Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA)

Although the full details of Grassley and Hutchinson’s watered down protections for domestic violence victims have yet to be released, it is likely that they will map Grassley’s previously stated opposition to providing greater support for LGBT, undocumented, and tribal victims of domestic violence. The Hutchison/Grassley amendment will likely leave out some victims who face particularly harsh discrimination. If Senate Republicans embrace Grassley’s earlier objections to reauthorizing VAWA, they will show that they are willing to tolerate a certain amount of domestic violence by ignoring certain victims:

For Native victims: In 86 percent of reported rapes or sexual assaults on Native women, the perpetrators are non-Native. While Hutchison has criticized the tribal provisions, saying that ‘any American’ could be imprisoned by tribal courts, in actuality, the provisions allow tribal members to prosecute a non-tribal people who commit domestic violence and who either live or work on a reservation, or are married to a tribal member. The Grassley / Hutchison amendment requires any domestic violence to be prosecuted in federal courts, meaning that rural tribal victims won’t seek help. Additionally, federal prosecutors “already decline to prosecute half of Indian Country crimes that are referred to them,” and with the added number of domestic violence crimes, victims are likely to never see justice.

For LGBT victims: The new version of the bill also lacks any additional provisions for the LGBT community, blanketing over LGBT-specific issues with gender neutral language that lumps the needs of gay and lesbian protections in with the needs of straight couples. The original version of VAWA says that domestic violence shelters cannot discriminate against gay, lesbian, or trans people, but the new version says nothing about this issue. Grassley has said that he does not believe discrimination in shelters is an issue — despite the fact that “44.6 percent of LGBT/HIV-positive survivors of intimate partner violence were turned away from shelters.”

For undocumented victims: The Grassley/Hutchison version of the bill takes out the added visas for undocumented people who are beaten and seek assistance from the state. The visas are put in place so that victims aren’t too scared to contact the authorities when they find themselves physically harmed or in danger. When such protections don’t exist, people are forced to work outside of the law to protect themselves.

But there may be a bit of good news in the amendment. It may offer increased funding for rape kits, the processing of which is notoriously backlogged in the criminal justice system across the U.S. This funding should be increased, but LGBT, Native American and immigrant victims should not have to suffer for it.

Devon Boyer, a council member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and a former law enforcement officer, shared the stories of two women who couldn’t see justice done to their abusers:

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA)

The Senate began debate on Wednesday to reauthorize the landmark Violence Against Women Act, a measure that prevents domestic violence and aids victims of domestic or sexual abuse. Earlier this year, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) led a Republican effort to block renewal of the Act because he objected to the bill’s protections for LGBT individuals, undocumented immigrants and Native Americans, causing every single Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote against its reauthorization. House Republicans have also refused to take up the measure earlier this year.

Now, the GOP is crafting watered-down proposals that specifically exclude LGBT people, Native Americans, immigrants, and others:

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, joined by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, is preparing an alternative that would alter several Democratic provisions. Their alternative would cap visas available to legal and illegal immigrants who suffer abuse at 10,000 a year, compared to 15,000 proposed by the Democratic bill offered by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. It does not specify, as the Democratic bill does, that violence against gays, lesbians and transgenders are part of the act. The Leahy bill expands the authority of Native American officials to handle cases of abuse of Indian women by non-Indians. The Republican substitute permits tribal authorities to go to federal court for protective orders on behalf of abused Native American women.

The base Senate bill would reauthorize VAWA for five years with funding of $659.3 million a year, down $136.5 million a year from the last VAWA act, which expired several months ago. The money goes to such programs as legal assistance for victims, enforcement of protection orders, transitional housing aid and youth prevention programs.

Sponsors of the House bill, which is still being drafted, said it would be close to the Grassley-Hutchison approach. It was introduced by 12 GOP women lawmakers and three members of the Republican leadership, including Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia.

Mitt Romney, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, has refused to say which version of the Violence Against Women Act he supports, but as Attorney General Eric Holder put it, “For the life of me, I cannot begin to understand why this is something that is a debate within Congress.”

