Chuck Grassley, the senior senator from Iowa, was first elected to the House in 1974 and to the Senate in 1980. He grew up on a farm in Butler County near Waterloo. His parents switched to the Republican Party when Franklin Roosevelt ran for a third term in 1940. Grassley received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Northern Iowa, and while in graduate school, he ran for the state House in 1956, losing by only 70-some votes. Two years later, he ran again and was elected at age 25. While he was in the state legislature, he worked as a sheet metal shearer and on an assembly line. He won an open U.S. House seat in 1974, the hugely successful post-Watergate year for the Democrats, and six years later, he won his Senate seat by beating incumbent Democratic Sen. John Culver, the father of future Gov. Chet Culver. Sen. Culver was an uncompromising liberal who came under fire from religious conservatives in 1980. Grassley was a conservative who had built up strong loyalty in his north central Iowa House district, which gave him nearly half his statewide lead over Culver. In his other career as a part-time farmer, Grassley runs an 80-acre farm that he inherited in 1960 and has added to it over the years. It’s now a 710-acre concern that produces corn and soybeans. Grassley’s son manages the farm, but the senator likes to go back to help out in the fields on weekends, sometimes conducting congressional business on the cell phone that he keeps tucked under his cap. He stays in touch with his state in other ways, too. He has held meetings in each of the state’s 99 counties every year that he has served in the Senate. Read More

Chuck Grassley, the senior senator from Iowa, was first elected to the House in 1974 and to the Senate in 1980. He grew up on a farm in Butler County near Waterloo. His parents switched to the Republican Party when Franklin Roosevelt ran for a third term in 1940. Grassley received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Northern Iowa, and while in graduate school, he ran for the state House in 1956, losing by only 70-some votes. Two years later, he ran again and was elected at age 25. While he was in the state legislature, he worked as a sheet metal shearer and on an assembly line. He won an open U.S. House seat in 1974, the hugely successful post-Watergate year for the Democrats, and six years later, he won his Senate seat by beating incumbent Democratic Sen. John Culver, the father of future Gov. Chet Culver. Sen. Culver was an uncompromising liberal who came under fire from religious conservatives in 1980. Grassley was a conservative who had built up strong loyalty in his north central Iowa House district, which gave him nearly half his statewide lead over Culver. In his other career as a part-time farmer, Grassley runs an 80-acre farm that he inherited in 1960 and has added to it over the years. It’s now a 710-acre concern that produces corn and soybeans. Grassley’s son manages the farm, but the senator likes to go back to help out in the fields on weekends, sometimes conducting congressional business on the cell phone that he keeps tucked under his cap. He stays in touch with his state in other ways, too. He has held meetings in each of the state’s 99 counties every year that he has served in the Senate.

Though he’s a steady conservative on social issues—he opposes abortion rights and most gun control initiatives—Grassley is also a populist in the American agrarian tradition. He has distinguished himself in Congress as a defender of government whistle-blowers and other underdogs, and he has made oversight of bloated, indifferent or corrupt government agencies a focal point of his Senate career. To the chagrin of his party, Grassley also takes on well-heeled political contributors when they raise his ire, as many a pharmaceutical executive can attest. Throughout the George W. Bush era, Grassley repeatedly went after Food and Drug Administration officials who he thought were too cozy with the industries they were supposed to regulate. In the mid-1980s, Grassley’s first major legislative achievement was passage of the Federal False Claims Act, which authorized lawsuits for fraud on behalf of the government; he says it has since brought the taxpayers more than $17 billion.

Over the years, Grassley has conducted intensive oversight of the FBI, the Homeland Security Department, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the FDA. He has long advocated that Congress follow the same laws it imposes on citizens, and he was the chief Senate sponsor of the sweeping Congressional Accountability Act of 1995. At his urging, the Senate in late 2010 passed a whistleblower protection bill for federal employees. Although it left out Grassley’s specific provision protecting whistleblowers in the intelligence community, he was happy with the outcome. “Whistleblowers know where the skeletons are, deep in the closets of the federal bureaucracy,” he said. “The bill restores the congressional intent behind a number of key whistleblower laws.”

Grassley has shown an inclination to challenge Wall Street. He was one of four Republicans who voted for the initial Senate financial services package in May 2010, although he voted against the final version later in July. “There’s no question this bill has flaws, but a message needs to be sent to Wall Street that business-as-usual is over,” Grassley said. He also was the only Republican to vote with Democrats on the Senate Agriculture Committee for sweeping reform of the derivatives market in April 2010. And his support for whistleblower rights led him to co-sponsor with Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md. an amendment in May 2010 that extended whistleblower protections to employees of credit rating agencies, such as Standard & Poor’s, which have been criticized for not providing accurate credit ratings for high risk securities. Grassley voted for the government rescue of the financial industry during the final months of the Bush administration and faced criticism from Iowa conservatives in early 2009. Grassley won Senate approval of an amendment co-sponsored with Baucus that required companies accepting tax dollars from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to cooperate with requests for information from the Government Accountability Office.

