- Pritzker Fellows
- Current Fellows
- Ken Buck
Ken Buck
Former Republican Congressman from Colorado
Biography
Former Congressman Ken Buck, Republican from Colorado, began his career in the office of then Congressman Dick Cheney on the committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair. He went on to serve for 25 years as a prosecutor in the US Department of Justice and as an elected District Attorney in northern Colorado. His congressional career began in the House in 2015, where he helped start the House Freedom Caucus and served on the Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees. Small government, debt reduction, and promoting competition policy in the tech sector were among his signature issues.
While supporting the majority of President Trump’s policies, Congressman Buck disagreed with the former President’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and his characterization that the January 6th
defendants were political prisoners. Congressman Buck demonstrated his willingness to act independently from his party on a number of votes including what he saw as a misuse of the impeachment process and the removal of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He announced his retirement from Congress in March of this year.
Seminars
“Threats to Democracy: Real & Perceived”
In his seminars, Congressman Buck will make the case that a confluence of an ineffective Congress, the erosion of open and civil discourse on campuses, social media platforms and elsewhere have corroded our trust in institutions and created various threats to Democracy. Other issues perceived and portrayed as threats, however, are not, and he will unpack why.
Seminars are open to current UChicago students only.
During Congressman Buck’s time in the House, Democrats and Republicans both made claims that the opposing party was threatening our nation’s democracy. Both sides often misused the term, but both also ran afoul of our founders’ vision in profound ways. In this seminar, he will explore how politicians and others use this phrase to shamelessly appeal to emotion. He will share what he saw in the Capitol on January 6th and the political theatre that occurred in the aftermath.
Congressional hearings were designed to provide oversight and accountability, but now, as the C-SPAN cameras roll, they generally devolve into partisan shouting matches. That and the erosion of local governance has separated voters from actual policymaking, which can lead to the expansion of an already out-of-control federal government.
Congress was designed, in part, to be a check on the executive branch, but Congressional dysfunction increasingly leads to kicking the can down the road from the national debt to weak oversight to the rise of the administrative state and general unwillingness from Congress to solve our nation’s real problems. Toward that end, Congressman Buck will explain how he witnessed social media performance art replace actual lawmaking, and truth and good faith become casualties.
Congressman Buck will explain how extremism wins the day with the current primary system. He will use examples and observations from his own Congressional career to explain how we end up with lawmakers in Congress who appeal to the minority fringe views in their party and solutions to improve our primary process. He will also examine how the greatest country on earth can end up with largely unpopular presidential candidates who never debated a primary opponent.
Suggested Reading: The Primary Solution: Rescuing Our Democracy from the Fringes, by Nick Troiano
Democracy demands uncomfortable speech, especially during election season. Congressman Buck will look at how the decline in civil discourse - from Congress to campuses to the presidential election - contributes to the erosion of a democratic society. He will discuss the presidential debates this year and how personal attacks have replaced persuasion and discussion of policy ideas. This seminar will invite students to think about the policy disputes underlying voter enthusiasm on both sides this year. He will speak candidly about how The University of Chicago’s commitment to free speech functions in real terms and in real life. Politics is, as they say, downstream from culture.
The notion that America is in decline and cannot be saved is both specious and sinister. It is equally ridiculous to believe that our country is institutionally racist or would benefit from the left’s identity politics. Congressman Buck will examine the election results, the implications of “Make America Great Again,” “Black Lives Matter” and men playing women’s sports and how hyper-cynicism fuels an erosion of faith in our foundational institutions. He will conclude that the system our founders designed has held up for nearly 250 years and still can, and what we can learn from the election about our nation’s enduring principles.
One of Congressman Buck’s signature issues in Congress was promoting competition in Big Tech via antitrust legislation. He wrote a book explaining how companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are monopolies that crush competition and thus speech. He will look at how Americans’ media consumption habits and Big Tech censorship undermine our democracy.
Suggested Reading: Crushed: Big Tech’s War on Free Speech, by Ken Buck