“It is inconceivable to me now that we are in the process of a debate about something that has proven so effective and is clearly so needed for the future,” Holder added. “It must be passed, and it must be passed soon.”

Research indicates that domestic violence among same-sex couples occurs at similar rates as domestic violence among straight couples. Unfortunately, domestic violence victims in same-sex relationships are not receiving the help they need due to the lack of legal recognition of same-sex relationships, law enforcement’s failure to identity and properly handle domestic violence cases involving people of the same sex, and the shortage of resources available to victims of same-sex partner domestic abuse. A 2011 report from the National Anti-Violence Project, however, that rates of domestic abuse and violence have increased among couples in the LGBT community and that support and protections for survivors is low. Reported instances of domestic violence increased 38 percent from last year, including seven deaths, while over 44 percent of survivors were turned away from traditional shelters and over 54 percent who sought court orders for protection from abuse were denied.

Now, U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is advocating a boycott of the company:

The Grassley boycott could be quite extensive. Over the last few weeks, at least 11 other companies — including Pepsi, McDonald’s, and Kraft — announced they were severing ties with ALEC.

In response to the criticism, ALEC announced they were ending all “non-economic” activities. Unfortunately for ALEC, that hasn’t stopped the parade of defections, which most recently includes Blue Cross Blue Shield and Yum! Foods.

In light of these recent Republican efforts to hold some domestic violence survivors hostage to block protections for others, formerGov. Mitt Romney’s campaign was recently asked whether he supports including the protections for gay people, undocumented immigrants and Native Americans or not. Team Romney would not answer the question:

Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for Mr. Romney, said in an e-mail, “Gov. Romney supports the Violence Against Women Act and hopes it can be reauthorized without turning it into a political football.” But she declined to specify which version he supported.

As Attorney General Eric Holder said yesterday, it is “inconceivable” that there is actually a debate over whether to protect domestic violence victims or not. It is equally inconceivable that anyone could deem some victims more worthy of protection than others. Romney, however, doesn’t seem willing to even go that far. He won’t even tell us which people caught in a horrific spiral of domestic violence deserve the law’s full protection against domestic violence.

However, the bill that the Senate adopted is the same one that the House passed last month, not a stronger version that the Senate had written earlier and approved by a huge margin. The earlier version included a provision, championed by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), that would have required Washington insiders who sell intelligence to corporate America to register as lobbyists. Grassley, who was one of the three votes against the bill, today took to the Senate floor to blast Congress for adopting the watered down House version:

On Tuesday the Republican Majority Leader of the House and the Democrat [sic] Majority Leader of the Senate worked together to thwart the will of 60 Senators and 286 Members of Congress. This is not the kind of bipartisan cooperation we need.

I won’t ascribe motives to anyone in this body, but I know that today’s actions only serve the desires of obscure and powerful Wall Street interests and undercut the will of an overwhelming majority of Congress. [...]

There are over 2,000 people working in the completely unregulated world of political intelligence, or political espionage as I call it. Right now, they are celebrating. They are celebrating because they know that its business as usual. They can continue to pass along tips they get from Members of Congress, Senators and staff and no one will be the wiser. They pass along these tips to hedge funds, private equity firms and other investors who pay them top dollar.

The lobbyists get rich. Wall Street traders get rich. But the American people lose.

The weaker House version of the bill was drawn up by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), who had earlier blocked the GOP from moving an anti-insider trading bill at all. Last month, Grassley reacted to the House removing his political intelligence provision by saying, “it’s astonishing and extremely disappointing that the House would fulfill Wall Street’s wishes by killing this provision.”

Employment discrimination cases are difficult to prove because the plaintiff ultimately must show what their boss was thinking at the time they were fired or demoted–it is illegal for an employer to fire a worker because they think the worker is too old or too black or too female, but not because they think the worker is incompetent or poorly dressed. Since workers don’t have ESP, the Supreme Court long ago put certain procedures in place to make sure that laws banning discrimination amount to more than just empty promises.

