Friday, March 25, 2016

Iowa asks 'What happened to Chuck Grassley?'

Rss@dailykos.com (joan Mccarter) · Friday, March 18, 2016, 2:36 pm

Oh, it's going to be a great two-week recess back home in Iowa for Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the crotchety Republican who is at the center of the Supreme Court blockade.

Republican Joy Corning and Democrat Sally Pederson, both former Iowa lieutenant governors, are teaming up to try to convince Grassley to hold hearings for Obama's court pick, Merrick Garland. They held a Thursday press event in Des Moines to remind him of his roots.

"You voted in favor of Iowa's constitutional amendment that took campaign politics out of Iowa's judicial system," said Corning, citing a 2014 interview in which Grassley boasted about voting as a state lawmaker to prevent political parties from nominating judges. "You express great pride in that vote, and I quote, 'It was a very forward-looking thing to do what we did 50 years ago.'" […]
"Throughout your career, Chuck, you have been a fair-minded, common-sense consensus builder," the former GOP official continued. "Refusing to fill the Supreme Court vacancy is none of those things." [...]
"The senator's opposition [to hearings] is troubling," [Penderson] said. "Moreover, this is not the Chuck Grassley we thought we knew."

The two are heading up a nonpartisan grassroots organization, Justice Not Politics, of "tens of thousands" of Iowans who agree with former Grassley, the 2014 version, that politics should be taken out of the judicial system. They are planning to confront 2016 Grassley over this flip-flop when he's back home having town meetings in the next couple of weeks.

That should go well for him, considering how he's holding up under pressure so far.

http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/PvzzIhwK1cA/-Iowa-asks-What-happened-to-Chuck-Grassley

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