There Grassley Goes Again.....
As His Senate Career Winds Down, He's Making a Rubble Pile of His Legacy
As Senator Chuck Grassley’ 64 year career in public office slowly fades to a close, he gives the impression of a man determined to destroy whatever legacy he may have forged in the past, with a more recent string of embarrassments, harmful and excessive partisanship, and simple bad judgment.
His long service in the Senate - he is now the U.S. Senates’s senior Senator - has earned him a special voice with which he could show real leadership and truly serve his country in these difficult times. Instead Senator Grassley squanders that opportunity to lead by choosing to simply follow those in his party who have some of the worst political instincts, judgment, and motives in the country’s history.
He may be the Senate’s senior senator, but these days, he acts more like a lowly Republican party hack - a Renfield to a Republican Party full of Count Draculas as far as democracy is concerned.
A quick round up/summary, and then a discussion of the latest embarrassment from Iowa’s Senator Chuck Grassley:
His leading role in the theft of a Supreme Court appointment from President Barrack Obama. Blocking a constitutionally mandated appointment to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, by a president with a full year left in office, is certainly nothing the Founding Fathers envisioned. Grassley’s partisan masters in the Republican Senate, however, wanted it, so Grassley did their bidding, just as he was told.
Grassley continues to kowtow to Donald Trump, the twice impeached former “President” who so far has been indicted for 71 criminal felonies by grand juries of impartial citizens who heard and weighed the evidence, and made their judgments. As if that isn’t enough, a tsunami of more indictments, likely to be even more serious, are expected to land in the next month or so.
As the most senior member of the US Senate, Chuck Grassley ought to be standing up for the rule of law, and for democracy. He ought to be actively steering his party away from Trump, the one man crime wave, and away from Trump’s reckless drive toward fascist authoritarianism.
But no. Grassley isn’t up to that these days.
In 1974, Republican US Senator Barry Goldwater (the 1964 Republican nominee for President) and then-Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott had the character, courage, and patriotism to stand up to President Richard Nixon and stop his White House crimes.
Grassley, as the senior Republican US Senator, is in a similar role today. His response to Trump’s corruption and and desire to upend democracy, his party’s seeming endorsement of all that, and Trump’s absurd candidacy for another term as President as his best shot for staying out of prison? It appears Chuck Grassley decided to take a nap.
Trump’s crimes are so enormous, dangerous and unprecedented that they simply cannot be ignored He will, in my view, eventually do jail time - he must if we are to deter future wannabe dictators. Grassley’s choice to sleep through our present danger to democracy - in fact, to even cheer it on at times - rather than defending it, is, in the end, much more likely to be his longest lasting legacy than anything else.
Grassley remains silent in the face of some of the biggest scandals ever to rock the Supreme Court. Again, someone of Grassley’s stature and experience - he’s a former Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee - ought to have an opinion on the seedy goings on at the Court. At least two Republican Justices are clearly on the take, seemingly “adopted” by Republican billionaires with business before the court, who lavish them with financial favors, and free, luxurious vacations, none of which the Justices have bothered to even report, much less decline.
No flashing red lights or wailing sirens for the once great corruption cop Grassley, there, either. He says we ought to let the Court handle it. Exactly what it has failed to do so far.
Grassley’s puzzling comfort level with the corruption at the court, likely has everything to do with his partisan desire to keep things the way they are at the court - with a solid Republican majority that is more than happy to demolish precedents in a rush to partisan judgments that create policies Republicans can’t win at the ballot box.
Grassley’s latest attack on his own legacy comes in an area where one might think he would be most interested in preserving it, because it is strong. Any public official would want to be remembered for this work. Why Grassley is taking a wrecking ball to it these days is a baffling mystery.
In the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, Grassley was the “go to guy” for government whistle blowers who wanted to expose waste, fraud and abuse. He performed a real service with that work.
Now, I don’t know. If I was 89 years old, riding my horse toward the horizon where the sun is beginning to set on my so far 64 year career as a government official, I think I might be wondering about how to make sure people remembered me for that work after my time in the Senate comes to an end.
Grassley is doing just the opposite. He’s busy burying that legacy in the rubble of hyper partisanship, subservience to his party’s misguided leaders, and myopia.
His latest stunt - if I were a less charitable person I’d call it his latest dangerous foolishness - took place Thursday this past week when he released a confidential FBI informant’s years old, second-hand, unsubstantiated claim that was part of the Republican effort to discredit Hunter Biden by linking him to criminal activity in Ukraine.
The allegation was investigated by Trump’s own Justice Department for eight months, before they dropped it because there was no evidence to pursue. In other words, the allegation was false.
Sound familiar? Of course it does. Paging Rudy Giuliani! This is the same matter that got Trump impeached the first time, yet, Republicans still insist on riding this dead horse, not because they think it is true, but because they think it is good politics for them.
