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.

Politifact’s 2009 “Lie of the Year” was that the landmark health care reform legislation contained a clause authorizing “death panels.” The smear, started by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), was propagated by other Republicans, including long-time Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who warned that the bill could “pull the plug on grandma.”

At a town hall in Carroll, Iowa, on Monday, Grassley repeated the falsehood that the health care reform law would lead to “rationing” and result in seniors not getting the care they need. One Iowa constituent, however, challenged Grassley’s characterization.

Sharon Gruber politely told the senator that what the law actually does is “move away from [paying for] procedures and going to [paying for] outcomes.” In a surprise twist, Grassley not only agreed with the woman’s assessment that the law simply shifts to a pay-for-outcome model, but the Iowa senator actually reversed course and agreed that “what you say is absolutely right and should be done,” less than two minutes after calling the provision “rationing.”

GRASSLEY: The reason why I think you have to worry about this panel rationing, or leading to rationing, is because presently, health care costs go up about two to three times the rate of inflation. Their goal is to not have health care costs after they kick in more than 1.5 percent the rate of inflation. So where’s that going to come from? That’s going to come from not reimbursing doctors, hospitals, etc. as much, and then that’s going to lead to people deciding, “if you’re over 80 years old, should you have a knee replaced?” Whereas nowadays there’s no question about it.

GRUBER: I think that what they’re trying to do is move away from the fact that doctors and hospitals are paid on the procedure that’s used. [...] We’ve gotta get the fraud out of the system because that’s where a lot of the costs go. And this is part of it. They’re looking to move away from procedures and going to outcomes, from what I understand.

GRASSLEY: And that’s a very good thing to do. But they’re still limited to the decisions they’re making to be within 1.5 percent over inflation. But what you say is absolutely right and should be done. Not everything in the president’s health care reform bill is bad.

Though Grassley told Gruber that “[n]ot everything in the president’s health care reform bill is bad,” it’s important to remember that the Iowa senator joined every one of his Senate Republican colleagues in voting to repeal the entire bill in February, including the shift to a pay-for-outcome model, a ban on preexisting conditions, and increased funding for community health centers.

ThinkProgress spoke with Gruber after the event to get her reaction. She said she was “very disappointed” in Grassley for promoting the myth of rationing and death panels. Gruber noted that in the past he had “tended to be above [...] these talking points,” but that was no longer the case:

During a town hall in Carroll, Iowa last night, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) fielded question after question from constituents who were furious at Republican efforts to weaken Social Security. Midway through the event, one Iowan stood and told Grassley his personal story about retiring in 2008 just as the stock market cratered, decimating his IRA and 401k retirement plans.

He implored Grassley not to privatize Social Security, asking if he should expect “to live on whatever the stock market leaves me?” After the crowd gave the constituent loud applause, Grassley responded that he only knows of “one member out of 535 who wants to privatize Social Security.”

CONSTITUENT: The idea of privatizing Social Security. I have a story about that, very brief. When I retired in 2008, I took my company pension and put it into an IRA and 401k plan and that was in April, I rolled it over. By October, that entire pension was gone because the stock market went south on me. And if that had been my Social Security, sir, I wouldn’t have that or not as much of it. I would be expected to live on whatever the stock market leaves me? I don’t think that’s quite right when someone like Warren Buffett could lose half of his income and still be better off than I am with my full income. I want to know what you’re going to do to strengthen Social Security to make it so that we don’t ever have to worry about whether or not the stock market is going to go south, the banks get bailed out, and I get nothing. [Applause]

GRASSLEY: First of all, I’ve already answered the first question. Everything’s on the table. Secondly, I only know of one member of Congress out of 535, and I won’t name him, but I only know of one member out of 535 who wants to privatize Social Security.

Watch it:

A quick Google search turns up one prominent Republican who favors privatizing Social Security: Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley. In fact, as Senate Finance Committee chairman in 2005, Grassley led his party’s efforts to privatize the popular retirement program.

A ThinkProgress investigation also turned up 118 other Republicans currently in the House and Senate who are on record supporting Social Security privatization, including fellow Iowans Reps. Steve King (R-IA) and Tom Latham (R-IA). Either Grassley and his fellow Republicans have had a major change of heart on the merits of privatizing Social Security since their ill-fated attempt to do so in 2005, or he is telling his constituents an outright falsehood.

