A thought experiment for your Nebraska sensibilities: Imagine you’re a reporter at a news conference held by Nebraska political leaders including our Congressional delegation in Washington, our 49 state senators and the governor — everyone we have elected to make decisions for us in this democratically infused type of government.

News conferences are increasingly a modern rarity. With a palette of platforms on which to communicate, many politicians choose Facebook, Twitter (X), or press secretaries to speak for them live or on some other form of social media. Lost is a regular opportunity for us to see our representatives answering questions, thinking on their feet — a form of political freestyling that eschews the formal news release or canned answer to a letter or email. The news conference embraces face-to-face human interaction.

If and when these sporadic events take place today, pronouncements and politicking often mire them in fuzzy imprecision. That reduces the give and take between elected officials and those in the Fourth Estate whose responsibility is to hold officials accountable, obviously, because they represent us, but especially because they decide how to spend our tax dollars.

Nebraska U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts, for example, held regular press conferences as governor and does the same from Washington, D.C. U.S. Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., whose 2nd Congressional District is the state’s most competitive, also hosts regular calls. And U.S. Rep. Mike Flood, R-Neb., owns a media company, so he understands the value of the give and take.

Natural Reluctance

Not to excuse politicians from avoiding news conferences, but I get the reluctance. Elected leaders obviously hear a kaleidoscope of concerns from voters (and non-voters), the working media, lobbyists and even their fellow representatives who were elected to solve problems and improve lives while in the vanguard of this ongoing experiment in democracy. At least that’s this constituent’s view.

Some of the more courageous among the elected class prefer to bypass the news conference and the media with something called a town hall meeting, which allows direct interaction with constituents. I mention courage because as we’ve seen on video and in person, these can turn into donnybrooks, a mixture of voter frustration and some bad manners. The result: Elected officials — whether they earned it or not — as convenient targets.

Targets, too, are the aforementioned media by both the public and elected officials. But a news conference has a structure and usually stays on track even if sometimes the free flow of information gets bogged down.

Of course we can always email, phone or even write a letter on a piece of paper and send it to any of the above politicians, but if your experience is like mine, you’re likely to get a pat response worthy of an AI algorithm.

Which brings us back to our thought experiment, the one where Nebraska’s leaders would be available to answer our questions. What would you ask? Would you zero in on the economy? Education? The culture wars? Taxes?

Notebook Questions

Here are a few questions that might be in your notebook, too:

• To any or all of Nebraska’s state senators and the governor, what, if any, is the moral calculus you will apply when considering budget cuts to meet the demands of a $432 million shortfall?
• To everyone else, what is the moral calculus you apply when considering any budget cut?
• To Nebraska’s Congressional delegation, please explain why DOGE showed up first with programmers when they tell us they are looking for “fraud and waste” in the federal government? Finding fraud and waste is the work of accountants and auditors, not coders. As a follow up, will you eventually ask for verifiable numbers aside from the “billions” now being used to describe the results of DOGE’s work or continue just to take Elon Musk’s word for it?
• To anyone whose constituents voted for lower prices and reduced inflation, can you explain the silence on the price of eggs, gas, rent and surely more when tariffs kick in?
• To Nebraska’s Congressional delegation, do you subscribe to the notion now proffered by the president that Ukraine started the war with Russia? If so, exactly how did they do that? If not, what’s your response?
• To any or all of Nebraska’s state senators and the governor, the Legislature’s winner-take-all debate has exposed unfettered partisanship, a noted departure from George Norris and the voters’ vision of a nonpartisan Unicameral. Is the principle of nonpartisanship in the State Legislature simply a quaint moniker belying our current political landscape and if so at what cost?
• To Nebraska’s Congressional delegation, what is your message to Nebraska ag producers who worked with the currently-shuttered USAID and to the University of Nebraska Medical Center, which stands to lose $22 million a year after cuts of indirect costs to NIH recipients?
• To anyone but especially Nebraska’s Congressional delegation, what is the short-term remedy and long-term lesson when elected officials’ political acquiescence works against those who elected them?

This story was published by Nebraska Examiner, an editorially independent newsroom providing a hard-hitting, daily flow of news. Read the original article: https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2025/02/24/breaking-out-the-notebook-is-hea...

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