Inept chairman

Reid: Grassley an inept chairman

The Senate minority leader is furious over the GOP’s plan to block Obama from filling a Supreme Court vacancy.

By Burgess Everett

Harry Reid unleashed a blunt and blistering attack on longtime GOP colleague Chuck Grassley, accusing the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman of ceding his panel’s autonomy to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and being an inept leader of the committee.

The Senate minority leader, furious over the GOP’s plan to block President Barack Obama from filling a Supreme Court vacancy, publicly lambasted Grassley (R-Iowa) for refusing to meet with the president to discuss the vacancy this week. Grassley and his committee’s Republican members wrote McConnell on Tuesday to confirm they would refuse to even hold a hearing for Obama’s nominee, and the Des Moines Register reported that Grassley has declined an invitation to visit with Obama.

“Sen. Grassley has surrendered every pretense of independence ... so partisan, in fact, that the senior senator from Iowa won’t respond to a personal invitation from the president,” Reid said in a 10-minute speech almost entirely trained on Grassley.

“Think about that. The president of the United States calls a very senior senator here and doesn’t even respond to the president. This is a sad day for one of the proudest committees in the United States Senate,” Reid said. “We don’t have to go back to 1980 or 1982 to prove the current chairman’s ineptness. Look at the spike in judicial emergencies that occurred on Chairman Grassley’s watch just in the past year.”

There are 31 judicial emergencies in the lower courts where judges are overworked and understaffed, according to the federal government. McConnell and Grassley had been steadily but slowly confirming lower level judges over the past 14 months, but there are growing doubts over how many more can be processed given the worsening firefight over the Supreme Court vacancy.

Grassley has thus far declined to respond in kind to Reid, but has used Vice President Joe Biden’s words to justify his efforts to bar a nominee from a hearing. On Monday, Grassley gave a speech quoting Biden at length from an old speech, claiming that he is merely operating under the “Biden rules” in denying a confirmation during an election year.

“If the president of the United States insists on submitting a nominee under these circumstances, Sen. Biden, my friend from Delaware, the man who sat at a desk across the aisle and at the back of this Chamber for more than 35 years, knows what the Senate should do,” Grassley said on Monday.

Reid, of course, infuriated Grassley in 2013 by changing the Senate’s rules and confirming dozens of mostly liberal judges while Reid was still majority leader. Grassley has smarted at criticisms of his leadership ever since, insisting that as chairman he would have processed many of those nominations without affecting Senate precedent.