With assertions like these, it’s little surprise that Grassley’s constituents are showing up in droves to his town halls to tell the long-time senator, “We want to have Social Security!”

Constituents waved signs and gave boisterous applause when one Iowan after another stood up and urged Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to strengthen Social Security rather than cut the retirement program at a town hall in Carroll, Iowa on Monday.

One middle-aged woman, Rosie Partridge, pointedly asked Grassley, “Why can’t we raise the wage cap in order to ensure that Social Security can continue on as it is without talking about cutting it?” (The current payroll tax does not tax income above $106,800.) Partridge, a small business owner, went on to tell her senator that despite the fact her business “would pay more” in payroll taxes, “you know what? No complaints. We want to have Social Security!” Grassley, who helped lead his party’s efforts to privatize Social Security in 2005, backed down, saying, “You have to have everything on the table”:

PARTRIDGE: My husband and I have a business in Carroll County. [...] My question is, why can’t we raise the wage cap in order to ensure that Social Security can continue on as it is without talking about cutting it? [Applause] And if we, as a business, we would have some people that would be giving more to that, actually a family member that’s part ownership of the business. And the business would pay more, too. And you know what? No complaints. We want to have Social Security! [Applause]

GRASSLEY: I think when it comes to Social Security, if anybody’s going to bargain in good faith, you have to have everything on the table. But if your point of view is to solve the Social Security problem just by taking the cap off, that isn’t going to solve it, as the trustees looked at it and said five years.

Watch it:

In fact, lifting the payroll tax cap would keep Social Security solvent for the next 75 years. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) announced he would introduce legislation to this effect, because doing so would keep Social Security fully-funded without having to cut benefits.

Though it may be tempting to hear “everything [is] on the table” and believe that Grassley is open to Partridge’s proposal, this is a phrase he commonly employs in tough policy fights. Optimists may believe that Grassley genuinely considers all options; pessimists will point to the health care reform debate when he made similar musings, only to string Senate Democrats along for months before criticizing the bill for supposedly allowing government to “pull the plug on grandma.”

Later in the town hall, another older woman chastised Grassley and his fellow Republicans for including Social Security in the recent debt ceiling standoff. “We have not caused the debt,” the woman said. “You owe Social Security recipients just like you owe China and anybody else that has treasury bonds.”

He then proceeded to cite what he termed an “obscene, crazy” regulation. “If you are a tractor driver, if you drive your tractor across a public road, you’re going to have to have a commercial driver’s license. Now how idiotic is that?”

Perry said he had talked on Sunday night with U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa at a GOP dinner in Waterloo. Perry told Grassley he had heard in the previous two days that the federal government was going to put such a regulation in place.

“Your own United States senator, sitting there at the table, said, ‘That’s right.’ And I said, ‘What were they thinking, senator?’ And he said, ‘They weren’t.’ So that is the issue at hand here,” Perry said.

Watch it:

The only problem is this regulation simply doesn’t exist. “We are absolutely not requiring farmers” to obtain commercial licenses, said U.S. Department Of Transportation spokeswoman Candice Tolliver. Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum spent some time getting to the bottom of this urban legend:

The [Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration] has long had rules that defined most grain haulage as interstate commerce and designated farmers hauling shared crops as commercial operators. This was never a big deal because they had never enforced those rules and neither had anyone else. But then Illinois decided to start enforcing the letter of the law and Illinois farmers were unhappy. So now FMCSA is asking whether these regulations ever made sense in the first place. [...] Far from trying to implement a barrage of regulations on our nation’s farmers, FMCSA is apparently trying to stop state officials from implementing a barrage of regulations on our nation’s farmers.

Perry is either ignorant of the issue at stake here or is simply lying to score an anti-government political point. Grassley, in a newsletter issued on Friday, wrote that “common sense had appeared to prevail in the matter of proposed agricultural transportation regulations.”

After one of the three credit ratings agencies, S&P, downgraded the United States’ creditworthiness from AAA to AA+ in large part because of extreme GOP intransigence on raising revenue, Republicans were quick to try to deflect blame onto the Democrats. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney singled out the White House, saying “Standard & Poor’s rating downgrade is a deeply troubling indicator of our country’s decline under President Obama.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) piled on the following day, calling S&P’s move a “wake-up call for Congress and the President to take meaningful action to reduce deficit spending and the resulting debt.”

