Opinion by Art Cullen
Today at 3:28 p.m. EDT
Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) was first elected to the state legislature in 1958, when I was 1 year old and Fidel Castro’s beard was just filling in.
Now I’m on Social Security, Castro is dead, and Grassley is running for another six-year Senate term.
You might think 42 years in the Senate is enough. But Iowans don’t. Although they prefer that he not run again, a recent Des Moines Register-Mediacom poll showed him crushing Democratic front-runner Abby Finkenauer, a former one-term House member, should they match up in November 2022.
Older Iowans hear the ghost of H.R. Gross wailing from the fields of dry corn.
Long ago, Harold Royce Gross was a noted congressman from northeast Iowa whose political philosophy was: cheap. Gross opposed the Vietnam War because it was too expensive. He even opposed the eternal flame at JFK’s grave for its perpetual fuel cost. His wife, Hazel, ran his office for no pay. He cast a dim brow toward the grain trade and the meatpackers, and otherwise sought to protect the taxpayer from Washington. Gerald Ford once said America had three political parties: Republicans, Democrats and H.R. Gross.
Gross shaped young Charles E. Grassley, who was smart enough to recognize a message that would get him off the farm and the factory floors around Waterloo. Frugal is as Iowa as black dirt. After 16 years in the Iowa Capitol, Grassley assumed Gross’s seat in the House in 1975, where he began complaining, much as Gross had done, about the Pentagon’s $600 toilet seats and $400 hammers, and kept at it when he moved to the Senate in 1981.
We called him a “maverick” because he bucked the military-industrial complex — but then Iowa has no major military bases. He championed corn ethanol and wind turbines from the Senate Finance Committee. He was aw-shucks Chuck, and he threshed most of his challengers with ease, often with ads that showed him tugging two mowers across his farm yard in stereo.
Grassley might think he still walks in Gross’s footsteps, but the truth is that he strayed far from the farm as he climbed the ladder of power. He has written enough letters to fill a book complaining about weak antitrust laws and meatpacking. But gather the votes to do something to stop it? He’d rather just fire up his typewriter for another letter. When the Trump administration shut down the stockyards inspection administration, Grassley did nothing. You didn’t hear a peep when President Donald Trump ordered immigrant meat cutters onto the kill floor, shoulder to shoulder, without coronavirus testing or proper personal protective equipment, to maintain the brittle meat supply chain that tottered in the spring of 2020.
He chaired the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee as the rich claimed theirs. He and then-Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) holed up in a room to weaken the legs of the Affordable Care Act, ensuring that upstart health insurance cooperatives would be starved of funding. From the Senate Judiciary Committee, Grassley has served as Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) chief acolyte, denying President Barack Obama his Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. Grassley has tasted power, and prefers it to a pork chop on a stick.
Grassley likes it when you call him the “father of the wind energy production tax credit,” which has helped the wind farm business, but he won’t make the credit permanent. He tells us that you can’t deport 10 million undocumented people but vows he will not allow “mass amnesty.” He went along with all the wars that H.R. Gross would have starved in their cradles. Grassley says he favors term limits. Except for himself.
If elected, he will be 89 when he is sworn in to an eighth term.
One Iowa parlor game is to play out what is really going on here. It could be dynastic: Grassley presumably wins next year, as does Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, who has a 55 percent approval rating. Grassley might hang around a while, then retire to his New Hartford farm, allowing Reynolds to appoint the senator’s grandson, Iowa House Speaker Pat Grassley, to replace him. Grassley the Younger is chiseled from the same stone but rolls farther right. But then, these days, so does Iowa.
Grassley the Elder isn’t speculating. He’s running. You have to think that he is going the distance. He still jogs every morning.
I wonder what H.R. Gross would think. He hung it up after 26 years and watched pro wrestling. You would think that our senior senator, after 63 years in elected office, might have accomplished what he set out to do in the first place — if anyone can remember what that was.
