Reflecting upon the extraordinary 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, it seems important to again contemplate and admire the bravery and devotion of our Founding Fathers to the cause of liberty. The incomparable creation of this everlasting document and its corollary Constitution are nothing short of a miracle penned by extraordinarily gifted men coming together at a moment in time that rarely presents itself.
Their genius provided us with living parchments establishing lofty ideals and aspirations for a new nation and the construct to preserve it. One principal, unmistakeable safeguard to its preservation was the formation of three co-equal branches of government, each responsible for providing checks and balances to excesses of the other.
Today, regrettably, one could reasonably conclude that our current executive branch has purposefully, methodically, and, with sycophant assistance, assent, weakness, and/or cowardice, co-opted these essential, intentional safeguards.
How, one should ask, could this happen?
One illustrative instance of the intentionality and purposefulness that brought us to where we are today can be laid squarely at the doorstep of Iowa’s senior senator, Chuck Grassley, previously and now chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Recall, if you will, President Barack Obama’s March 16, 2016, nomination of appellate judge Merrick Garland to serve as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, 237 days before the Nov. 8, 2016, presidential election.
Supremely qualified, Garland saw his nomination ended by Grassley and every other Republican on his Judiciary Committee by way of their (coordinated with Sen. Mitch McConnell) steadfast refusal to hold confirmation hearings. This marked the first time since the Civil War that a nominee whose nomination had not been withdrawn had failed to receive consideration for an open seat on the Supreme Court.
Justifications were offered by Grassley, the most salient of which was that short timing before the election dictated the next president should possess this selection, thereby reflecting the will of the American people.
(Recall, too, that candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and received approximately 65.85 million votes, 48.18%, compared with Donald Trump’s 62.98 million votes, 46.09%, leading by nearly 2.9 million votes.)
Looking back at President Donald Trump’s Sept. 26, 2020, nomination of appellate judge Amy Coney Barrett and her remarkably expedited Oct. 27, 2020, seating on the court in advance of the Nov. 3, 2020, presidential election, the expressed justifications for Grassley’s treatment of Garland’s nomination are scarcely credible. This 31-day turnaround marked one of the fastest nomination-to-oath cycles in modern U.S. history.
However, our senator’s unabashed hypocrisy doesn’t end there.
Because it would be next to impossible to argue that today’s makeup of the court is fair, or balanced, or even an accurate reflection of the will of the American people, some Democrats have considered whether the composition of the court might be altered in such a way as to achieve more judicious outcomes. Now, lifetime appointments by one political party or the other of a disproportionate number of nine sitting justices can be seen as flawed imbalance. Rotations, term limits, and other solutions are being discussed. These discussions are occurring in the context of the “Trump court’s” numerous, unprecedented, exceedingly impactful decisions (some upending longstanding precedent), the court’s overuse of its “shadow docket,” the court’s seismic shifting of power through the unitary executive theory, and more. Many monumental rulings have already and will continue to irrevocably change, and damage, lives, diminish personal liberties, and forever alter the course of history.
Despite the value and reasonableness of this discussion, Grassley recently chose to not let sleeping dogs lie. On June 25, he authored and published a rebuke of Democrats’ court revision considerations, likening them to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1937 “Court packing scheme to rig the Supreme Court.” The full text is important reading because it exposes deliberate gaslighting by Iowa’s senior senator (who, as Senate president pro tempore, occupies the No. 3 spot in the line of succession for the presidency), blind to his own actions that intentionally and actually resulted in his own rigging of the Supreme Court.
One of the most outrageously ironic statements relates to Grassley’s apparent recognition that “our constitutional system of checks and balances … aims to prevent any one of the federal government’s three branches from gaining too much power.”
The senator must either be delusional or unwilling to acknowledge that this is exactly the problem that has raised such concern: his and his Republican Party’s abdication of their constitutional duty to rein in their drunk-with-power president. Grassley also wrote in his commentary that “Iowa’s own former President Hoover exposed the outrageous effort (by FDR) to reduce ‘the sword of the people’ to ‘a tool of the executive.'” It would be laughable for Grassley to have written this as a part of his critique of Democrats’ Supreme Court discussions if it wasn’t so very applicably dangerous today.
Given the pervasive Republican tutelage from the Trump and Roy Cohn Center for Government Deceit, Dishonesty, Corruption and Abuse, none of the honorable senator’s conduct is at all surprising.
Dean Lerner is a graduate of Grinnell College and Drake University Law School. He served for nearly 30 years as an Iowa assistant attorney general, chief deputy secretary of state, then deputy/director of the Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals. He then worked for the CMS Director of the Division of Nursing Homes and the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Chuck Grassley, not Democrats, blew up checks and balances | Opinion
Reporting by Dean Lerner, Guest columnist / Des Moines Register
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Dean Lerner, Guest columnist | USA TODAY Network
