Is Chuck Grassley Still Capable Of Working For The Good Of The Citizens Of Iowa?

Julian Bond has been fighting the good fight

for a long, long time

I first met Julian Bond in 1966 when I was in college and he had been elected to-- and denied seating in-- the Georgia state legislature. I blogged about meeting him a couple years ago; fun post about something I'm very proud of. In case all you know about Julian is his service as the chairman of the NAACP from 1998 until this year, he was around long before that. He helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. And he served for 20 years in the Georgia state House and state Senate, although that all started kind of rough when the crackers who ran that show refused to seat him because they hated smart, uppity black people-- the same way Georgia racist Lynn Westmoreland hates President Obama half a century later-- and because he was opposed to the war against Vietnam. When I met him the Supreme Court had just ruled 9-0 (Bond vs Floyd) that the Georgia House of Representatives had denied him his freedom of speech and was required to seat him. He went on to organize the state legislature's Black Caucus, which wasn't very popular with the power structure there either. So what's all this got to do with Chuck Grassley? Julian did a spectacular OpEd in the Des Moines Register yesterday about Grassley's idiotic attack on the legacy of Thurgood Marshall.

Now that the Senate has formally approved Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court, one thing we know about her is that she clerked for and reveres Thurgood Marshall. That is because this became a major line of attack by Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, chief among them Iowa's Sen. Charles Grassley, as they gauged her fitness as a potential justice. Many watchers were surprised by the attacks against Marshall by Grassley and his fellow Republican senators. I wasn't one of them. Appalled, yes; surprised, no.

Knowing that none of Marshall's 112 opinions from his time as a judge on the Second Circuit was overturned, Grassley nevertheless said Marshall's legal viewpoint "does not comport with the proper role of a judge or judicial method."

Kagan's work for Marshall, Grassley said, "indicates a liberal and seemingly outcome-based approach to your legal analysis."

Knowing that Marshall led the fight to dismantle the "separate but equal" doctrine in public education, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the committee, suggested Kagan was somehow wrong for esteeming him as her hero.

These attacks didn't surprise me because they're completely consistent with a party locked in the past, echoing the anti-civil rights message of those who opposed Justice Marshall's own confirmation in 1967.

Grassley, Sessions and their fellow Republicans roasted Solicitor General Kagan with the same attacks used against Marshall four decades earlier. Then, the late Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina complained about the likelihood that Marshall would be "a judicial activist," which he defined as someone "unable to exercise the self-restraint which is inherent in the judicial process when it is properly understood and applied, and who is willing to add to the Constitution things that are not in it and to subtract from the Constitution things which are in it."

When Ervin spoke of adding rights to the Constitution, there was no doubt that he was referring to the court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which he had fervently opposed. Ervin went on to join with 10 other southern Senators in voting against Marshall's confirmation.

Now, in an effort to curry favor with an increasingly extreme base, personified by the likes of Sarah Palin, Republican senators flagrantly disparage a civil rights hero and the legacy of equality for which he fought. Although smears against Justice Marshall might have seemed out of place in the committee room, they fit right in among some of the GOP's most extreme supporters who wave posters portraying our president as a witch doctor and fling racial slurs. For that matter, they fit right in alongside attacks against last year's Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, who was herself accused of racism at the same time she was painted with ugly stereotypes about Latinos.

Grassley cannot participate in these subtle smears and at the same time claim to be representing all Iowans. Instead he, like others in the GOP, is making a calculated decision to pander to some while spitting on the values and history of others.

Blue America is very enthusiastic about the progressive Democrat running against Grassley, Roxanne Conlin. She joined us for a live blog session back in February at Crooks & Liars. When I asked her to tell me why Grassley voted against Elena Kagan's confirmation she seemed to indicate that Grassley had changed... and rather dramatically.

Senator Grassley’s vote against Elena Kagan is proof that Washington is broken, and any bipartisanship in the Senate is on the verge of extinction. Senator Grassley has chosen to vote against two talented, qualified women nominated to the Supreme Court, by a Democratic president, after decades of support for past nominations. This is an incredibly dangerous and disturbing precedent.  Voting on a Supreme Court nominee is a serious responsibility and Iowans deserve much better than childish, partisan games.