“Mixed motive” suits are an example of these procedures. To win a mixed motive case, a plaintiff had to prove that discrimination was one of the reasons behind their boss’ decision to fire or demote them. It was then up to their boss to prove that they would have made the same decision regardless of the worker’s race or gender or age. Workers are spared the nearly impossible task of having to prove that that their boss was thinking only of bigotry when they lashed out at their employee; and employers are given a fair chance to prove that discrimination is not the real reason why the worker was cast aside. . . .[Gross v. FBL Financial Services] eliminates such claims in age discrimination cases. Thanks to Justice Thomas’ majority opinion, victims of age discrimination are helpless unless they can get inside their boss’ head and show that their boss would have behaved differently if the victim had been a little younger.

A bill introduced Tuesday by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Tom Harkin (D-IA) will overturn Gross and restore to older workers the same ability to fight discrimination that they agreed before a 5-4 Supreme Court took it away from them. Although many Senate Democrats have long supported undoing the justices’ mischief in this way, this is the first time a Republican has signed on to the effort — Grassley’s endorsement of the bill is a hopeful sign that it could become law.

Enacting this bill is not simply important because it will restore necessary rights to older workers, it also is important to push back against a Supreme Court that openly flouts its own precedents. Justice Thomas’ majority opinion in Gross acknowledged that his decision was at war with longstanding precedent, but he dismissed this fact by simply saying “it is far from clear that the Court would have the same approach were it to consider the question today in the first instance.” In other words, Thomas believes that, because the Supreme Court is now dominated by five far right justices, it should no longer have to follow precedents from a more sensible era.

The House Republicans’ version of the bill, however, does not include Grassley’s provision. In fact, the House version, crafted by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), is significantly weaker than the Senate version, leading Grassley to slam his own party for granting “Wall Street’s wishes” on the legislation:

It’s astonishing and extremely disappointing that the House would fulfill Wall Street’s wishes by killing this provision. The Senate clearly voted to try to shed light on an industry that’s behind the scenes. If the Senate language is too broad, as opponents say, why not propose a solution instead of scrapping the provision altogether? I hope to see a vehicle for meaningful transparency through a House-Senate conference or other means. If Congress delays action, the political intelligence industry will stay in the shadows, just the way Wall Street likes it.

The House is planing to vote on its version of the STOCK Act this week. It’s worth remembering that, before he introduced this weak tea version of the legislation, Cantor blocked his own party from moving an insider trading bill at all.

Ninth Circuit Nominee Paul Watford

Senate Republicans immediately started distorting his record, and they eventually filibustered his nomination into oblivion.

About a year later, we saw this same charade play out again. President Obama nominated Caitlin Halligan to serve as a federal appellate judge in DC. Like Liu, Halligan is an absolutely brilliant legal mind and a former Supreme Court law clerk. Unlike Liu, however, she did not have a paper trial because she has never been a law professor and spent her career advocating on behalf of her client’s views rather than expressing her own. Nevertheless, Senate Republicans filibustered her, relying on the thin argument that she is unconfirmable because she once represented a client whose views disagree with those of the NRA.

So when President Obama nominated former Supreme Court law clerk Paul Watford to a federal judgeship last October, ThinkProgress worried that he too would prove too qualified to be confirmed. Sadly, our fears seem justified. Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee cast an entirely party-line vote to advance Watford to the full Senate — an action which, in the past, has proceeded a GOP filibuster. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) was given the unfortunate task of devising a flimsy rationale for opposing the nomination:

I have substantive concerns regarding Mr. Watford’s views on both immigration and the death penalty.

Mr. Watford partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) in two cases to oppose Arizona’s 2010 immigration bill. In the first case, Friendly House, a class-action lawsuit, Mr. Watford served as co-counsel for most of the plaintiffs, including the class action representative, Friendly House. . . .

With regard to the death penalty, Mr. Watford assisted in submitting an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in Baze v. Rees on behalf of a number of groups who opposed Kentucky’s three-drug lethal injection protocol. In its plurality opinion, the Court rejected the arguments raised in the brief. Ultimately, Kentucky’s three drug protocol was upheld 7-2.

So there you go. In a legal career that stretches nearly two decades, Watford worked for two clients that Grassley disagrees with, and this fact evermore disqualifies him for a seat on the federal courts.