They think if they can make the allegation stick in the public’s mind - whether it is true or false doesn’t matter in this plan - it will be a great distraction from the success of Biden’s presidency so far, from Trump’s massive legal troubles, and from the fact that Republicans have nothing in the way of policy to offer as an alternative.
When you’ve got nothing, banging the garbage can lids together in a cacophony of noisy distraction has been the preferred strategy of Republicans for the past several decades.
The FBI says Grassley’s action in releasing the raw, unconfirmed allegations “at a minimum, unnecessarily risks the safety of a confidential source.” Last month, the FBI’s deputy director testified before the Senate that protecting sources in investigations is “a question of life and death, potentially.”
Grassley does’t care. His partisanship “trumps” that concern.
Grassley says he wants to know whether and how the FBI followed up on the allegation, and what they did to pursue it. There has already been plenty of public discussion about that. It’s on the public record and much of it is in the record of Trump’s first impeachment trial in which Grassley served as a juror who ignored the evidence and voted to acquit Trump.
But if Senator Grassley now thinks he needs more information than has already been available for years in order to rehash it again, as a U.S. Senator he has plenty of ways to get it without the highly unorthodox release of raw investigation notes that potentially put a confidential FBI source’s life at risk.
Grassley knows this.
He also knows that the quickest way to stop whistleblowers anywhere in the future from blowing their whistle is to send a message that their anonymity, their identify, their safety and even their life will not be protected.
That might be a message aimed at witnesses to Trump’s corruption.
What the Republicans are doing, and what Iowa’s senior senator is hip deep in helping them do, is dirty politics, pure and simple. It is also dangerous business. What Chuck Grassley is doing is helping Republicans advance a worn out, discredited and debunked narrative, and doing so for political purposes. He is abusing and endangering a confidential FBI informant, a whistleblower, in the process, not to mention law enforcement’s ability to conduct investigations.
Some way for the former “go to guy” for whistle blowers in Washington, the former Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the Senate’s senior senator, to wind down his Senate career.
It’s sad, and actually hard to watch.
Barry Piatt on Politics: Behind the Curtains is a weekly column that is part of the Iowa Writer’s Collaborative. The Collaborative links some of Iowa’s best thinkers and writers directly with readers to help fill the gap left as many of Iowa’s traditional newspapers cut back on opinion, analysis and even reporting on a wide range of topics. Please review the Iowa Writer’s Collaborative columns listed below and consider subscribing - either for free or with a paid subscription - to help ensure that readers continue to have access to informed and thoughtful opinion, analysis, commentary, and reporting. Your subscriptions, especially paid subscriptions, are what makes this effort work and allow these columns to be available.
Laura Belin: Iowa Politics with Laura Belin, Windsor Heights
Doug Burns: The Iowa Mercury, Carroll
Dave Busiek: Dave Busiek on Media, Des Moines
Stephanie Copley: It Was Never a Dress, Johnston
Art Cullen: Art Cullen’s Notebook, Storm Lake
Suzanna de Baca Dispatches from the Heartland, Huxley
Debra Engle: A Whole New World, Madison County
Julie Gammack: Julie Gammack’s Iowa Potluck, Des Moines and Okoboji
Joe Geha: Fern and Joe, Ames
Jody Gifford: Benign Inspiration, West Des Moines
Nik Heftman, The Seven Times, Los Angeles and Iowa
Beth Hoffman: In the Dirt, Lovilla
Dana James: New Black Iowa, Des Moines
Pat Kinney: View from Cedar Valley, Waterloo
Fern Kupfer: Fern and Joe, Ames
Robert Leonard: Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture, Bussey
LettersfromIowans, Iowa
Tar Macias: Hola Iowa, Iowa
Darcy Maulsby: Keepin’ It Rural, Lake City
Kurt Meyer, Showing Up, St. Ansgar
Wini Moranville, Wini’s Food Stories, Des Moines
Kyle Munson, Kyle Munson’s Main Street, Des Moines
Jane Nguyen, The Asian Iowan, West Des Moines
John Naughton: My Life, in Color, Des Moines
Chuck Offenburger: Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger, Jefferson and Des Moines
Barry Piatt: Piatt on Politics: Behind the Curtains, Washington, D.C.
Dave Price: Dave Price’s Perspective, Urbandale
Macey Spensley, The Midwest Creative, Davenport and Des Moines
Larry Stone, Listening to the Land, Elkader
Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Buggy Land, Kalona
Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Emerging Voices, Kalona
Cheryl Tevis: Unfinished Business, Boone County
Ed Tibbetts: Along the Mississippi, Davenport
Teresa Zilk: Talking Good, Des Moines
The Iowa Writers Collaborative is also proud to ally with the Iowa Capitol Dispatch.
All I could think of when you mentioned the banging of garbage can lids together was, the old wind up toy of a monkey, usually dressed in a band uniform, clashing his cymbals together. Maybe that ought to replace the party's symbolic elephant.
Exactly!