As a farmer, Grassley supported both the Republicans’ 1996 Freedom to Farm law that attempted to phase out government subsidies and the subsequent disaster payments to farmers when they suffered financially under the law. He opposed the 2002 farm bill, drafted by Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin, on the grounds that it allowed a higher limit on subsidies than the $275,000 that Grassley had persuaded the Senate to vote for. He has consistently argued that high payments to individual farmers put the whole program in political jeopardy. A July 2007 Government Accountability Office report that Grassley requested revealed that the Agriculture Department had given more than $1 billion to deceased farmers from 1999 to 2005. Grassley pushed an amendment to the 2008 budget to cap payments to farmers at $250,000.

Grassley has served two stints as chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, in the first half of 2001 and from 2003 to 2007. With Democrats in control of the Senate, Grassley is now the ranking Republican on the committee. Over the years, he has had close relations and weekly meetings with his Democratic counterpart, Max Baucus of Montana, often to the dismay of conservative Republicans who think Grassley is too accommodating of Baucus. But the working relationship between the two was crucial to many of the GOP initiatives during the Bush era. Grassley and Baucus rounded up bipartisan support for the massive tax cuts early in Bush’s first term. And Grassley was one of the leaders in creating the prescription drug benefit under Medicare in 2003. After the bill passed, he defended it against continuing Democratic attacks, and in 2007, he helped halt Democratic efforts to pass a measure that Republicans had expressly kept out of the earlier bill: to allow the government to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. The industry balked at the greatly enhanced powers the bill would give the government in setting prices, and Grassley threatened to filibuster any such bill that came to the floor. Also in 2007, Grassley worked with Baucus to secure Senate support to expand the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program.

When President Obama in 2009 proposed a far-reaching bill to bring more people into the health insurance market, Grassley was one of the Senate negotiators trying to broker a deal. Some Democrats were skeptical that Grassley would ever sign on to an Obama-backed bill. He was also under pressure from his own party leadership for negotiating on health care with Democrats. In August 2009, Grassley told National Journal: “Wouldn’t you rather have a conservative Republican at the table than have nobody at the table?” In the end, Grassley voted against the legislation, complaining that it would cut funding for Medicare and would neither hold down taxes nor contain health care costs. When critics charged that the legislation created so-called “death panels” to selectively dole out care, Grassley helped fan the flames when he said, “[You] should not have a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on Grandma.”

With his populist bent, he has for years pursued “fairness” in the tax code. He sought a charitable deduction for non-itemizers and tighter rules for foundations, with tougher penalties. He led the committee to tighten the rules on partial gifts of art, which allowed donors to retain possession while receiving tax deductions. “Call it what it is, a subsidy for millionaires to buy art,” he said. “Where I come from, the word ‘giving’ doesn’t mean ‘keeping.’ ” In 2007, Grassley joined Baucus in backing a bill to repeal the alternative minimum tax, which has been ensnaring an increasing number of middle-income taxpayers in addition to the wealthy itemizers it was designed to catch. But Grassley also said it would be unfair to raise other taxes to repeal the AMT.

Corn-based ethanol is an important product of Iowa’s agribusiness, and Grassley has used his influence on the committee to win advantageous tax treatment of ethanol. He has also sought tax incentives for biodiesel, made with soybean oil or recycled cooking oil. The United States is a major exporter of agricultural products, and Grassley has been a supporter of free trade, backing the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, normal trade relations with China and the Central America Free Trade Agreement.

Grassley also serves on the Judiciary Committee, where for years he was the chief sponsor of the bankruptcy law overhaul bill that finally passed and was signed into law in 2005. He took special care to see that Chapter 12, which applies to farmers, would allow them to reorganize their debt without creditors’ consent. Grassley’s vote against the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor was the first time he ever opposed a nominee for the high court. “I question if Judge Sotomayor will be able to set aside personal biases and prejudices to decide cases in an impartial manner and in accordance with the Constitution,” Grassley said in a statement. He voiced displeasure with her views on property rights and gun ownership rights.

In January 2011, Grassley won passage of a binding resolution requiring senators to make the holds they put on legislation and nominees public. The use of so-called “secret holds,” unique to the Senate, had allowed individual senators to delay or stop action by the Senate anonymously, and it has been a major obstacle to getting judicial nominees confirmed. Grassley won a 92-4 vote forcing senators to put their objections in writing and submit them for publication in The Congressional Record no longer than two days after the holds are made.

For more than two decades, Grassley has been the most popular politician in Iowa. “I commune with Iowans on a regular basis, and I think they know that. They appreciate it, and they don’t feel like Washington has gone to my head. I suppose if I don’t get smug and overconfident, I’ll be re-elected,” he said in 2004, shortly before he was returned to the Senate by a vote of 70%-28%. In 1986, he became the first Iowa senator to win re-election in 20 years, with a record 66% of the vote. He has not had a tough race since 1974, when he won his House seat with 51% of the vote. He won re-election in 2010 with 64% of the vote against Democrat Roxanne Conlin, a Des Moines attorney, who got 33%.