Deb Fischer: “I am so very fortunate to have Senator Johanns as the senior Senator from Nebraska. He has a wealth of experience as a…”

“I am so very fortunate to have Senator Johanns as the senior Senator from Nebraska. He has a wealth of experience as a former Governor, as a former Secretary of Agriculture, and as a U.S. Senator. So he has definitely been a mentor to me. I believe, perhaps, Nebraska can mentor the Senate through the trying times we are facing right now. As Senator Johanns said, we are nonpartisan. We do not caucus. We do not have majority or minority leaders because we are nonpartisan. So we do not have that leadership structure in our State that we have here in the Senate. In the State of Nebraska, if you want to be part of leadership, you stand on the first day of a legislative session, and you have to nominate yourself and run for that position. So you would nominate yourself for speaker and then we do a secret ballot. It is 25 votes, and you would be speaker because there are only 49 of us. Then we go through the committees, and we have 14 standing committees. So as chair of the transportation and telecommunications committee, I had to stand on the floor of the legislature and nominate myself, which is hard to do, but you nominate yourself, and then your colleagues, your peers, decide who the chairman will be. We had Republicans and Democrats who were committee chairs.…”