The Iowa Standard was able to participate in Sen. Charles Grassley’s Capitol Hill Report on Tuesday morning. We asked Sen. Grassley to discuss last week’s judicial appointments and the impact being made on the courts.
“First of all, we in the Senate get a lot of credit for this, but the Senate can’t move ahead on nominations for the judges without the President proposing them. So, it first starts with the President. Three years ago, when this guy took office, even before he took office, he got around him a bunch of people who said we’re not going to dilly dally around making decisions on who to put on the courts, we’re going to move quickly to do it. When they decided to move quickly, the Senate had to move quickly.”
Grassley said the Senate has confirmed a historically high number of circuit court judges, which is second in importance only to the Supreme Court. There have also been 115 district court nominees.
“The President is doing the right thing,” Grassley said. “We have a responsibility to make sure these can be done as fast as possible because any vacancies on the district court level means that justice is going to be denied. I think we’ve done a good job of following through and speeding things up in a way that hasn’t been done under any other President. We’re fortunate because we’ll have a stronger judiciary because of it.”
The Iowa Standard also asked Grassley how the Senate is operating now that impeachment is concluded.
“The impeachment thing didn’t help anything,” Grassley said. “But, I think it didn’t make anything worse. So, with or without impeachment, you’re still going to have too much partisanship, but it’s not made worse as a result of impeachment.”
