Grassley's Failure to Act - Much Less Lead - in Fight Against Trump Corruption Will be Iowa Senator's Lasting Legacy
PHOTO CREDIT: Screen grab from US Senate Judiciary Committee website
(WASHINGTON, DC) - US Senator Chuck Grassley, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is one of the chief enablers - through his silence and inaction - of massive corruption in Donald Trump’s Washington, DC.
(WASHINGTON, DC.) As a young U.S. Senator, Charles Grassley (R-IA) cut a path in Washington, D.C. that was part hype, but also part accurate, as a vigorous fighter against waste and corruption in government, especially against the easy targets like $500 Pentagon hammers.
Now in his 90s, Grassley reserves most of that effort these days for partisan skirmishes - his leading role in stealing a Supreme Court seat from President Obama, and his long vendetta against President Biden’s only surviving son, Hunter, in a non-scandal lie that was cooked up and fed to Grassley by literal Russian operatives.
Grassley - who should be settling into the role of respected senior statesman at age 92 - is instead, regarded by many as Iowa’s senior partisan, top Trump toady and Iowa’s frequent embarrassment.
Time passes. Things change.
There will be no grand monument to - or loud accolades for - Senator Grassley when he finally leaves the Senate. Nor should there be.
He has squandered any chance of that.
He’ll be lucky to be remembered in the Iowa history books for anything positive at all, despite the fact that he has been in public office since John F. Kennedy was a young U.S. Senator from Massachusetts; Richard Nixon was Vice President; Dwight Eisenhower lived in the White House; and even before there was a pop band over in England called the Beatles.
He’s a long time supporter of term limits, by the way. How he pulls that one off with a straight face is beyond me.
These days, with a Republican in the White House - even one who has wrecked foreign farm markets important to Iowa, driven up fertilizer and fuel prices, and sparked a farm bankruptcy crisis that rivals the days of Ronald Reagan - Grassley doesn’t even fight the easy fights like those old $500 Pentagon hammers any more.
Like most other Republicans in Washington, DC, Grassley, appears to fear Trump.
Corruption, waste, fraud and abuse - by any measure - have never in history been worse than they are today in the Trump White House and throughout the Trump administration.
Within that rejuvenated, re-energized, and bigger than ever swamp of corruption, there is no bigger epicenter of corruption - aside from the Oval Office itself - than the Department of Justice (DOJ).
That’s the cabinet department over which the Senate Judiciary Committee - which Grassley chairs - has oversight jurisdiction.
Grassley has the authority to launch investigations into the acres of DOJ corruption and political weaponization of what was once the nation’s premiere law enforcement agency, but has done little but issue the occasional press release.
When routine department oversight hearings have been held by Grassley’s committee with the likes of former Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, Grassley spent an inordinate amount of time praising both and politically attacking former President Joe Biden.
Oh, if only the mountains of corruption the Trump crowd is piling up could rise to the level of Hunter Biden’s lap top and the Russian lies that surrounded it that Grassley pushed at taxpayers’ expense.
Grassley once told a reporter friend of mine, in answer to a question, that he doesn’t care much about what his legacy will be and doesn’t spend much time thinking about it.
That’s pretty obvious.
I don’t think I would want to go down that road either, if I were him.
But at age 92, Senator Grassley should be thinking about it. If not for sake of the Iowans who voted for him, then at least for the sake of the generations of little Grassleys yet unborn who are otherwise going to have a very troubling and embarrassing series of “Family History Days” at school decades from now.
If Grassley’s advancing age and the relentless march of time aren’t enough to convince him that he ought to think a bit more about what future generations of Iowans will think of his extreme partisanship, his subservience to the authoritarian Trump, and the impact the Trump policies Grassley supports are having on Iowa and the nation, a little reflection on those questions might do the trick.
America is currently experiencing the greatest period of government and political corruption since the days of Richard Nixon and Warren Harding - and the first Trump presidency.
Senator Grassley is Iowa’s senior senator, the Senate’s senior senator, and the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee - the committee that should be leading the fight to stop Donald Trump’s massive corruption and of those around him. - especially at the DOJ.
Grassley’s early career in the Senate when he did battle against the likes of those $500 hammers at the Pentagon, should have prepared him to lead such a fight, right?
His decision, instead, to curl up and take a long nap when faced with Trump’s corruption is, therefore, as perplexing as it is unacceptable and outrageous.
No Iowan should tolerate it.
At this point, despite Grassley’s multiple decades in public office, his time in the government when it comes to an end has earned him no grand memorialization at the state’s history museum in Des Moines.
His legacy, by his own doing, is in ashes.
At the end of his current term in the Senate, Senator Grassley - the term limits supporter, remember - will have been in public office for 70 years.
He stayed too long.
He came to believe term limits should only apply to others, but not - of course - to him.
He grew comfortable enabling the flames of corruption, lit by his fellow partisans, that now engulf Washington, DC. and imperil American democracy.
Iowa’s senior senator, had the opportunity to do great service for his country by leading a fight against Trump’s massive corruption and assaults on justice and democracy.
Instead Senator Grassley chose to enable and support that corruption with his silence, his inaction, and his hyper-partisanship.
No Iowan should support that or celebrate any of it.
But that is now Senator Grassley’s legacy. It is the legacy he chose and the legacy he built.
It is a sad one, to be certain, especially since there was a day when it could have played out much differently.
But it is the one Chuck Grassley has earned.
OVER DUE FARM BILL TRACKER: DAY #952
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) The clock continues to tick on the new Farm Bill, now 952 days over due as of Sunday, May 10, 2026..
The US House finally passed its version of the Farm Bill on April 30 by a vote of 224-200. It still must be passed by the Senate and signed by the president before it becomes law. Current thinking is that the Senate won’t get to even considering it for months.
In years past, the legislation was always considered “must pass” legisltion, before it expired. Farmers need to know what long term federal farm policy is in order to plan.
The fact that a new Farm Bill, to replace the old Farm Bill written and enacted back in 2018 and that expired 952 days ago, has STILL not passed Congress is another reflection of the inability of Republicans to govern, and the low priority Congress and the President give farm legislation and policy.
Two U.S. House members from Iowa serve on the House Agriculture Committee: Reps. Zach Nunn (R-3rd IA) and Randy Feenstra (R-4th IA). Both of Iowa’s U.S. Senators serve on the Senate Agriculture Committee: Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Joni Ernst (R-IA). Those four had and continue to have a special responsibility to get this legislation enacted on time, which they failed to do, and for letting it fester still unenacted 952 days later.
Rep. Randy Feenstra has been traveling across Iowa reporting on what he claims to have “delivered” in the Farm Bill. While Feenstra’s connection to those provisions are sometimes, at best, debatable, one thing is certain: he has “delivered” nothing until the bill is actually enacted into law.
Feenstra’s claims to the contrary are just gas lighting.
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Grassley has honed the art of double speak. He is all in on the seashell by the seashore prosecution which is purely an SNL skit and abuse of the legal process. I think the House of Representatives finally acted on the Farm Bill as it can be a campaign bullet point that is showy with limited substance.
Identifying the crucial farm issues cogently. Grassley’s fellow Iowans need to read your insightful article. Grassley’s chief asset is his drawl, nicely nasal, thunderous to some degree, and slow, both in enunciation and thought. My husband left Sioux City for Chicago, then New York, and had some terrified memories of bullying farm-bred kids. Grassley reminded him of their attitudes.