Grassley Constructs Troubling Legacy as Senate Career Winds Down
It will be his recent rot history remembers
As an Iowan, it gives me no joy to write this. As someone who remembers what and who Iowa’s senior Senator once was, it is hard to see what he has become.
At a time in Senator Grassley’s career when he could, and should, be providing some sorely needed leadership and patriotic direction to his Republican Party - a party which has so corrupted itself that even its commitment to democracy must now be questioned - he has chosen a different role:
Senator Chuck Grassley has become a reliable, partisan water carrier for a party that acts like it is in a demolition derby with democracy and the rule of law.
Senator Grassley has always been a partisan, frequently a rough one. He kept that part of his “activity log” well disguised for most of his career. In recent years, however, his record has only gotten more partisan, more depressingly predictable, and more pitiful.
In recent years, his record came has included the following, for example:
Grassley was a central and willing accomplice in the theft of a Supreme Court nomination from President Barack Obama. It was that theft that paved the way for the new Supreme Court majority that demolished Roe vs Wade, and along with it a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions.
Grassley was found to be peddling Russian provided disinformation designed to falsely and politically discredit and smear President Biden’s only surviving son, and by extension, President Biden himself.
Grassley continues to embrace ex-President Donald Trump, the biggest grifter to ever darken the White House door, a one man crime wave, who even today not only continues to publicly threaten democracy but has said publicly he would, if returned to the White House, ignore the Constitution and be a dictator.
Whatever else Chuck Grassley may have done back during the Eisenhower administration, when he first entered public office, it is this more recent rot that history will remember about him.
On Wednesday, May 15, Iowa’s senior senator added to that sorry record by announcing that he and fellow Republican Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) are launching an “investigation” into Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for potential wrong doing.
Their evidence of said “wrong doing?”
Well, they don’t have any right now. Like most recent “show trial” investigations Republicans have staged in Congress, all they have is the hot air of their accusation.
Senators Grassley and Johnson do, however, hope that this investigation - unlike all the other Republican “show trials” that have gone before it - might actually produce some evidence that somebody might have done something wrong, or better yet illegal.
Like House Judiciary Committee Chair US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the resident partisan clown in the US House of Representatives who is launching a similar “show trial” on that side of the Capitol - their investigation is actually a “fishing expedition.”
They have nothing. They’d like to surprise themselves and find something.
If history is any guide, they won’t.
These Republican “investigations” are not about facts or uncovering wrong doing. The record is clear about that. They don’t produce anything except a mountain of wasted tax dollars spent “tilting” at imaginary, purely partisan “windmills.”
They are about politics and theatrics. They are about distraction, about delaying, about discrediting and destroying reputations.
Admittedly Trump has some difficulty in defending himself in Georgia from the multiple felonies Willis is prosecuting against him. He is being prosecuted for alleged crimes committed trying to steal the 2020 Georgia presidential election by asking election officials there to fraudulently and deliberately change the results.
The source of that difficulty? He asked them to steal the election in a telephone call that was fully recorded and has been played publicly multiple times.
The Republican response - and of Trump and his attorneys - has not been to defend the indicted ex-President with facts and evidence of their own, or to even argue that what we all heard him say, he didn’t say. It has been to try to delay and derail that prosecution. If they thought they could successfully defend against those charges, that’s where their energy would be going.
That’s why Republicans are attacking Willis and why they are launching multiple spurious investigations against her.
Iowa’s Chuck Grassley is more than happy to carry that bucket of dirty water for his party. Again.
They are smearing people who are just doing their jobs - which is to defend democracy - rather than building a defense based on facts and evidence. That’s been a standard, time worn tactic Republicans have used across the multiple Trump criminal trials.
That they would employ it against Willis, should surprise no one. It ought to outrage everyone.
Delay and derail. That strategy - to say the least - betrays a lack of confidence by Trump, his attorneys, and his fellow Republicans, in Trump’s innocence as he faces the multiple felonies at issue.
Iowans may well ask, and should ask: What in God’s name is Chuck Grassley doing in the middle of yet another one of these corrupt, partisan messes?
The sad answer?
It’s where he lives now. It’s who he has become.
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Thanks for reading “Barry Piatt on Politics: Behind the Curtains!”
Thanks for your column, Barry. While I am a life long democrat and Iowan, I too used to have respect for Charles Grassley and his positions. He seemed principled. He has fallen so far from that, that it makes me wonder if I imagined it. I suppose it is the years in Washington and the desire to hold onto power. Whatever happened, it is sad, pathetic, and so dangerous. His part in the manipulation of the Supreme Court has already done great damage. He appears determined to be part of the attempt to overturn democracy. Not a legacy I thought would ever be attached to Charles Grassley.
Thank you, Barry. Grassley’s actions are so much more than disappointing. They are a betrayal of the trust Iowans have given him to represent who we are as citizens of Iowa and our country. And, to date, there are no answers about why he would make a statement telling the country that he would preside over the electoral count on January 6, 2021. His reputation will only become more tarnished as time goes by.