There's Reid, and then there's Reality

There’s REID, and then there’s REALITY.

REID:  Senator Grassley's commitment to transparency is as shallow as the shallowest puddle you can find.
REALITY:  Senator Grassley holds five conference calls with Iowa reporters every week.  He reserves time in his schedule every day he’s in Washington for eight, 15-minute appointments with constituents.  He answers every phone call, email and letter from Iowans.  He holds constituent meetings in each of Iowa’s 99 counties, every year since he’s been elected to the Senate.  The Judiciary Committee and the Senate have passed the FOIA Improvement bill, Grassley is the author of legislation to allow cameras in the courtroom and to create an inspector general for the federal judiciary.  He’s the author of legislation to give whistleblower protections to legislative branch employees and has been called a hero in the whistleblower community for helping protect whistleblowers who expose waste, fraud and abuse in the federal bureaucracy.  He’s the author of the IG Empowerment Act, being held up by Senator Reid.  His home state newspaper has editorialized against his actions for holding up the bill, and just yesterday the South Carolina Post and Courier editorialized “Reid keeps transparency on hold.”  

REID:  All it took was one phone call obviously from the Republican leader for Senator Grassley to abandon any pretense of transparency that shut the American people out of the Supreme Court process.
REALITY:  Senator Grassley did not speak to Senator McConnell until Wednesday after Justice Scalia’s death.

REID:  There was no transparency when the Judiciary Committee Chairman and Republican members shut Democrats out and met with the Republican leader behind closed doors.
REALITY:  The letter signed by all of the Judiciary Committee Republicans was released in a matter of minutes after it was signed.  In addition, Republicans were not invited to the Democrats’ secret meeting when they decided to invoke the nuclear option and then marched straight to the Senate floor to vote on changing the rules WITHOUT Republican support.  Private caucus meetings on both sides take place nearly every day.

REID:  There was no transparency when he twisted the arms of his own committee members to sign a loyalty oath behind closed doors.
REALITY:  Assuming Reid is talking about the letter that was made public shortly after it was signed, anyone who knows anything about the members of the Judiciary Committee, knows there’s no twisting of arms.  It would be hard to argue there’s a more philosophically diverse group of members.

REID:  There was no transparency when he sought to move a public committee meeting behind closed doors just to avoid talking about the Supreme Court nomination.
REALITY:  In a statement released to the press at the time, it was explained that Chairman Grassley was managing the opioid bill at the time, a bill that was under the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee, he asked to hold the business meeting off the Senate floor, which has been done routinely under both Democratic and Republican leadership, to allow processing some nominees and holding over legislation for next week.  Instead, the Ranking Member objected to the mark-up, so the Chairman decided to postpone the meeting until the following week so the managers of the bill could work on getting another Judiciary Committee passed bill over the finish line.  In addition, the EB-5 oversight hearing scheduled for earlier that week, was postponed, at the Democrats’ request, so the managers could be on the floor to work on the opioid bill.

REID:  And there was certainly no transparency on Tuesday, yesterday, when at 8:00 in the morning he met downstairs with Judge Merrick Garland in a private Senate dining room moments before slipping out the back door to avoid reporters.
REALITY:  Every meeting with a Supreme Court nominee is private.  Reid’s private meeting with Judge Garland was on March 17.  
Senator Grassley exited the dining room through the back door to get to his Capitol office where he could take his weekly conference calls with Iowa radio networks and farm reporters, which, by the way, occur 52 weeks out of the year.  He is in a moratorium from using the Senate Recording Studio because the primary in Iowa is less than 60 days away, so the back door, instead of the front door was closest to his Capitol office so he could take the calls (reasonably) on time. Not evading reporters…just taking care of Iowans.  Iowans are, always have been, and always will be Senator Grassley’s priority.

REID:  They are afraid to allow this man to be seen by the American public.
REALITY:  Unless the administration is hiding Judge Garland’s rulings, they are all public for the American people to read and see.

REID:  Now, talking about transparency, there wasn't any if the Republican senators aren't going to be able to have a vote on the nomination.
REALITY:  Beyond the precedent set by the minority leader himself when he said the Senate had no constitutional responsibility to hold a vote on a nominee, the Senate has rejected 33 Supreme Court nominees.  Five of those nominees did not have a vote.  There’s plenty of precedent for the Senate’s actions.

