Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

U.S. Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, was at a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee—and not in an echo chamber—when he asked Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, “You are a decent man. Why are you doing this?”

And so began still another exhausting chapter in Grassley’s support of President Donald Trump, the nature of Grassley’s role as chair of the Judiciary Committee, and Trump’s efforts to stack the judicial branch with loyalists.

The echo chamber context resonates with many because, as Todd Dorman pointed out in a column in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, Booker “asked a question many puzzled Iowans also have been asking for years.” What’s happened to Grassley?

Booker’s question about decency came after Grassley cut off committee discussion of Trump’s nomination of Bove to a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, comprising Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

But Booker’s question and protests by Democratic committee members were futile. The Judiciary Committee advanced Bove’s nomination on July 17 with only Republican votes, despite the lack of a quorum after Democrats walked out. The full Senate confirmed Bove on July 29 by 50 votes to 49. (Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine joined Democrats to vote no.)

For his part, in prepared remarks supporting Bove’s nomination, Grassley vigorously defended the process and outcome of his handling of the matter. The senator characterized criticism of Bove as smear attacks and expressed frustration with Democratic conduct in the Bove and other nomination processes, concluding:

Reasonable minds can differ. And when I direct my staff to allocate resources away from other ongoing whistleblower projects to handle situations like Bove, their efforts ought to be respected and given good faith treatment.

But eleventh-hour media smears by my colleagues based on information that was hidden from the Committee are unacceptable, and I won’t stand for it as a delay and obstruction tactic.

The protests about the process and then Senate approval nearly along party lines come at a time when much of government decision making at the state and federal levels seems driven by fear and not conscience.

Even though Grassley had rushed through Bove’s nomination without allowing whistleblowers to testify before his committee, Trump lashed out at the Judiciary chair this week. The president was upset that Grassley has continued the long tradition of “blue slips,” which allow senators to block U.S. attorney or judicial nominees for their home states.

On the same day Bove was confirmed, Trump demanded in a Truth Social post that Grassley abandon committee processes. His language was so vehement that Grassley responded publicly the following day.

But in Wednesday’s Judiciary Committee meeting, Grassley said he was “surprised” by Trump’s comments. While “the people in real America don’t care about what the ‘blue slip’ is,” the process is something that deeply impacts their state’s judicial systems, he said.

“I was offended by what the president said, and I’m disappointed that it would result in personal insults,” Grassley said.

As Alexander Bolton observed in his story for The Hill, not only did Trump attack Grassley over blue slips, he “also reposted a Truth Social post that accused Grassley of being a ‘RINO,’ short for ‘Republican in name only,’ and ‘sneaky.'”

Bolton reported on July 31 that fellow Republican senators “were appalled by President Trump’s rough treatment” of Grassley, and “are pushing back on Trump’s attempts to squeeze the senator into abolishing an arcane procedure known as the Senate blue slip.”

All this harkens back to previous concerns about Grassley’s role as chair of the judiciary committee, summarized a piece I wrote for Bleeding Heartland in August 2020.

That post recalled how U.S. Representative Bruce Braley, a Democrat, lost the 2014 U.S. Senate race to Republican State Senator Joni Ernst. Grassley figured in that race because of Braley’s warning (at a fundraiser where he did not know he was being recorded) that an Ernst victory would mean “You might have a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school,” as chair of the judiciary committee. That comment—caught on video as Braley talked to lawyers in Texas—boosted Ernst’s campaign because it was understandably taken as a slur against rural Iowa in general and farmers in particular, despite Braley’s abject apology.

A more reasoned criticism of Grassley came in a 2019 Iowa Law Review article that contrasted how Grassley handled judicial nominations during the last two years of Barack Obama’s presidency (2015 and 2016) and first two years of Trump’s presidency (2017 and 2018).

Carl Tobias of the University of Richmond Law School concluded that under Obama,

Grassley strictly enforced numerous rules and customs, mainly “blue slips,” and seriously delayed the confirmation process. These phenomena meant that the Senate confirmed the fewest appeals court judges since 1897–98. In profound contrast, across the 115th Congress during President Donald Trump’s first two years… Grassley jettisoned, changed or deemphasized a number of venerable strictures and conventions.

Dorman’s column for the Gazette lists some of the reasons that more than 900 former Department of Justice lawyers opposed the Bove nomination, along with several whistle blowers and DOJ veterans.

Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee took the extraordinary step of walking out of the July 17 meeting in protest of Grassley’s actions as committee chair. He refused to allow a vote on calling for a person to testify and would not allow all Democratic members to voice their concerns.

Grassley characterized opposition to Bove as unwarranted, having “all the hallmarks of a political hit job.”