ThinkProgress spoke with Grassley at the Iowa State Fair on Thursday to get his further thoughts on S&P’s criticism of Republican stubbornness. However, before we were able to ask the Iowa senator about S&P’s recommendations regarding our nation’s fiscal dilemma, Grassley made a startling revelation: he has not even read the report.

KEYES: Did you get a chance to read the S&P report?

GRASSLEY: It’s a wakeup call…

KEYES: Did you read the report they released on it?

GRASSLEY: No, I did not, because it came out as I was leaving. I was out here, you know, so I don’t have a copy of the report.

The report is five pages long. It was released a full week ago. And despite Grassley’s assertion that he was “out here [in Iowa] so I don’t have a copy of the report,” it’s available free on the Internet for anyone to read, Iowans included.

Still, Grassley didn’t let the fact that he hadn’t read the report stop him from making broad generalizations about what our plan of action needs to be going forward.

With the revelation that Grassley, the Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, didn’t even read S&P’s short report explaining why it decided to downgrade the United States’ creditworthiness before commenting on it, one has to ask: how many other members of Congress haven’t read the report?

• The board overseeing Virginia’s juvenile justice facilities voted unanimously to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation it those facilities, despite attempts by Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) to press them to keep their previous anti-gay policy.

• Racial and gender diversity is up among the legal profession’s most elite club, Supreme Court practitioners.

• Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who previously promised to ramp up partisan assaults on Obama’s judicial nominees, made good on that promise yesterday by attacking several nominees qualifications because they have not had every possible professional experience a lawyer can have before being nominated to the bench.

• The Senate appears poised to pass a bill that will reduce the number of presidential nominees requiring Senate confirmation.

• The Supreme Court is being asked to consider whether foreign corporations can be used in U.S. courts for war crimes or human rights abuses.

• And, finally, right-wing media mogul Conrad Black went to jail — and promptly decided the other inmates were his personal servants.

Another problem I have with [Goodwin Liu’s] statement is the portion that quote “the court of appeals is where law is made.” We have heard this view before. While serving as a circuit judge, Justice Sotomayor stated that the court of appeals quote “is where policy is made.” Now I understand that there are elements of our society who wish this were the case. Those who can’t get their policy views enacted through the legislative process, as our Constitution requires, often turn to the courts — but I flatly reject that notion. The Constitution vests legislative power in the Congress, not the courts. Judges are simply not policymakers.

Watch it:

There is something delightfully retro about Grassley’s statement. As he reminds us, conservatives thought as recently as 2009 that an effective messaging strategy was to feign umbridge at the very idea that judges might play a role in shaping the law.

Of course, this messaging strategy was either naive or willfully ignorant. Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia has said that judges “often ‘make law.’” And there is simply no question that when the Supreme Court wipes out sixty years of campaign finance regulation or effectively eliminates consumer class actions or strips many women and older workers of their ability to receive equal pay for equal work that they have changed the face of American law.

The biggest problem with Grassley’s anachronistic use of this two year-old talking point, however, is that it unambiguously and unequivocally disavows the GOP’s single highest constitutional priority — getting the courts to overrule the democratically enacted Affordable Care Act by any means necessary. The GOP desperately wants to repeal this law but it cannot, in Grassley’s words “get th[is] policy view[] enacted through the legislative process, as our Constitution requires,” so they have turned to a legal theory which cannot be squared with nearly two centuries of precedent.

In 1824, the Supreme Court held that Congress’ authority to regulate interstate commercial transactions is “complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations, other than are prescribed in the constitution,” which is just a Nineteenth Century way of saying that Congress can regulate national markets such as the health care market however it wants so long as it don’t violate any other part of the Constitution, such as the right to free speech or racial equality or the right to bear arms. Yet in their very first appellate argument challenging the ACA, the law’s opponents could not point to a single word of the Constitution which suggests that the law is invalid. Nevertheless, they still insist that the courts must strike the law down.

This is judicial activism in its purest form. Democratically elected officials spoke. The losers of that debate don’t like what they said, so they want the courts to scrap 200 years of precedent in favor of a legal theory that no one had even articulated until 2009.

It’s likely that Grassley simply did not understand the implications of his words when he repeated the same talking points that dominated the GOP’s constitutional arguments until the ACA became law. Nevertheless, it is impossible to square those words with his constitutionally indefensible stance on the ACA. If Grassley truly does “flatly reject” the idea that judges may second-guess elected officials, than he should prove it by expressly disavowing the ACA litigation.