Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley doesn’t care about how history will judge him for refusing to consider President Obama’s next Supreme Court justice nominee.
“Do you think I spend my days wondering about how Chuck Grassley will go down in history?” the Iowa Republican told reporters Wednesday.
“I don’t care if I ever go down in history,” Grassley added, “I’m here to do my job.”
Grassley also pushed back against criticism from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, R-Nev., that he is an “obstructionist.”
“I’ve been a leader on the Judiciary Committee for the last five years, first as ranking member and now as chairman,” he said. “I think Congress has passed more than 320 judges and only disproved two. So, if I wanted to obstruct, I could obstruct. But I think this proves we haven’t been doing that.”
On the Senate floor Tuesday, Reid said Grassley will go down as the “most obstructionist” chairman in history after Senate Republican Judiciary members decided not to hold hearings or votes on any Obama nominee to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
“Hard to comprehend, but it appears Sen. Grassley’s going to follow through on this plan and go down in history as the most obstructionist Judiciary chair in the history of this country,” Reid said.
“That says a lot, because we knew about Judiciary Committee chairs during the civil rights era,” Reid added. “I can’t imagine that Sen. Grassley, who I’ve served with in Congress for more than three decades — is this the legacy that he wants?”
According to Grassley, Obama’s nomination of a new justice would be futile.
“Just think of the waste of taxpayers’ money,” he said. “If you’ve already got the Senate saying this ought to be put off — and the important words are let the people have a voice — then you’d be wasting that million dollars if it’s already a forgone conclusion.
“Not very often do the people have a chance to express the view on, ‘Do you want a very liberal person put on the court or a conservative person put on the court?'” Grassley said. “So you’ve got an opportunity [with Democratic presidential front-runner] Hillary Clinton on one hand and whoever our Republican nominee is on the other hand. It highlights the importance of the Supreme Court.”
