News - World: Republican Senator Ben Sasse has officially stepped down from the Senate one week after he criticized the upper chamber of the US Congress as an institution that "does not work very well.”

Sasse, an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump, officially resigned from the Senate on Sunday.

In his farewell remarks last week, the Nebraska Republican acknowledged that the Senate, to which he has been a member since 2015, “doesn’t work very well right now.”

“Each of us knows we should be taking a look in the mirror and acknowledging that lives lived in a politicized echo chamber are unworthy of a place that calls itself a deliberative body, let alone the world’s greatest deliberative body,” he said.

“When we’re being honest with each other, which usually means when on one of the very rare occasions where cameras aren’t present, we all know that a big chunk of the performative yelling that happens here and in every hearing room is just about being booked for even more performative yelling at night on TV,” he said.

The senator won re-election in 2020, and his term was set to expire in 2027.

He was among seven Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for a second time after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

He blamed Trump for intimidating election officials and repeatedly boosting baseless claims of widespread election fraud in the 2020 election.

“Those lies had consequences, endangering the life of the vice president and bringing us dangerously close to a bloody constitutional crisis,” Sasse said at the time. “Each of these actions are violations of a president’s oath of office.”

Sasse's departure opens up the seat to an appointment by Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican.

Source: Press TV