REID:  Now, I would say all this has been going on is not like the Grassley that I have served with for more than three decades.
REALITY:  Senator Grassley has already held constituent meetings in 52 Iowa counties.  These are Q&A sessions in town hall meetings, on factory floors, with service organizations, with young people at schools, in businesses.  It’s his commitment to listening to Iowans.  Even the Cedar Rapids Gazette Fact Checker gave the political organization, which appears to be part of the White House’s coordinated effort, an “F” for its claim that Grassley was doing something different this year than other years.

REID:  My caucus knows how much I believe in the committee system. I think it's very important that committees work well, and we know one committee that's not working well, led by the senior Senator from Iowa.
REALITY:  Considering that Senator Reid didn’t allow the committee process to work on the signature piece of legislation during his time as majority leader, this is an unusual comment.  The fact of the matter is that 27 bills have cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee since Senator Grassley became Chairman.  And, ALL of the bills have been bipartisan.  The Judiciary Committee is clearly working well.

REID:  This is what she (Kathie Obradovich) wrote, “Senator Grassley keeps offering new reasons for refusing to give Judge Merrick Garland a hearing and a vote on his appointment to the U. S. Supreme Court. He may as well keep trying as explanations he's given so far for waiting until after the next presidential election are mostly nonsense.”
REALITY:  The fact of the matter is that the examples used by this newspaper columnist aren’t new at all, and positions that anybody following the debate would know that he’s given these points from very early on.

REID:  Senator Grassley won't consider Merrick Garland because he says he wants the American people to have a voice. The Senator either is ignoring or forgetting or doesn't know that the American people and fellow Iowans used their voice twice when they elected and reelected both times overwhelmingly President Obama.
REALITY:  The American people also overwhelmingly voted in 2014 for the Senate to be a true check on President Obama’s agenda.  Even President Obama admitted that the 2014 election was a referendum on his policies.  Clearly, those policies were rejected by the American people.

REID:  They gave President Obama the right to nominate individuals to the Supreme Court among the other obligations the President has.
REALITY:  Exactly.  President Obama has the right to nominate individuals to the Supreme Court, but he does NOT have the right to appoint an individual to the Supreme Court.  To be appointed to the Supreme Court, the nominee must have the advice and consent of the Senate, which the Senate has chosen to withhold in this instance.  

REID:  Senator Grassley won't consider Merrick Garland because he says he wants a justice who abides by the law.
REALITY:  Senator Grassley has made it clear that he wants the American people to have a voice in the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system of government.  It’s time for the grass roots to decide if they want a court that’s a super legislature deciding a case based on how they feel that day, or the empathy standard which President Obama has articulated; or do the American people want a court that will decide cases based on the Constitution, the law, and the facts of the case.  This is a legitimate debate that the American people at the grass roots should be having.  

REID:  Senator Grassley says he won't consider Merrick Garland for the third reason because the Supreme Court needs only eight (Supreme Court) justices.
REALITY:  The size of the court as Congress designed it over the years has frequently changed, and hasn’t left the court in disarray.  The temporary impact of a split decision pales in comparison to the damage an election-year political brawl would cause the court and the country, as then-Senator Joe Biden said in 1992.  At the time, he explained that the Senate shouldn’t move forward on a Supreme Court nomination during a hyper-partisan election year, predicting that a nominee, the President, the Senate, and the nation would endure a bitter fight no matter how good a person is nominated.  Justice Kagan sat out of dozens of cases because of her prior work as Solicitor General—including two that resulted in evenly-divided four-to-four decisions.

REID:  It's all Chief Justice Roberts' fault.
REALITY:  Senator Grassley’s speech was about how it shouldn’t be any harder to keep personal preferences out of politically charged cases than other cases.  And, the only explanation for the 5-4 rulings in the “hot button” cases, as Chief Justice Roberts described them, is that some of the justices are deciding based on their political preferences and not the law.  

REID:  Senator Grassley should follow Joe Biden's example and process more than part of a speech he gave.
REALITY:  The example set by then-Chairman Biden is a refusal to have hearings on 44 judicial nominees.  Second, if you read Biden’s entire speech, it’s clear that he was referring to cooperation in relation to changing the nominations process AFTER the election in the NEXT administration.  
 
