Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

Iowa’s senior U.S. Senator, Republican Chuck Grassley, met with more than 50 of us from the Jefferson area here on April 17. Unlike most Republican members of Congress these days, Grassley has continued to make himself available to his constituents in all 99 Iowa counties.

Some of his meetings are true wide-open town meetings; others are by invitation. The hour-long Jefferson session was billed as a Q and A with local business and development people, but many of those in attendance did not fit that description. Still they asked their questions, and Grassley answered each of them.

Grassley opened the session by noting that he has taken his 99-county tour annually over his 45 years in the Senate. That practice now defies the advice of Republican strategists, who frown on letting people raise their voices face-to-face in disagreement with GOP members of Congress. He is correct in his defiance, and that stance earned him the thanks of some of those at last Thursday’s meeting, even if they strongly disagreed with his positions and his answers to their questions.

When the senator had trouble hearing a question, or it seemed he might have misunderstood a question, one of his Senate staff members seated near him in the front row helped him out by summarizing the question’s gist. He often walked out into the crowd to hear a questioner more clearly.

I’ve known Senator Grassley a long time. He has always been willing to answer questions at meetings like these. But on occasion he bases his answers on misinformation—fake news, if you will.

One of these occasions occurred last week when an attendee asked Grassley to explain why, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he did not hold a hearing in 2016 on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Justice Scalia had died in February 2016, and Obama had nominated Garland to fill the court vacancy in March. In concert with Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Grassley refused to hold a hearing on the nomination for 293 days, by far the longest stretch in American history for a Supreme Court nomination to remain open. Garland’s nomination finally expired on January 3, 2017, shortly before President-elect Donald Trump took the oath of office for his first term.

At the time, Grassley, McConnell, and other Senate Republicans (including Iowa’s junior Senator, Republican Joni Ernst) stated publicly that no Supreme Court vacancy should be filled in a presidential election year. Rather, they held that the vacancy should remain open until voters had had their chance to select the next president.

At that time, neither Grassley nor Ernst (who was also a member of the Judiciary Committee) mentioned that President Obama was a Democrat, and that the Senate was under Republican control. They held to their supposed reason that the vacancy should remain open until after the election, even though Justice Scalia had died in February and the election wasn’t until November.

But at last Thursday’s Jefferson meeting, Grassley responded differently to the attendee’s question about the Senate’s refusal to give Garland a Judiciary Committee hearing.

He said what has been obvious since early 2016: the Republican-controlled Senate wasn’t about to confirm a Democratic president’s nominee to a Supreme Court vacancy.

It surprised me that Grassley openly admitted that politics prompted the Senate’s freezing of the confirmation process. He made no mention at all of the argument he made back in 2016, about leaving the vacancy open until after the presidential election. Nor of the fact that in the fall of 2020, the Republican Senate hastened to confirm Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Trump had nominated her just 38 days before that that year’s presidential election; she was confirmed eight days before election day, when tens of millions of Americans had already cast ballots.

Grassley now acknowledges blocking Garland was simply politics.

Then he went on to make up facts.

For well over 100 years of American history, he said, it has been the custom “that when you have a president of one party and a Senate of the other party, and it’s getting close to a presidential election, the Senate doesn’t approve that.” In other words, Grassley depicted himself as in step with an American tradition.

He’s wrong. I don’t know if he said it because he was misinformed, or because he was trying to justify his action.

There were five Republican presidents from the 1950s to the 1990s: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. During most of those years Democrats had a Senate majority.

And Democratic-controlled Senates confirmed eleven Supreme Court nominees presented to them by those Republican presidents. They were as follows:

• Nominated by Eisenhower: John Marshall Harlan II, William Brennan, Charles Whittaker, and Potter Stewart.
• Nominated by Nixon: Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun, and Lewis F. Powell Jr.
• Nominated by Ford: John Paul Stevens.
• Nominated by Reagan: Anthony Kennedy.
• Nominated by George H.W. Bush: David Souter and Clarence Thomas.

Not all Republican presidential Supreme Court appointees made it through a Democratic Senate in those years: the Senate rejected President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork in 1987.

But Grassley’s decision to refuse to hold a hearing on Merrick Garland’s nomination in 2016 was, as he admitted last Thursday, a political decision. Democratic majorities resisted that temptation when they confirmed Kennedy during the last year of Reagan’s second term, and confirmed Powell and Stevens less than a year before the 1972 and 1976 presidential elections. 

Grassley and his Republican colleagues were not following some venerable American tradition. To say anything else is fake news.

And he should know, because Grassley served in the Senate during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

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Courtesy of John Brunow, here is the full video of Grassley’s April 17 town hall in Jefferson. Brunow asked the question about Merrick Garland’s nomination, beginning around the 44:20 mark.