It’s impossible to describe how dangerous this standard is. Our system of law depends on all parties having adequate representation to assert their legal claims, and this is doubly true with respect to the kind of disadvantaged clients who stand against conservatives’ preferred legal outcomes. Grassley is sending a clear and unambiguous message to the entire legal profession here — if you want to be a judge some day, don’t even think about working for the poor, for immigrants, for unions or for criminal defendants. Sadly, many bright and ambitious attorneys will hear that message loud and clear, and will remain in corporate law firms representing well-moneyed clients who will be just fine with or without their services.

Ultimately, however, it’s likely that Grassley’s real motivations are slightly different. Like Liu and Halligan before him, Watford is guilty of being the kind of exceptionally talented attorney who could be on the Supreme Court some day — and so the Senate GOP appears poised to block him even if they can’t think of a plausible reason to do so.

GRASSLEY: The Leahy substitute would prohibit discrimination by grantees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Of course, I agree that shelters and other grant recipients should provide services equally to everyone. But advocates of this provision haven’t produced data that shelters have refused to provide services for these reasons. This is true even after we were told they would send a report on the subject. The provision is a solution in search of a problem. Instead, it is only a political statement that shouldn’t be made on a bill that is designed to address actual needs of victims.

Grassley is wrong on two counts. First, there are plenty of troubling data to show why the protections are necessary. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) both published studies last year that demonstrate how LGBT people have been refused protection by shelters:

• In 2010, 44.6 percent of LGBT/HIV-positive survivors of intimate partner violence were turned away from shelters (NCAVP).
• More than half of survivors (54.4 percent) were denied orders of protection (NCAVP).
• 29 percent of homeless transgender people have been turned away by shelters (NGLTF).
• 6 percent of transgender people report being denied equal access to domestic violence shelters and programs (NGLTF).

The other count on which Grassley is wrong is his basic reasoning. In this statement, he basically asserted that LGBT people have to first face discrimination before they deserve to be protected from it. One wonders how much “data” he expects the LGBT community to endure before he’ll deem it worthy of his compassion.

To their credit, two former Bush Administration attorneys quickly denounced Grassley’s misguided campaign of vengeance:

“The Senator’s name-calling is misplaced,” said Jack Goldsmith, who served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel during President George W. Bush’s administration. “The legality of the Obama recess appointments is, as the Seitz opinion acknowledged, a close question. But much of Seitz’s opinion followed long-settled executive branch legal precedent, and when she encountered novel issues, she addressed them honestly in a reasoned analysis that she published for the world to see and criticize.”

“These OLC opinions involve very difficult constitutional issues as well as separation of powers,” said Richard Painter, a White House ethics lawyer during the Bush administration. “OLC lawyers should be free to render their honest opinion and not be threatened with adverse career consquences by either the White House or Congress.”

Seitz’s opinion did indeed confront a very difficult legal question, and she did indeed rely heavily on well-settled precedents. Ultimately, however, she forgot the first rule of keeping right-wing senators mollified — the Constitution only says what conservatives wish it said.

[Seitz] stated [in her confirmation hearing] that if the Administration contemplated taking action that she believed was unconstitutional, she would not stand idly by. [...] Ms. Seitz is the author of this wholly erroneous opinion that takes an unprecedented view of recess appointments clause [sic]. And I suppose that it is literally true that Ms. Seitz did not stand idly by when the administration took unconstitutional action. Rather, she actively became a lackey for the administration. She wrote a poorly reasoned opinion that placed loyalty to the president over loyalty to the rule of law. [...] After reading this misguided and very dangerous legal opinion, I’m sorry the Senate confirmed her. It’s likely to be the last confirmation that she’ll ever experience.

Watch it:

Grassley’s attack on Seitz is troubling on many levels — not the least of which is the fact that her opinion reached the correct interpretation of the Constitution. As Seitz’s predecessor from the Bush Administration explained in a 2010 op-ed, the Senate is in recess when it is “not capable of acting on the president’s nominations.” When the president announced his recess appointments, the Senate was adjourned under an order stating that there will be “no business conducted” for weeks. So the Senate was in no shape to confirm a nominee until it returned to Washington, and the president acted entirely within his legal rights in making recess appointments.

