Senator Chuck Grassley seems out of place in Washington. He loves to eat at Perkins, the Midwest restaurant chain. But the nearest one from Washington is 60 miles away in Winchester, Virginia—too far for dinner. For dessert, there’s Dairy Queen, but not on Capitol Hill. His favorite summer interlude is a day at the Iowa state fair. “It’s a kind of reminder of everything we have in Iowa and not just agriculture,” he says. He gives tours of the massive fairgrounds to out-of-staters from time to time.
Next to being a Republican senator, Grassley is best known as the nation’s foremost critic of the History Channel. He loved the old shows about World War II but says the channel airs too little actual history now. “When I turned it on in July, I got a show about pawnbrokers,” he says. So he tweets about history instead and calls his Twitter feed “the real history channel.”
But forget the charming folkways. Grassley is now, in his 38th year in the Senate, one of the strongest players on Capitol Hill—and one of the boldest. He once was Senator Bipartisan, but he’s put that phase behind him. Confronted by Democrats’ unprincipled, no-holds-barred opposition to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and other Republican initiatives, he had to. Grassley also had a reputation for being deliberate, but an adviser refers to him these days as “aggressive.”
As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he’ll run the hearings, starting September 4, on the confirmation of Kavanaugh, who will almost certainly become the fifth conservative on the Supreme Court, replacing the retiring Anthony Kennedy.
Democrats are apoplectic and have reason to be. They’ve been crushed by Grassley’s forceful response to their attacks. It helps that Kavanaugh, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, is an impressive jurist. But what’s striking is the commanding position Grassley has put Kavanaugh in to get through the Senate confirmation process unscathed.
Even before Kavanaugh was nominated, Democrats insisted the “Biden rule” should apply to any High Court choice by President Trump. As interpreted by Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, this means a Supreme Court nominee should not be considered in an election year like 2018, just as Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell invoked the rule in 2016, declining to hold hearings on President Obama’s choice for the court.
This notion was quickly shot down by Grassley, with an assist from Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler. Joe Biden, then a Democratic senator from Delaware, had been clear when he enunciated the rule in 1992 that he was talking about presidential election years. Grassley knew this. He’s been in the Senate for 37 years, and he was on the Judiciary Committee when Biden was chairman. In a flash, the Biden rule vanished as a talking point.
The day after President Trump named Kavanaugh, Republican senators and their aides were bombarded with background material from Grassley. The idea here—part of it anyway—was to arm Republicans to push back against Democratic attacks. That was followed by a barrage of statements and letters of support for Kavanaugh.
Democrats had trouble keeping up with Grassley’s fast pace. They now plan to talk about issues like abortion and Obamacare, but that’s where they started. There’s a name for this: returning to square one. It’s not a sign you’re making progress.
Grassley visits each of Iowa’s 99 counties at least once a year. In early August, he made five appearances around Iowa in one day. In Conroy, he dealt with hostile questioners—no problem. Grassley has mastered the Q&A. He answers in two or three sentences, then turns immediately to the next questioner, leaving no time in between for boos or heckling.
Kavanaugh isn’t the only big-time issue Grassley has on his mind—that is, an issue that attracts national media attention for weeks or months. The senator has moved where the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee has feared to tread and where Democrats refuse to. Grassley is investigating the FBI to find out why it submitted a dossier with tales of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russians to gain approval to wiretap a low-level Trump adviser.
In effect, he’s joined forces with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Democrats and the media loathe Nunes, but Grassley likes him. It was the Nunes committee that subpoenaed the bank records that revealed the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for the dossier.
As a Senate committee chairman, Grassley hasn’t had to endure harsh treatment—so far. The Washington press corps is wary of taking on Grassley, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and the committee’s powerhouse investigative staff. The lonely chairman of the House committee is fair game to the brave journalists in the anti-Nunes cabal.
But Grassley has paid a price for joining the Nunes side. He has split with his longtime friend, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, California senator Dianne Feinstein. They’re the two oldest senators. Feinstein is 85, Grassley 84. Senate rules require the approval of both the committee chairman and the ranking minority member to authorize an investigation with subpoena power. She refused. By Capitol Hill standards, it was a historic rupture.
Senate Democrats are still on a quest for evidence of Trump collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign, but so far they’re holding an empty bag. The GOP probe is alive and well and scares Democrats. They’re desperate to block it, for partisan reasons. Feinstein is running for reelection. And Obama administration officials could be implicated in spying on the Trump campaign, a Watergate-sized transgression.
Grassley lacks subpoena power, but Nunes has it. (In the House, the chairman has sole subpoena power.) Working as a team, the two can swap information. The dossier, by the way, has turned out to be nothing more than a tip sheet—a poor one at that. Sued for libel in London, its author Christopher Steele said under oath that the dossier contained “raw intelligence.” Its “unverified” leads “warranted further investigation.” Steele couldn’t vouch for the dossier’s truthfulness.
Grassley, along with Graham and other committee Republicans, didn’t buckle. He and Graham have asked the Justice Department to investigate Steele, ostensibly to see if he lied to the FBI. That’s a pretext. Grassley wants to learn more, especially about who ordered surveillance of a low-level Trump adviser. Feinstein wants everyone to know less.
One might never suspect it, but Grassley has a sense of humor. And guess who he makes fun of? Yes, the hapless Chuck Schumer. Grassley published a piece in the Wall Street Journal in early August that recalled Schumer’s vow to oppose Kavanaugh “with everything I’ve got.” Schumer was just being honest, according to Grassley. Yet Democrats are demanding more and more and more Kavanaugh documents. How many more do Schumer and Democrats need, he asked, “when they’re already voting no?”
All this leads to a big question: Why has Grassley been so effective in guiding Kavanaugh toward confirmation as a justice of the Supreme Court? Grassley is not a lawyer. He’s a farmer by trade, growing corn and soybeans on his farm in northeast Iowa. He graduated from the University of Northern Iowa, not Yale or Harvard. He’s been influenced by the right people. He filled the seat of H. R. Gross when he was elected to the House in 1974, bucking a Democratic tide. Don’t remember H. R. Gross? He was the congressman who was always on the floor when the House was in session, challenging excessive spending. Grassley was then elected to the Senate in the Reagan landslide of 1980.
If he’s not the hardest-working member of Congress, he’s close. He doesn’t have time to read newspapers during the week when he’s working on Capitol Hill. So he saves all the papers and reads them on the weekend. He hasn’t missed a Senate vote since 1993. He’s been on the Judiciary Committee for all 37 years of his Senate career. Kavanaugh’s hearing will be the 15th for a Supreme Court nominee he’s participated in. He says the most impressive was Robert Bork.
Grassley is smarter, better prepared, more clever, and, more often than not, more experienced than his opponents. In 2016, he joined Mitch McConnell in refusing to take up Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. He had breakfast with Judge Merrick Garland, the unlucky pick, but held no hearing. Democrats howled, but they would have done the same had they controlled the Senate with a lame-duck Republican as president.
Grassley was also running for reelection in 2016, and Democrats sought to capitalize on the lack of a hearing. They recruited former Iowa lieutenant governor Patty Judge to run against him. As usual, the media took its cue from Democrats and declared Grassley in trouble. The Democratic challenger’s theme was “Do your job.” Judge said she was the “one judge” Grassley could not ignore. Grassley won, 60 percent to 36 percent.
In the Senate, Grassley has been a respected figure for decades. He’s carved out issues of his own—ethanol, wind farming, whistleblowers, criminal justice reform, tax fairness, spending restraint. Most of his issues don’t thrill the national press. But a Supreme Court fight does—even the dry issue of what Kavanaugh documents and how many should be made public, and how long the period should last between the nomination and the vote on confirmation. Democrats were interested in these matters because they offered a way to drag out the process past the midterm election. Delay is their only hope. If that happens, the Kavanaugh nomination might be doomed.
Grassley was ready. So were his staff, McConnell, the White House, the Kavanaugh team, and well-heeled conservative groups. They were loaded with numbers that Grassley has trotted out early and often. They showed the nomination was not being rushed to a vote, nor was Grassley skimping on documents. Kavanaugh, for instance, has released more documents than the past five nominees.
The numbers killed Schumer. After Schumer declared in July that Kavanaugh would threaten “the rights and freedoms” that Americans enjoy, Grassley told him, “Loosen up, Chuck.” Good advice then, good advice now.
