticism of political polarization as a driving force behind the denigration of the Senate oversimplifies the problem.

Sasse says he has approached the Senate like a company in need of a culture change. “I’ve done 26 crisis and turnaround projects in the last 21 years, so I’m used to going into places that are really broken,” he says. “You always have to walk this fine line between learning a place—by being humble and asking questions and having empathy for real humans laboring in broken institutions—and resolve, that you’re going to still steel yourself to not let human empathy cloud the fact that a broken institution is a broken institution.” In his speech today, according to a draft, he plans to say, “I believe that a cultural recovery inside the Senate is a partial prerequisite for national recovery.”…

“I actually plan to engage people,” Sasse replied. “I guess they can ignore me, but part of the reason I want to preview this is so it doesn’t seem so jarring when it actually happens. When people give straw-man speeches, I plan to go and interrupt.”

That is, Sasse plans to actually hang out in the Senate, listening to his colleagues’ stupid speeches—and rebutting them in real time when he feels they’ve gone astray. He’s not just begging them to have debates. He’s going to debate them, whether they like it or not…

“If it’s not the Senate, where will this deliberation happen?” Sasse asks me, before he bounces out of his chair to head off to a meeting. “I think we’d be much better off if the people who have this job had to actually argue about what the policy agenda of the country should be over the next decade.” If the Senate’s most interesting egghead has his way, there will be a lot more arguing soon to come.

“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.”…

So in sum, Sasse said: “The people despise us all.”