Grassley
By 
You know really deserves a hit piece? Charles Grassley, who has slipped under the radar for years, with his horrors being largely ignored even as he embraced Trump like almost no other senior Republican (though Bob Dole loved him some Trump before he died). Here’s a good rundown of how much he sucks.
So what has Chuck Grassley done with his considerable power? When the curtain finally falls on his life and career, how will he be judged? Not well, if you’re an ordinary working-class Iowan. At every turn, Grassley has consistently made decisions that make their lives worse.
If you like having your thumbs attached to your hands, for instance, you might not like Chuck very much. As the Iowa Capital Dispatch reports, he spent 2021 going around Congress collecting signatures for a letter to the Biden administration, urging it to loosen safety rules and let meat companies speed up the lines in slaughterhouses and packing plants. When you do that, as Chance Phillips recently wrote for Current Affairs, more workers get injured, including in grisly ways like amputation and “the loss of an eye.” But when reporters questioned him about his reasons, Grassley was refreshingly honest: “It’s going to affect profitability.”
If you’re an Iowan dealing with diabetes, as approximately 248,315 people (or 10 percent of the state’s population) are, Chuck has also screwed you over. Back in 2022, he spearheaded Republican efforts to get a $35 price cap on insulin taken out of the Inflation Reduction Act, arguing to the Senate “parliamentarian” that it violated an arcane budget rule. Then, as Douglas Burns wrote for the Iowa Capital-Dispatch, he immediately did an online promotion for deep-fried and sugar-laden Iowa State Fair food:
I’m not trying to be The Grinch Who Stole The State Fair Corndog or unsweetened that State Fair lemonade. I get that the fair-food contest is an annual fun-spirited endeavor the Grassley staff schedules. But to run an eating contest tied to two weeks of gluttony days after your boss takes a public-relations beating on failing to back the insulin cap? Well, it’s just not Christian. Or very smart.
The insulin price cap eventually did pass, more or less, but only in spite of Grassley’s best efforts. If he’d had his way, people would still be shelling out hundreds or even thousands of dollars for the stuff—or, if they don’t have that kind of cash, just rationing their shots and dying. (As a senator, of course, Grassley himself gets only the best healthcare money can buy.)
If you live in Iowa and want a good education, you’ll also find yourself at odds with Senator Grassley. It was him, along with a handful of other Republicans, who led the effort to get rid of the Biden administration’s SAVE (Saving on a Valuable Education) plan for student loan borrowers, which would have lowered monthly payments and eliminated some people’s debt after enough time had passed. Like most of what Biden did in office, it was a sad half-measure compared to what was really needed: full debt erasure, on the spot. But even that was too much for Grassley and his ilk, who gathered like bloodhounds around a tree at the smallest suggestion that poor people might get something. And here, the age issue really does come into play: when Grassley graduated from the University of Northern Iowa in 1955, his tuition was just $159 per year, compared to over $8,000 for his young constituents today. Apparently, he thinks they ought to pony up tens of thousands for an opportunity he received practically for free.
Then, too, as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee Grassley had a major role in converting the Supreme Court to the openly right-wing institution it is today. Back in 2016, when he first led the committee, it was Grassley who delayed the vote on Merrick Garland’s confirmation to the Court until after the 2016 election, effectively stealing a seat from the outgoing Obama administration. Afterward, it was Grassley who was among the staunchest defenders of Brett Kavanaugh, even (and especially) after it became clear that Kavanaugh had lied to the American people about the sexual assault accusations brought against him by Christine Blasey Ford. So in a sense, all of the decisions that make up the Court’s post-2016 rightward turn—from the dismantling of women’s reproductive rights to the sweeping criminal immunity granted to Donald Trump—are Grassley’s handiwork.
Good news, though: if you’re a mentally ill person who wants to get a high-powered gun, Chuck Grassley is your best friend! One of his pet projects in 2017 was to repeal Obama-era regulations that prevented people from buying firearms if they had “mental impairments” so significant that they needed a third party to help them claim Social Security benefits. That seems like a rule even the most avid hunters and rifle collectors could agree with—if you can’t fill out a form unaided, you shouldn’t have a gun—but Grassley objected, claiming that the standards were too “vague” and that “if a specific individual is likely to be violent due to the nature of their mental illness, then the government should have to prove it” on a case-by-case basis. Never mind that, by the time the “proof” arrives, a school or a Walmart could be riddled with bullets and bloodstains.
Grassley is one of the next obits I need to write. This article will be very useful. You’d also think I’d actually get to run more of these obituaries than I do, but you have to play the long game sometimes and with Grassley, it’s a very, very, very long game.