Dean Lerner served Iowa as an Assistant Attorney General for sixteen years, Chief Deputy Secretary of State for four years, and about ten years as Deputy Director, then Director of the Department of Inspections & Appeals. He then worked for the CMS Director of the Division of Nursing Homes, and the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa. He is a graduate of Grinnell College and Drake University Law School.
Reflecting upon the extraordinary 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, it seems important to again contemplate and admire the bravery and devotion of our founding fathers to the cause of liberty. The incomparable creation of this everlasting document and its corollary Constitution are nothing short of a miracle penned by extraordinarily gifted men.
Their genius provided us with living parchments establishing lofty ideals and aspirations for a new nation and the construct to preserve it. One principal, unmistakable safeguard to its preservation was the formation of three co-equal branches of government, each responsible for providing checks and balances to excesses of the other.
Today, regrettably, one could reasonably conclude that our executive branch has methodically co-opted these essential safeguards—with assistance from weak and/or cowardly sycophants. How, one should ask, could this happen?
Iowa’s senior Senator Chuck Grassley’s actions as the past and current chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee illustrate the intentional, purposeful behavior that brought our country to where we are. Remember that President Barack Obama nominated U.S. Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland to serve as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court on March 16, 2016, some 237 days before the 2016 presidential election.
Garland was supremely qualified, but Grassley (in coordination with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) derailed his nomination by refusing to hold confirmation hearings. This marked the first time since the Civil War that a nominee whose nomination had not been withdrawn had failed to receive consideration for an open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Iowa’s honorable senator justified his actions by citing the short time before the election. He said the next president should select this justice, thereby reflecting the will of the American people. Recall that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by roughly 48.2 percent to 46.1 percent in November 2016, receiving nearly 2.9 million votes more than Donald Trump.
Now recall the fast-tracked confirmation of U.S. Appeals Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett in 2020. President Trump nominated Barrett on September 26, and the Senate confirmed her on October 27—days before the November election, when tens of millions of Americans had already voted. This 31-day turnaround marked one of the fastest nomination-to-oath cycles in modern U.S. history.
Grassley’s pretext for his treatment of Garland’s nomination is not credible. However, our honorable senator’s hypocrisy doesn’t end there.
Because it would be next to impossible to argue that today’s makeup of the court is fair, or balanced, or even an accurate reflection of the will of the American people, some Democrats have considered ideas to alter the composition of the court. Now, lifetime appointments by one political party or the other of a disproportionate number of nine sitting justices can be seen as flawed imbalance. Rotations, term limits and other solutions have been floated.
These discussions are occurring in the context of the “Trump Court’s” numerous impactful decisions (some upending longstanding precedent), the court’s overuse of its “shadow docket,” the seismic shifting of power through the unitary executive theory, and so on.
To add further context, the court has handed down monumental rulings on matters such as voting rights, abortion, deportations, civil rights, due process, and gun rights. Those decisions have already and will continue to irrevocably damage lives, diminish personal liberties, and alter the course of history. Some of the sitting justices have displayed questionable ethics as well.
So discussions of reforming the Supreme Court are inherently reasonable. But not to our honorable Senator Grassley. Last month, his office published the senator’s rebuke of Democratic proposals for the court. He likened them to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1937 “Court packing scheme to rig the Supreme Court.”
The honorable senator’s column is important, and I recommend that you read it in full. As the Senate’s President Pro Tempore, Grassley is third in the line of succession. But he gaslights us all, oblivious to his own actions that resulted in his very own rigging of the Supreme Court.
One of the honorable senator’s most ironic statements in his June 25 commentary seems to acknowledge that “…our constitutional system of checks and balances…aims to prevent any one of the federal government’s three branches from gaining too much power.”
Grassley must either be delusional or unwilling to acknowledge that this is exactly the problem that has raised such concern: his and his party’s abdication of their constitutional duty to rein in their drunk-with-power president. The senator also writes, “Iowa’s own former President Hoover exposed the outrageous effort [by FDR] to reduce ‘the sword of the people’ to ‘a tool of the executive.’”
Critiquing the Democrats’ Supreme Court reform ideas in that way would be laughable if Hoover’s warning didn’t aptly describe court’s current deference to Trump.
Then again, none of the honorable senator’s conduct is surprising, given the pervasive Republican tutelage from the headmaster’s throne inside the Trump & Roy Cohn Center for Government Deceit, Dishonesty, Corruption and Abuse.
Top photo of Senator Chuck Grassley is from a July 2025 hearing and was first published on his official Facebook page.