Ben Sasse, the senator-elect from Nebraska, has attracted a lot of attention on the right as a rising star of the Republican Party’s conservative wing. National Review lionized him on its cover early this year as “Obamacare’s Nebraska Nemesis.”

Yet in many ways, his résumé does not fit the mold of an anti-establishment Tea Party politician. He went to Harvard, where he received a degree in government. After graduation, he spent time as a consultant, then eventually returned to school and earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale. (His résumé has some overlap with a fellow incoming Republican senator, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a congressman who also went to Harvard and was in the consulting business.)

Mr. Sasse held two jobs in the Bush administration, one with the Justice Department and another with the Department of Health and Human Services. In between, he was a Capitol Hill chief of staff, working for Representative Jeff Fortenberry, Republican of Nebraska. Mr. Sasse’s most recent job was as president of a small liberal arts college.

That the new Republican Senate class will have so many members with deep government experience is somewhat by design. Republicans, under the direction of the incoming majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, sought early on to weed out candidates who were unpredictable and untested and could spoil their chances of winning the majority.

Mr. McConnell wanted to make sure that his prospective new senators were not going to prove as unmanageable as some of his more go-it-alone members like Ted Cruz of Texas, so he met with many of them early to talk them into running. Within days of the 2012 elections, in which Republicans failed to win the White House and lost seats in both houses of Congress, Mr. McConnell called Representative Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia into his office to press her to run for the Senate. He also sought out Mr. Cotton of Arkansas, a first-term congressman, not long after he was sworn in last year.

Last week, as the freshmen toured the Capitol, found their way to their temporary offices and listened to seminars on Senate history as part of their orientation, the vetting was evident. Those who took questions from the news media were uniformly on-message: We are here to get things done, not to obstruct.