REID:  Senator Grassley said he won't consider Merrick Garland's nomination because the hearing would be a waste of taxpayers' dollars. I quote what he said. Well, we could have a hearing or are going to have a hearing but let's suppose we did have a hearing. So you have a hearing and you spend a lot of taxpayers' money gearing up for it. You spend a lot of time with members, a lot of research, and it has to be done by staff.
REALITY:  According to Judiciary Committee records, allocations received by the committee for each of the last four Supreme Court nominations have been, on average, approximately $1 million.

REID:  Where was his concern for misusing taxpayer funds while his committee continues to waste millions of dollars on partisan opposition research of a presidential candidate?... Where was Senator Grassley's focus on government waste while the so-called Benghazi Select Committee continues to spend millions and millions of dollars on a political hit job with no end in sight?
REALITY:  The bigger point is that if the State Department had answered Senator Grassley’s questions in 2013 when he first asked, the inquiry would likely have been over.  Beyond that, the staff time and resources used to ask questions about this issue are nowhere near the figure cited by Senator Reid, and Senator Reid can point to zero evidence to substantiate this claim.  Unlike the Benghazi Committee, the Judiciary Committee is a permanent committee working on a much broader scope of responsibilities.  This issue is just one among dozens of oversight projects undertaken by the Judiciary Committee, in addition to its substantial legislative agenda.  Secretary Clinton’s non-government server and private email arrangement effectively walled off her official communications from normal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other federal record keeping requirements.  FOIA is within the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee.  When a non-government server system is used for official business and is unconnected to government networks, it frustrates the intent and spirit of open records laws.

Secretary Clinton’s extraordinary non-government arrangement generated a flood of FOIA litigation as the Department of State failed to timely and adequately respond to requests from journalists, watchdog groups, and concerned citizens.  It has become clear that Secretary Clinton did not turn over all federal records to the government. That failure and the resulting litigation is likely costing the taxpayers millions of dollars.  The Judiciary Committee’s questions about that controversy certainly are not.

Moreover, the committee is far from alone in seeking more information. For example, Judge Emmet Sullivan, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton to serve as a United States District Judge for the District of Columbia, questioned Secretary Clinton’s non-government set-up in a related FOIA case:
How on earth can the court conclude there is not at minimum a reasonable suspicion of bad faith?

REID:  Where was the penny pinching when the Judiciary Committee used Senate funds and Senate staff to investigate former Clinton staffers?
REALITY:  It was not the Committee, but rather the State Department Inspector General that opened a criminal inquiry into time and attendance fraud at the State Department.  That inquiry began before the current Inspector General was confirmed.  And, as a result of that inquiry, the State Department itself sought the return of approximately $10,000 in improper payments for unused leave.  

REID:  Every day the Judiciary Committee has a new excuse, a new justification why it won't do its job.
REALITY:  Actually, there are no new arguments.  Senate Republicans are doing their job by deciding not to process the nominee.  It’s a simple principle to allow the American people to have a voice in the role of the Supreme Court for the next generation that has never changed.   

REID:  He (Grassley) encouraged the FBI to join the political crusade against Secretary Hillary Clinton.
REALITY:  At a Rotary Club in Iowa, Senator Grassley surmised that if there were decisions about the prosecution of Secretary Clinton made by the Justice Department that were improperly influenced by a desire to pull punches for political reasons, that information would be made public at some point.  He was emphasizing transparency and the public’s right to know. He’s called on both the FBI director and the Attorney General to explain their actions once decisions are made on the case.   Senator Grassley certainly never “encouraged” anything, and in a subsequent answer to a question he said that he would not advocate a “leak.”  He does support employees who engage in legally protected whistleblowing.

REID:  Remember, there's been a lot of speculation under Chairman Grassley's leadership, personal information of a Clinton staffer was leaked to the press, including payroll records and social security numbers.  
REALITY:  No one on the committee could have leaked any Social Security numbers of any Clinton staffer to the press or to anyone else because the committee has not received them.  Documents produced to the committee have such sensitive information redacted by the State Department first.   The news article reporting on the Inspector General’s Report of Investigation into alleged time and attendance fraud explicitly said that the reporter had obtained the document from a source outside the Senate and the Inspector General’s office.

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