Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican, has been in the Senate longer than most Americans have been alive. Now he holds an important key to Donald Trump’s second-term agenda.
The 91-year-old Grassley will oversee everything from “remaking the immigration system to unraveling the so-called ‘deep state'” from his perch atop the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Politico. Critically, he will also be in charge of helping confirm Trump’s judicial nominees. But his age — he is the chamber’s only nonagenarian — has raised concerns among GOP colleagues about whether he is “too old for a job central to the execution of Trump’s agenda.” Other Republicans are quick to come to his defense: Grassley “pisses excellence and experience,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.).
What is Grassley’s Senate history?
Grassley is the “longest-serving GOP senator in U.S. history,” said The Washington Post. He ran for his first political office in 1958, and was elected to Congress in 1974 before ascending to the Senate in 1981. He is “known for his reverence for Senate tradition” and a willingness to work with Democrats. In his Judiciary role, he is also charged with shepherding the nominations of Pam Bondi to be Trump’s attorney general and Kash Patel to head the FBI. Grassley says he is not worried Trump’s appointees will weaponize law enforcement on the president’s behalf. “Common sense tells me that,” he told the Post.
The senator can be fiercely partisan. Grassley is “unapologetic” about leading the GOP’s successful 2016 effort to block President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, said USA Today. That maneuver opened the way for conservatives’ current 6-3 supermajority on the court. “I took a position and stuck to it. That’s it,” he said in 2021, when Garland was nominated to serve as President Joe Biden’s attorney general.
How much will he advocate for Trump?
Grassley can depart from GOP orthodoxy. He has urged caution on Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs, telling Radio Iowa that Congress “violated the Constitution” by handing the presidency the power to unilaterally impose tariffs on imports from other countries. “When you delegate too much authority for presidential action, you’re really violating that section of the code,” he said.
There are some (anonymous) Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who say Grassley is not fierce enough to advance Trump’s legal agenda. Grassley is “not a knife fighter,” one GOP senator said to Punchbowl News. One reason for concern: Big battles over the future of the Supreme Court are likely. There is speculation that conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will use Trump’s return to retire and pave the way for replacements. The stakes on the Judiciary Committee “are going to be high,” said the anonymous senator.
Grassley’s power affects not only the Supreme Court. One of Grassley’s tasks is to “add more conservatives to the federal courts,” said Roll Call. That includes the district and appellate courts. But the Supreme Court remains the big prize. The replacements for Thomas and Alito will be just as conservative, said George Washington University law professor John P. Collins Jr., “but 30 years younger.”