In both 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published profiles of U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, an octogenarian who has served in Congress since 1975, and been a U.S. Senator since 1981. We shared the hilarity of Grassley’s Twitter feed, with brilliant examples of wordsmithing like, ”N”, ”Work on farm Fri. Burning piles of brush WindyFire got out of control. Thank God for good naber He help get undr control PantsBurnLegWound”, ”Fred and I hit a deer on hiway 136 south of Dyersville. After I pulled fender rubbing on tire we continued to farm. Assume deer dead”, and “Windsor Heights Dairy Queen is good place for u kno what”. Oh, and the time on Twitter he compared President Obama’s foreign policy to Poland’s foreign policy that led to Hitler invading in 1939. Our main beef with Sen. Grassley was that as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and therefore gets to decide on confirmation of judges and Supreme Court nominees, and goddamn has been partisan and obstructive in that role. Merrick Garland was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Obama but Grassley, more than anyone in the Republican Senate (with perhaps the exception of Mitch McConnell), is responsible for shirking their Constitutional duty to appoint a successor to the late Antonin Scalia and admitted the logic was purely political.
The rest of his voting record includes opposition to the Brady Handgun Bill to create background checks for firearm purchases, against universal background checks after Sandy Hook, support for the Defense of Marriage Act, voting for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton for lying about having an affair with Monica Lewinsky, and voting for the Gramm-Leach-Billey Act, which repealed key parts of the Glass-Steagall Financial Regulation Act, and opened the door for big banks to create the 2007 Sub-Prime Mortgage Housing Crisis. Grassley also voted for the Iraq War Resolution, voted against the Equal Pay Bill and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the Zadroga Bill, disaster relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and against raising the debt ceiling in 2011. Oh, and Sen. Grassley is on record as a denier that climate change exists, claiming he does not have enough evidence to make a conclusion or to vote on the matter.
Grassley was also a big supporter of the Graham/Cassidy Healthcare Act, a last-ditch effort to repeal the ACA which Sen. Grassley admits to being extremely flawed and will harm Americans… but hey, he promised he would get rid of Obamacare, so no matter what the actual details or how bad they’re going to hurt real people, damn it, he’s gonna do it. HE ADMITTED THAT. Sen. Grassley also voted for the BRCA, which would have repealed the Affordable Care Act and left 23 million people without health insurance, and coldly voted against disaster relief funding, this time for victims of Hurricane Harvey in Texas.
Oh, and Grassley not only voted for the GOP’s tax plan/tax scam in December of 2017, he shrugged off complaints that it would only offer tax breaks to people who owned stock by saying that working class people might have the money to buy some if they didn’t “booze or women or movies”.
We also took issue with Sen. Grassley’s behavior regarding the Trump/Russia investigation, as on multiple occasions over the past year and a half, Grassley has gone out of his way to either cast doubt on the mounting evidence, such as when he tried insinuating that the Steele Dossier was the REAL fake news planted by the Russians, or even when he released a statement to blame the FBI for not telling the Trump campaign that Paul Manafort was leaking information from the Trump campaign to Russian oligarchs (which ignores how they probably should have been aware when one of them sent agents to Trump Tower to meet with Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr.). His allegiance to Trump has become so cancerous that Sen. Grassley flat out refuses to conduct Senate hearings on political appointees if he thinks that they in some way participated in, or are loyal to people conducting the Mueller investigation. At this point, Grassley is doing more to aid the Trump administration in a coverup than preventing future Russian interference, but hey, what do you expect from a senile, partisan old hack?
We can’t say we don’t also take issue with Grassley’s voting record during the past three years, as he voted to confirm every member of Donald Trump’s Cabinet of Horrors, and saw his obstruction against Merrick Garland being named to the Supreme Court rewarded with him getting to vote for Merrick Garland…
But right here, right now, if there were any doubt anyone still had about how utterly partisan Chuck Grassley is at the ripe old age of 84… and looking to name a replacement for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, an uber-conservative son-of-a-bitch who won’t think twice about overturning Roe v. Wade. And so it was that Brett Kavanaugh, who made his career investigating the Clintons during Whitewater and trying to foment conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton murdering Vince Foster… a guy who perjured himself in his confirmation to be a federal judge multiple times…. THAT was the pick. And Sen. Grassley knows… KNOWS all the dirt that’s out there on Kavanaugh. It’s why he and the Trump White House refused to make documents about Kavanaugh’s work unavailable to the Senators who would vote on them, and why he literally opened the hearings shouting over the reasonable requests by Democrats to release those documents and allow Kavanaugh’s record to be legitimately reviewed. So it looked like the final vote on Kavanaugh would go through strictly along partisan lines, 51-49… until a woman emerged to accuse Kavanaugh of attempting to drunkenly rape her when she was 15 and he was 17. Now, you’re really seeing how single-minded and gutless Chuck Grassley is, as he wanted to “investigate” the matter by not letting the FBI look into it, and conducting a sham hearing where only two witnesses will be called, Kavanaugh, and his accuser, and Senate Republicans can harass a woman already traumatized decades ago by her sexual assault. And that upon learning of a second accuser, Grassley and his colleagues actually tried to force the vote FASTER, and blocked the second accuser, Deborah Ramirez from testifying or having the FBI investigate her claims. After trying to open the hearing with 15 minutes of grandstanding, Sen. Grassley forgot to introduce and thank the witness, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, for coming forward, and after his time to speak was up and he ceded to Sen. Diane Feinstein… he interrupted her after SHE introduced Ford to insist he didn’t forget.
But through all that, do you know who Chuck Grassley thinks the victim in all this is? CHUCK GRASSLEY. Yes, in an interview during all of this, Grassley whined about how he didn’t like when it’s mentioned that he’s so old, and feels, we s*** you not… that he is being DISCRIMINATED AGAINST. You’re 86, Chuck. You’d think you’d have developed a good calloused hide by now.
Grassley won re-election rather easily in 2016 over Iowa’s Democratic Lieutenant Governor Patty Judge, and unless one of those deer Chuck Grassley posted about killing on Twitter has one of their family members come to avenge them, he might be around in office until at least 2022, when he’ll be 89 years old. Maybe he’ll get around to appointing some sane judges at some point that aren’t former rapists if he can stop squinting, open his methusaleh eyes, but it seems unlikely that he’s going to listen to what his constituency actually wants anytime soon, and should just go back to trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act if possible.
One Year Ago, September 29th, 2018: Chuck Grassley (IA)/E.W. Jackson (VA)… 2018 Update
One Year Ago, September 29th, 2017: Chuck Grassley (IA)… 2017 Update
Two Years Ago, September 29th, 2016: Chuck Grassley (IA)… Original Profile
Three Years Ago, September 29th, 2015: E.W. Jackson (VA)… 2015 Update
Four Years Ago, September 29th, 2014: E.W. Jackson (VA)… Original Profile