Moreover, the attack on Seitz is particularly troubling in light of the unique nature of Seitz’s job. Unlike most lawyers in the Department of Justice, OLC’s attorneys are not advocates. Their job is to provide neutral, objective and correct legal advice to the executive branch, regardless of whether their advice agrees with the view held by powerful politicians. That is exactly what Seitz did here when she correctly reasoned that the Constitution means exactly what her Bush era predecessor said that it means — the Senate must be engaged in actual work to defeat the recess appointment power.

By punishing Seitz for issuing a legally correct opinion that he disagrees with, Grassley places dangerous pressure on Seitz and on all future OLC heads. OLC is an important office in its own right, but it is also frequently led by ambitious attorneys who go on to do greater things — both Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia once held Seitz’s current job. Grassley’s thinly veiled threat sends a clear message to future OLC heads: hand down a decision that I disagree with and I will destroy your career.

Needless to say, this kind of incentive is neither conducive to honest reasoning by OLC heads nor likely to attract the best applicants to lead this office. If the executive branch is to receive accurate and unbiased legal advice, it must come from attorneys who are focused solely on the law — not on trying to anticipate what Chuck Grassley thinks the law should be.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA)

Concern was raised about the proposed Department of Labor’s intent to greatly limit child labor on family farms.

“This farm bill will greatly affect our FFA and 4-H programs,” said Grassley. “Kids won’t be able to help on farms not owned by their parents.

“It’s interesting that this child labor bill goes against Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity initiative,” said Grassley. “How can kids be active if they are limited by this law?“

Grassley represents a farm state that both relies on child labor and contributes to the national obesity epidemic through its production of corn products like high-fructose corn syrup. Iowa farmers benefit from billions of dollars in corn subsidies that allow them to put a glut of cheap, unhealthy foods on the market.

As for his Dickensian defense of child labor, that’s sadly par for the course for Republicans these days. Several GOP-led states have rolled back child labor laws. In December, seventy rural state lawmakers led by Rep. Danny Rehberg (R-MT) denounced the Labor Department’s new protections for the country’s most vulnerable workers. They argued that hard manual labor teaches children important “life lessons.”

Under current law, 400,000 children working on farms are not protected from exploitation and dangerous labor. The proposed rules would forbid children younger than 16 from working with pesticides, timber operations, handling “power-driven equipment, or contributing to the “cultivation, harvesting and curing of tobacco.”

Contrary to Grassley’s suggestion, the physical activity children endure during farm labor is no picnic. The fatality rate for child farm workers is four times higher than that of nonagricultural child workers.

Many Republicans have mocked First Lady Michelle Obama’s anti-childhood obesity initiative, but Grassley in particular has powerful financial motivations for supporting some of epidemic’s worst culprits. As a member of the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry committee, he’s raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the Food & Beverage, Food Processing & Sales, and Agricultural Services and Products industries.

Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said today he prefers first seeking some Senate Democrats to join in a public pushback to Obama’s four recess appointments Jan. 4, including the installation of Richard Cordray as the new director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Short of that, Grassley said, Republicans may have to go it alone with tough actions that could include holding up pending nominations from a Senate confirmation vote.

“We have got to stand our ground,” Grassley said in an interview. “You can’t let a president who takes an oath to uphold the Constitution go around the Constitution. That’s what the checks and balances are.”

Let’s be absolutely clear about what is going on here. Grassley is mad at President Obama, but his retaliation will not really hurt President Obama. Obama lives in a very nice house and enjoys a fine life regardless of whether the Treasury Department has an Undersecretary for Domestic Finance or whether the federal courts have an adequate slate of judges. The people who will be hurt by Grassley’s tantrum are the millions of consumers who depend on functioning federal agencies to safeguard their rights, the workers who depend on workplace safety and fair wage laws in order to provide for them families, and the thousands of litigants who wait months or years for justice in a judiciary burdened by far too many vacancies.

