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Iowa: Senior Senator Sen. Charles Grassley (R) Last Updated July 25, 2003
Charles Grassley, the senior Senator from Iowa, was first elected to the Senate in 1980. He grew up on a farm in Butler County near Waterloo; his parents switched parties when Franklin Roosevelt ran for a third term in 1940. In 1956, Grassley ran for the state legislature and lost by 70-some votes. While in graduate school, he ran for the state House in the Democratic year of 1958 and was elected, at 25; while in the legislature he worked as a sheet metal shearer and an assembly line worker. He won an U.S. House seat in the Democratic year of 1974 and a Senate seat by beating a strong incumbent, John Culver, in 1980. Grassley combines political shrewdness with a seeming naivete that at some level is surely genuine. He describes himself as "just a hog farmer from New Hartford," and says, "I don't know how you're going to have a strong farm economy if we don't have some farmers in Congress. I can't tell you how many people I have to tell that food doesn't grow on grocery shelves." Starting in 1997, he led the Senate in consecutive roll call votes; the last one he missed came when he was inspecting flood damage in Iowa in 1993. He goes back home to Iowa just about every weekend, helps his son run the 710-acre family farm and holds open meetings in every one of Iowa's 99 counties each year. Three issues guided Grassley's early record in Congress: Thrift, agriculture and dovishness on defense. He is ever alert for abuse of power. His first major legislation was the 1986 Federal False Claims Act, which authorizes suits for fraud on behalf of the government; he says it has brought in $5.6 billion. He long sponsored the bill to apply to Congress the same laws it applies to others, and was the chief sponsor of the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995. He is a strong supporter of free trade and has worked from Washington to Seattle to open up markets for agricultural products; he strongly supported PNTR with China and managed trade promotion authority to passage in May 2002. Grassley supported both the Freedom to Farm Act of 1996 and subsequent emergency payments and loan provisions for farmers. In 1991, he was one of two Republicans to vote against the Gulf war resolution. He does not echo other Republicans' calls for more defense spending and is quick to seize on Pentagon outrages; in 2002, he was complaining about misuse of Defense Department credit cards. Grassley is now chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, a position he also held from January to June 2001. There he had worked for the childcare tax credit, enacted in 1997, and to reinstate the deductibility of interest on student loans. He was chief sponsor of the wind energy production tax credit of 1992 and seeks favorable treatment for ethanol and biomass; in 1998, he got the ethanol tax credit extended to 2007. He spent years highlighting abuses by the IRS and helped pass the IRS reforms of 1998. Later he worried that the IRS was not enforcing the law strictly enough; in April 2001 he said, "I'm worried by claims that the IRS is the dog that doesn't bark--or perhaps bark enough--about Internet tax fraud." As chairman in May 2001, he negotiated a bipartisan package that became the largest tax cut in history. He pushed unsuccessfully for the Bush stimulus package in fall 2001 and in summer 2002 was chief sponsor of the "tripartisan" prescription drug plan (it was co-sponsored by John Breaux and Jim Jeffords), one of several that failed to get the required 60 votes. In 2003 he is likely to be a key player on any Medicare/prescription drug bill. Grassley is likely to seek a change in the Medicare reimbursement formula under which Iowa currently receives the lowest reimbursement per beneficiary of any state ($3,053 per patient versus over $7,000 in Breaux's Louisiana); this became a big issue in Iowa in 2002 thanks to a Des Moines Register series and Republican Rep. Greg Ganske, running for the Senate, who put through a formula change in the House. Grassley has called for a less sweeping change than his colleague Tom Harkin, though Harkin also supported Grassley's bill. On the Judiciary Committee, Grassley has been the chief sponsor of bankruptcy reform, not yet passed; he has taken special care to see that Chapter 12, applying to farmers, would allow them to reorganize without creditors' consent. He supported the Freedom to Farm Act in 1996 and later, disaster relief spending. But he opposed the May 2002 farm bill, since the final version lacked his amendment to ban meatpacker ownership of livestock and had higher limits on subsidies than the $275,000 he had persuaded the Senate to vote for. "A number of folks have been saying this is a good bill, and I'd say those folks are part right. It's a good bill if you're a cotton and rice producer. The problem is, we don't grow those commodities in my state of Iowa." Large issues claim much of Grassley's attention, but he is willing to devote much time to smaller issues as well. He worked on the money-laundering bill after September 11 and said of bank lobbyists, "They are being very unpatriotic in their approach." He has called for the Justice Department to conduct antitrust investigations of mergers that affect Iowa--most recent, Smithfield Foods' proposed purchase of bankrupt Farmland Industries. Since the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident, he has been a frequent critic of the FBI; he has said that Director Robert Mueller needs to change the culture of the agency. He worked to bring airline competition to Iowa and to encourage renewable sources of energy--wind, biomass, soy diesel, animal waste nutrients. With New York Senator Charles Schumer, he has tried to bring television to federal courts. They urged Chief Justice William Rehnquist to let in the cameras when the court was considering the Florida cases in December 2000; the Court said no, but did release audiotapes immediately after oral argument. For more than 20 years, Grassley has been the most popular politician in Iowa. As he once said, "I think I've established credibility with the people of Iowa that they know I'm going to use a common-sense approach to government." In 1986, he became the first Iowa senator to win re-election in 20 years, with a record 66% of the vote. In 1992, he broke the record when he won 70%-27%, carrying all 99 counties. In 1998, against a Democrat who campaigned by taking trips down Iowa rivers, he fell back to 68%-30%, carrying all 99 counties again, from Johnson County and its college town Iowa City (53%-45%) to heavily Dutch-American Sioux County (91%-9%). In August 1999, he said he expected to run again in 2004 and no one doubts that he will win. At that point, he will have tied Bourke Hickenlooper for the second-longest tenure of an Iowa senator; he will beat the record set by William B. Allison if he serves until June 2016, three months before he turns 83.
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