Philip Bump of the Washington Post called attention to something that sets Senator Chuck Grassley apart from all of his colleagues in Congress. Iowa’s senior senator has not missed a roll-call vote since the summer of 1993, when he was touring flooded areas in Iowa with President Bill Clinton. The only person with a realistic chance to match his streak of more than 7,000 consecutive votes over more than two decades is Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who has participated in nearly 6,000 consecutive roll calls over more than 15 years. No other current member of the U.S. House or Senate has gone even five years without missing a roll-call vote.
Everyone can admire Grassley’s dedication to showing up for work. How he votes on all those bills and resolutions could be improved, though. After the jump I’ve enclosed highlights from the Progressive Punch scoring of Grassley’s voting record. In a dozen different issue categories, he goes against the progressive position at least 95 percent of the time. Grassley may be considered an establishment figure compared to some of the GOP’s “tea party” heroes, but he is no moderate and never has been.
In other Grassley-related news, the Senate Judiciary Committee chair was mentioned in this article about a new left-meets-right coalition seeking to “reduce mandatory sentences, lower prison populations, and re-evaluate the war on drugs in the states.”
Advocates already have a raft of bipartisan legislation to push forward. Last week, a bipartisan group of senators led by Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin and Utah Republican Mike Lee re-introduced the Smarter Sentencing Act, a bill heavily favored by advocates on both sides of the aisle. They’re up against Republican leaders like Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, who has said he’s not interested in any legislation that reduces mandatory minimum sentences.
You don’t have to be a liberal to recognize that mandatory minimum sentences “contribute to prison overcrowding, irrational sentencing, racial disparities in sentencing, and exorbitant criminal justice costs,” not to mention some absurdly disproportionate punishments for non-violent crimes. Here’s hoping some conservatives can talk Grassley into opening his mind on this issue. He certainly won’t listen to progressives.
Senator Chuck Grassley’s voting record, captured on the Progressive Punch database on February 24:
