The Des Moines Register Guard and columnist Kathie Obradovich (the writer who was recently on the receiving end of one of Sen. Chuck Grassley's unhinged tirades) are getting a little bit fed up with the senior senator from Iowa's myriad excuses for not having confirmation hearings on President Obama's Supreme Court nominee. These excuses, she writes, are "mostly nonsense."
Obradovich allows Grassley one concession in his ridiculous excuses: the Senate does indeed get to decide when to withhold its advice and consent. But, she argues, "Grassley’s correct that the Senate doesn’t have to do anything, but it’s not a reason why it shouldn’t."
She skewers the rest of his lame excuses, and he's come up with a lot of them: the people should decide (they did that in 2012); he's mad that Obama wants justices who can empathize (a truly disturbing objection); Biden said something hypothetically 14 years ago that justifies what Republicans are doing now; the court doesn't need more than eight judges; and the media shouldn't call Merrick Garland a "moderate," because Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. "They turned out that they're going to make law instead of interpreting law," he says.
That, she says, is "a naked political argument from Grassley."
[He] has been trying to claim his goal is to avoid mixing up the court nomination in election-year politics. Well, nobody really bought that one, anyway. Keep trying, senator.
He will, indeed, keep trying and excuses are likely to get thinner and more ridiculous as time goes on. Because Grassley is becoming more ridiculous as time goes on and the pressure on him to end this blockade increases. He's already cracked in media interviews, and he stood on the Senate floor and unleashed an incoherent tirade on the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Who knows what he'll do next to try to justify his actions?
Please donate $3 today to help retire this guy.