In fact, “political hit job” is how one might characterize the Republican-controlled Senate’s handling of Supreme Court nominations by Obama in 2016 and Trump in 2020.

In April of this year, Rick Morain recalled how Grassley and GOP senators blocked an Obama Supreme Court nomination because 2016 was an election year, but fast-tracked approval of a Trump Supreme Court nomination because, after all, 2020 was an election year.

After attending Grassley’s town hall meeting in Jefferson (Greene County), Morain wrote, in part:

It surprised me that Grassley openly admitted that politics prompted the Senate’s freezing of the confirmation process. He made no mention at all of the argument he made back in 2016, about leaving the vacancy open until after the presidential election. Nor of the fact that in the fall of 2020, the Republican Senate hastened to confirm Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Trump had nominated her just 38 days before that that year’s presidential election; she was confirmed eight days before election day, when tens of millions of Americans had already cast ballots.

Grassley now acknowledges blocking Garland was simply politics.

Then he went on to make up facts.

For well over 100 years of American history, he said, it has been the custom “that when you have a president of one party and a Senate of the other party, and it’s getting close to a presidential election, the Senate doesn’t approve that.” In other words, Grassley depicted himself as in step with an American tradition.

He’s wrong. I don’t know if he said it because he was misinformed, or because he was trying to justify his action.

There were five Republican presidents from the 1950s to the 1990s: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. During most of those years Democrats had a Senate majority.

And Democratic-controlled Senates confirmed eleven Supreme Court nominees presented to them by those Republican presidents. […]

Not all Republican presidential Supreme Court appointees made it through a Democratic Senate in those years: the Senate rejected President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork in 1987.

But Grassley’s decision to refuse to hold a hearing on Merrick Garland’s nomination in 2016 was, as he admitted last Thursday, a political decision. Democratic majorities resisted that temptation when they confirmed Kennedy during the last year of Reagan’s second term, and confirmed Powell and Stevens less than a year before the 1972 and 1976 presidential elections. 

Grassley and his Republican colleagues were not following some venerable American tradition. To say anything else is fake news.

And he should know, because Grassley served in the Senate during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

The question of what happened to Grassley comes up in other contexts, as when a former staffer who worked with the senator for 19 years critiqued how Grassley has used the oversight process to wage “political battles.”

Laura Belin has documented Grassley’s tendency to “rewrite history,” regarding his views on marriage equality and his role in promoting false allegations against President Joe Biden.

The same motif runs through many other Bleeding Heartland posts about Grassley from September 2020 to July 2025 (well indexed by the blog).

Several of those essays deal with Grassley’s silence in the face of Trump’s recklessness. A post of mine noted some of the senator’s double-talk or double-think when it comes to Trump.

For example, when private citizen Trump endorsed Grassley’s re-election bid at an October 2021 rally in Des Moines, the senator welcomed the former president’s remarks: “I was born at night, but not last night. So if I didn’t accept the endorsement of a person that’s got 91% of the Republican voters in Iowa, I wouldn’t be too smart. I’m smart enough to accept that endorsement.”

Within a week of that event, Grassley was dismissive those who criticized Trump’s rhetoric and lies about the 2020 election, declaring, “He’s a private citizen … He can say anything he wants to.”

In other words, Grassley was happy to get private citizen Trump’s endorsement. But he didn’t want to take a stand on Trump’s other public comments. In response to a message I sent to his office, Grassley emailed me in May 2023: “Donald Trump is no longer president. He is now a private citizen…I am fully focused on working with my colleagues in the Senate and the Administration…I have nothing more to say on the topic at this time.”

What happened to Grassley, who is, as Booker noted, “a decent man?

Maybe I’m overreacting to the use of one word.

But Booker’s “You are a decent man. Why are you doing this?” for me is uncomfortably close to Iowan Joseph Welch asking Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954: “Senator; you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Trump’s recent tirade over blue slips may put Grassley in a more sympathetic light. But smoothing a path for Bove won’t be the last time the Judiciary Committee chair demonstrates his loyalty to the president.

Regardless, writing this piece drove home how inviting and informative a search of Bleeding Heartland’s archive can be. The index/search process offers so much in commentary, quality links, and reader comments that will be a treasure for researchers for years to come—helping to provide insight and understanding of these troubling times.

Until then, good luck to all of in sorting out yet another anticipated (and feared) consequence of Trump’s second term.

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Top photos of Senator Chuck Grassley and Senator Cory Booker were screenshots from the official video of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s July 17 executive business meeting on nominations including Emil Bove’s. Top photo of President Donald Trump is cropped from an official White House photo taken by Daniel Torok on July 22, 2025.