Today at 3:28 p.m. EDT
Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) was first elected to the state legislature in 1958, when I was 1 year old and Fidel Castro’s beard was just filling in.
Now I’m on Social Security, Castro is dead, and Grassley is running for another six-year Senate term.
You might think 42 years in the Senate is enough. But Iowans don’t. Although they prefer that he not run again, a recent Des Moines Register-Mediacom poll showed him crushing Democratic front-runner Abby Finkenauer, a former one-term House member, should they match up in November 2022.
Older Iowans hear the ghost of H.R. Gross wailing from the fields of dry corn.
Long ago, Harold Royce Gross was a noted congressman from northeast Iowa whose political philosophy was: cheap. Gross opposed the Vietnam War because it was too expensive. He even opposed the eternal flame at JFK’s grave for its perpetual fuel cost. His wife, Hazel, ran his office for no pay. He cast a dim brow toward the grain trade and the meatpackers, and otherwise sought to protect the taxpayer from Washington. Gerald Ford once said America had three political parties: Republicans, Democrats and H.R. Gross.
Gross shaped young Charles E. Grassley, who was smart enough to recognize a message that would get him off the farm and the factory floors around Waterloo. Frugal is as Iowa as black dirt. After 16 years in the Iowa Capitol, Grassley assumed Gross’s seat in the House in 1975, where he began complaining, much as Gross had done, about the Pentagon’s $600 toilet seats and $400 hammers, and kept at it when he moved to the Senate in 1981.
We called him a “maverick” because he bucked the military-industrial complex — but then Iowa has no major military bases. He championed corn ethanol and wind turbines from the Senate Finance Committee. He was aw-shucks Chuck, and he threshed most of his challengers with ease, often with ads that showed him tugging two mowers across his farm yard in stereo.
Grassley might think he still walks in Gross’s footsteps, but the truth is that he strayed far from the farm as he climbed the ladder of power. He has written enough letters to fill a book complaining about weak antitrust laws and meatpacking. But gather the votes to do something to stop it? He’d rather just fire up his typewriter for another letter. When the Trump administration shut down the stockyards inspection administration, Grassley did nothing. You didn’t hear a peep when President Donald Trump ordered immigrant meat cutters onto the kill floor, shoulder to shoulder, without coronavirus testing or proper personal protective equipment, to maintain the brittle meat supply chain that tottered in the spring of 2020.
He chaired the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee as the rich claimed theirs. He and then-Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) holed up in a room to weaken the legs of the Affordable Care Act, ensuring that upstart health insurance cooperatives would be starved of funding. From the Senate Judiciary Committee, Grassley has served as Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) chief acolyte, denying President Barack Obama his Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. Grassley has tasted power, and prefers it to a pork chop on a stick.
Grassley likes it when you call him the “father of the wind energy production tax credit,” which has helped the wind farm business, but he won’t make the credit permanent. He tells us that you can’t deport 10 million undocumented people but vows he will not allow “mass amnesty.” He went along with all the wars that H.R. Gross would have starved in their cradles. Grassley says he favors term limits. Except for himself.
If elected, he will be 89 when he is sworn in to an eighth term.
One Iowa parlor game is to play out what is really going on here. It could be dynastic: Grassley presumably wins next year, as does Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, who has a 55 percent approval rating. Grassley might hang around a while, then retire to his New Hartford farm, allowing Reynolds to appoint the senator’s grandson, Iowa House Speaker Pat Grassley, to replace him. Grassley the Younger is chiseled from the same stone but rolls farther right. But then, these days, so does Iowa.
Grassley the Elder isn’t speculating. He’s running. You have to think that he is going the distance. He still jogs every morning.
I wonder what H.R. Gross would think. He hung it up after 26 years and watched pro wrestling. You would think that our senior senator, after 63 years in elected office, might have accomplished what he set out to do in the first place — if anyone can remember what that was.