Grassley is wrong on the facts when he claims that Obama’s actions are the least bit unconstitutional, but everyone makes factually mistakes and such errors can be forgiven. What is unforgivable is Grassley’s willingness to punish millions of innocent bystanders simply to exact some kind of revenge against President Obama.

Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) Discuss Their Understanding Of The Constitution

The Senate GOP’s decision to filibuster Halligan earned wide rebukes from Senate Republicans*, many of whom slammed this decision to filibuster a judicial nominee as unconstitutional:

• Lamar Alexander (R-TN): “I would never filibuster any President’s judicial nominee, period. I might vote against them, but I will always see they came to a vote.”
• Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA): “Every judge nominated by this president or any president deserves an up-or-down vote. It’s the responsibility of the Senate. The Constitution requires it.”
• Tom Coburn (R-OK): “If you look at the Constitution, it says the president is to nominate these people, and the Senate is to advise and consent. That means you got to have a vote if they come out of committee. And that happened for 200 years.”
• John Cornyn (R-TX): “We have a Democratic leader defeated, in part, as I said, because I believe he was identified with this obstructionist practice, this unconstitutional use of the filibuster to deny the president his judicial nominations.
• Mike Crapo (R-ID): “Until this Congress, not one of the President’s nominees has been successfully filibustered in the Senate of the United States because of the understanding of the fact that the Constitution gives the President the right to a vote.”
• Lindsey Graham (R-SC): “I think filibustering judges will destroy the judiciary over time. I think it’s unconstitutional”
• Chuck Grassley (R-IA): “It would be a real constitutional crisis if we up the confirmation of judges from 51 to 60, and that’s essentially what we’d be doing if the Democrats were going to filibuster.”
• Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX): “[T]he Constitution envisions a 51-vote majority for judgeships…. [Filibustering judges] amend[s] the Constitution without going through the proper processes…. We have a majority rule that is the tradition of the Senate with judges. It is the constitutional requirement.”
• Jon Kyl (R-AZ): “The President was elected fair and square. He has the right to submit judicial nominees and it is the Senate’s obligation under the Constitution to act on those nominees.”
• Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “The Constitution of the United States is at stake. Article II, Section 2 clearly provides that the President, and the President alone, nominates judges. The Senate is empowered to give advice and consent. But my Democratic colleagues want to change the rules. They want to reinterpret the Constitution to require a supermajority for confirmation.”
• Jeff Sessions (R- AL): “[The Constitution] says the Senate shall advise and consent on treaties by a two-thirds vote, and simply ‘shall advise and consent’ on nominations…. I think there is no doubt the Founders understood that to mean … confirmation of a judicial nomination requires only a simple majority vote.”
• Richard Shelby (R-AL): “Why not allow the President to do his job of selecting judicial nominees and let us do our job in confirming or denying them? Principles of fairness call for it and the Constitution requires it.”
• John Thune (SD): Filibustering judicial nominees “is contrary to our Constitution …. It was the Founders’ intention that the Senate dispose of them with a simple majority vote.”

*All quotes are taken from when George W. Bush was president. But, of course, that doesn’t matter because — in the words of Cornyn — “we need to treat all nominees exactly the same, regardless of whether they’re nominated by a Democrat or a Republican president.”**

**Cornyn’s statement was also made when George W. Bush was president.

Federal law requires recusal from a case if a judicial officer of the United States “has served in governmental employment and in such capacity participated as counsel, adviser or material witness concerning the proceeding or expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case or controversy.” 28 U.S.C. § 455(b)(3). In addition, a federal judge must disqualify herself from participating in a matter if her “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” Id. at § 455(a). It appears that former Solicitor General Kagan’s participation in the Obama Administration’s defense of the PPACA may satisfy both requirements for recusal.

Then-Solicitor General Kagan acknowledged to the Senate Judiciary Committee last year that, in fact, she played a “role” in the Obama Administration’s defense of the PPACA, including attending “at least one meeting” that discussed the litigation. But she minimized her degree of involvement in the litigation, characterizing it as not “substantial.” Federal law, however, requires recusal if a government official participated in a matter that is the subject of litigation; it does not require the government official’s past participation in that same matter to be “substantial” (as determined by the self-same government official).

Unsurprisingly, the letter from McConnell and his colleagues misrepresents Kagan’s actions. Although Kagan did testify at her confirmation hearing that she was once present in a meeting where the existence of the Affordable Care Act litigation was brought up, she also testified under oath that she did no work whatsoever as an attorney on this litigation. Being in a meeting where a particular lawsuit is mentioned does not constitute participation “as counsel, adviser or material witness” on a case any more than attending a football game makes you a coach.

Moreover, even though a far-right group filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking evidence that Kagan must recuse from the Affordable Care Act litigation, this request proved so fruitless that even the National Review’s Carrie Severino — a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas — was forced to conclude that the documents uncovered by this request contain no evidence requiring Justice Kagan’s recusal.

Yet, while McConnell’s letter is clearly just the latest chapter in a witchhunt seeking to discredit Kagan, it is nonetheless significant simply because McConnell’s name is on it. Previously, only a few senators such as Sessions and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — both of whom represent the Senate’s far right fringe — had jumped onboard the anti-Kagan witchhunt. The fact that McConnell, Kyl, and Grassley are now lighting up torches and demanding that Kagan be burnt at the stake indicates that this witchhunt is the official position of the Senate GOP caucus.

FRANKEN: I just believe you misstated the history of marriage. Marriage has not existed as a union between one man and one woman for thousands of years in every culture. In many cultures, men have been able to marry many women and young girls. For centuries, women have been treated as chattel in marriage. Further, if the religious purpose for marriage is procreation, why would we sanction marriage between an 89 year-old widower and an 80 year-old widow? I just think we need to be accurate when we talk about the history of marriage, the history of man and woman, the history of our institutions.

Watch it:

The act, which has 31 co-sponsors, now moves to the Senate, where it has yet to be scheduled for a vote.

SHOWDOWN: Chuck Grassley vs. Delicious Muffins

A Justice Department inspector general audit released last week has generated a lot of buzz on Capitol Hill over the suggestion that the agency has been spending too much on food at taxpayer-funded conferences. Some have interpreted the report to mean that DoJ spent as much as $16 per muffin at one event — which is pure fiction.

But to hear Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) tell the tale, this is the worst example of extravagant “elitist” spending in government since Marie Antoinette declared, “Let them eat cake!” The Iowa conservative even said yesterday that heads should roll over the incident:

Sen. Chuck Grassley said Thursday unless “heads roll” at the Department of Justice following revelations of extravagant spending on conferences that included $16 muffins, the scandal will not change the way government agencies use taxpayer money.

The Iowa Republican told CNN’s “American Morning” that President Barack Obama should ax the people responsible for the excessive spending on food and beverages at the department’s conferences uncovered by an audit earlier this week.

“Unless people are fired, and heads roll, you never get changes made,” Grassley said.

As Kevin Drum at Mother Jones explained yesterday, the $16 muffin charge is a myth. After plowing through the invoice for the event it’s obvious that “someone quite carefully calculated the amount they were allowed to spend and then gave the hotel a budget. The hotel agreed, but for some reason decided to divide up the charges into just a few categories instead of writing a detailed invoice for every single piece of food they provided.” As Drum notes, this sort of exchange happens all the time, and makes it seem on paper like the DoJ spent $16 per item. But “did DOJ really pay $16 for muffins? Of course not.”

Nevertheless, the Obama administration has already responded quickly to allegations of waste by ordering that agencies review spending at taxpayer-funded conferences. According to Politico, Vice President Joe Biden said a deputy secretary or equivalent chief operating officer at each agency will have to approve conference-related expenses during the review period.

But none of that is likely to satisfy Grassley, who seems determined to keep the $16 muffin myth alive because it’s a catchy, if completely false, story.

A News Corp. whistleblower allegedly gave sensitive documents to Grassley's Senate Finance investigator Nick Podsiadly in 2006. Above, Podisadly addresses a conference.

In December 2006, Robert Emmel, an account executive in News Corp’s profitable marketing division called News America Marketing, mailed Grassley’s office a 58-page document detailing News Corp’s unfair business practices. News America Marketing had won incredibly lucrative contracts away from a New Jersey-based firm called Floorgraphics not too long after Floorgraphics caught someone with a News Corp I.P. address illegally accessing password-protected information on the company’s computer system. As critics have pointed out, the alleged hacking attempts by News America Marketing seem to mirror information-stealing tactics used by News Corp’s British newspapers, including the now-defunct News of the World tabloid.

In 2006, Grassley was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Emmel had gone to the committee looking for help. According to court filings, Grassley investigative staffer Nick Podsiadly had spoken with Emmel and told him that the committee would consider its own inquiry into the matter or he would refer the documents to the Justice Department. Podsiadly was Emmel’s best hope. After he submitted the sensitive information about his employer to the Senate Finance Committee, Emmel signed a non-disclosure agreement with News Corp, and was dismissed from the company the following month. News Corp unleashed a slew of lawyers against Emmel, which eventually forced the man into bankruptcy. As the New York Times has reported, News Corp more or less extinguished allegations of corporate espionage with $655 million in various settlements and buy-outs to competitors. (In-store marketing companies Valassis and Insignia claimed that News Corp had used similar tactics against them.)

Podsiadly, as it turned out, may have never opened an inquiry or passed along Emmel’s tip to the Department of Justice. A spokeswoman for Grassley explained to the Guardian that ongoing litigation prevented the committee from action:

A spokeswoman for the finance committee said nothing would be done with any documents sent by Emmel until the litigation over them had ended. Emmel today remains under a court-imposed injunction that forbids him from disclosing anything from these documents. “I cannot comment,” he said.

Phil Hilder, Emmel’s attorney, is not buying the committee’s excuse for not investigating the matter. “What litigation? I’m not sure at the time there was any litigation that they were referring to.” Hilder explained that to his knowledge the tip was never referred to the Department of Justice either. “I have no idea what if anything Mr. Podsiadly did with the information,” said Hilder, a former federal prosecutor.

Perhaps Grassley’s spokeswoman was hoping that the Guardian, a London-based paper, would be unaware of standard congressional procedures. Ongoing litigation, or even the threat of litigation, never prohibits a congressional committee from opening an investigation.

Mort Rosenberg, the author of Investigative Oversight and a number of manuals for conducting congressional inquiries, dismissed the Grassley excuse in an interview with ThinkProgress. “Congress has huge powers over what it decides to investigate,” Rosenberg explained. In some cases, when the Department of Justice is already looking into a criminal matter, Congress will avoid engaging in an investigation. But overall, Rosenberg said outside litigation never prevents a committee from opening an inquiry.

ThinkProgress spoke to Beth Levine, a spokeswoman for Grassley, who said the documents are not currently under Grassley’s purview because he is no longer the chairman or ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. Asked if Podsiadly ever referred the whistleblower documents to the Justice Department or began a congressional inquiry into the matter when he received them in 2006, Levine responded, “I don’t know the answer to that question.” Further requests to Podsiadly and Grassley staff for more information have gone unanswered.

In the United Kingdom, News Corp ducked prosecution for its systematic hacking for years by exploiting the company’s connections to prominent politicians and police authorities. In the United States, FBI agents, after reviewing the “excellent paper trail” left by News Corp while allegedly breaking into the computers of competitor Floorgraphics, contacted the the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey to consider a criminal investigation. At the time, the U.S. attorney was a Bush appointee named Chris Christie — a confidant of News Corporation executive and Fox News chief Roger Ailes and now the Republican governor of New Jersey. As reporter David Carr noted, the FBI case “died a slow death” in Christie’s office.

News Corp has quieted the alleged American victims of its corporate espionage by buying their silence with over half a billion worth of settlements. The public, however, deserves a fair hearing about the alleged criminal conduct. News Corp is no ordinary company; its vast newspaper and cable news holdings have a responsibility to serve the public interest, so a pattern of corrupt conduct across the company has wide implications. The question remains though why Grassley’s staffer, Podsiadly, may have dropped the ball and thrown News Corp’s whistleblower under the bus.