Grassley talks health care, tax reform in Glenwood

Rural internet access.

The national debt.

Health care.

Partisanship.

North Korea.

The Farm bill.

These were just a few of the issues addressed by Sen. Charles Grassley in a questions and answers sessions at Glenwood City Hall Friday. The sit-down with the senator was one of several he had with constituents last week all over Iowa as part of his commitment to visit all of the state’s 99 counties.

For more than 40 minutes, Grassley sat with a dozen area residents in a informal setting, who peppered the ranking member of the judiciary, finance, budget and agriculture, nutrition and forestry committees about issues and concerns.

Grassley said the political divisiveness in this country has been a hot topic and the controversy surrounding the partisanship does get headlines. But while he agrees discourse is as bad as he’s seen it, it’s no worse “than it was 10 years ago.”

He bristled at the notion party bickering and partisanship among both parties is making working together in Washington untenable. He said that perception is often worse than the reality.

“Controversy makes news and people get a distorted view of it,” he said. “I think we can all get along.”
Just last week, the senator said, he and his wife celebrated their 63rd wedding anniversary and received a bouquet of flowers from Diane Feinstein, a Democratic stalwart in the senate for over two decades and harsh critic of the Trump administration. He also cited the 31 bills that got out of his committee last year that were all bi-partisan.

“I think sometimes people get the impression the two parties don’t talk or don’t get along,” he said. “But that’s not really true. I’ve co-sponsored several bills with Democrats and will continue to. You have to have some bi-partisanship or nothing’s going to get done.”

Health care remains the elephant in the room for congressional Republicans as efforts thus far to repeal and replace the Affordable Care act have come up short since a bill was passed in the house in June. Two recent votes in the senate also failed to garner enough votes, of which the latter being a reconciliation bill that fell one vote short of the required 51 votes.

How to bridge the gap between the repeal and replace campaign promise among Republicans and the actual nuts and bolts of signable repeal and replace has proved harder than perhaps even Grassley expected.

“When doing reconciliation, and the rules of reconciliation being different in that it doesn’t need 60 votes like legislations, it’s impossible to replace 2,000 pages of Obamacare,” Grassley said. “So you’re going to doctor up as much of the rules as you can and fix a lot of what’s wrong with it like they did with the 120 page bill in the house and a 148 page bill we’ve been working on in the senate to fix the egregious issues.”

Health care reform and its impact on tax reform played heavily into Rick Allely, Mills County’s Director of Economic Development, attending the session. He discussed with Grassley the impact Washington’s decisions regarding both are having on rural areas when it comes to businesses investment and recruitment.

Taxes and tax reform, Allely, said are a big issue when it comes to companies investing in rural areas like Mills County.

“Companies are looking at their bottom line and they need certainty on what their costs are going to be,” he said. “But perhaps more importantly with health care, if they have hundreds of employees or five, they need to see what that’s going to do their cost of business. What is going to be the cost of health care benefits for those companies?”

Allely said following last year’s election, he saw “fire in the belly” from industry and companies wanting to invest and add employees and new projects. All that stagnated, he said, when health care reform stalled in congress.

“The same companies with that fire in their bellies kind of are holding back and not making moves one way or another,” he said. “They want certainty on costs for their bottom line. I just wanted to tell the senator, to please take back (to Washington) this is impacting our existing companies ability to retain workers and to grow companies but also our ability to attract companies and investment and new jobs.”

Sharron Trimmer of Glenwood was in attendance at Friday’s townhall to thank Grassley for his support of health care reform and dedication to medical research. Trimmer, who is battling cancer, lost her daughter to the disease last year and was on hand to present the senator with poem her daughter wrote and an anniversary gift for he and his wife.

“My daughter always wanted to meet him when she was alive and she never got the chance so she’s with me today,” Trimmer said.

The issue that most concerns Trimmer is medical research and how government funding for research would be well spent on improving chemotherapy treatments. Trimmer is currently a chemotherapy patient.

“If you ever talk to anyone who is undergoing chemo, it’s almost worse than the disease and causing all kinds of problems,” she said. “But at the same time I can’t live without it and I don’t know how long I’ll live with it. We need to modify it and research how to make it better for people to live with it.”

In the session, Grassley also addressed concerns about international relations, including North Korea’s missile program and a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan.

Last week the president reversed course of his publicly stated Afghanistan policy by saying he would send in more troops but didn’t give details on the strategy nor the number of troops. Grassley said he wished the president didn’t have to send in more troops but if it means avoiding a repeat of what happened in Iraq, he supports it.

“I saw what happened in Iraq and we didn’t stick it out and we had to go in and fight the Iraq War twice and we’re still fighting it because ISIS came in. I don’t think we want Afghanistan to be a training ground for terrorists. Even if I disagreed with it, I would still take the view I have a responsibility to make sure the men and women we put in harm’s way have the tools they need to get the job done.”

Grassley admits the details of the president’s plan are sparse, but it appears an initial deployment of 4,000 additional troops is the first step in the new policy.

“I think you have a more comprehensive plan than you did under (President) Bush and Obama in the fact that we’re going to put pressure on Pakistan to not protect terrorists and get India involved,” he said.

One question Grassley didn’t face was the on-going probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Grassley, who chair’s the senate judiciary committee which provides oversight of the FBI and the Department of Justice, has spent the last few months taking part in one of the four congressional committees and a special counsel currently investigating the allegations of a Russian cyberattack.

“The senate intelligence committee, the house intelligence committee and the house oversight committee are also doing investigations but the thing people need to look at more than what we’re doing (in the senate judiciary committee) is the 800 pound gorilla in the special counsel. If there’s going to be prosecutions, he (special counsel Robert Mueller) will be making that judgment.”

Currently, Grassley said, as the senate heads back into session in early September, his committee is in a position of “questioning for transcript” Trump election staff, including the president’s son Donald Trump, Jr. and former campaign manager Paul Manafort, as well as the co-founder of the research firm that produced the now infamous “Russian Dossier,” Glen Simpson.

The senator said his committee will be sharing its transcripts and, ultimately, any findings from its investigation, with the special counsel.

Grassley declined to make any conclusions about allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives but didn’t hold back sharing his opinion on Russian meddling in the 2016 election. There’s two things, the senator said, that concern him.”

“The first is probably more applicable to the intelligence committee than my committee but if there’s international or Russian influence in our election, which there’s no doubt they (the Russians) tried but there is a question if they made any impact. That I don’t think we know yet. But even if they didn’t make an impact, it raises questions about what people think of the sanctity of our elections. We need to reaffirm confidence in the people.”

Grassley went onto say he was also concerned about political influence in the FBI’s work. He specifically mentioned Russian meddling, Hilary Clinton’s emails and communications between former President Clinton and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the firing of FBI Director James Comey last April.

“The Republicans got mad when Comey shut down the Clinton email investigation in July and the Democrats got mad when he re-opened it in October,” Grassley said. “The FBI should be devoid of any politics. We’re concerned about political manipulation.”

With the Russia investigations and health care and tax reform dominating the news cycles and congressional agendas, Grassley also is eyeing a few other legislative issues especially close to him.

“In my committee, juvenile justice reform and criminal justice reform, or another name for it would be sentencing reform, are my top priority,” he said.

In early August, Grassley’s co-sponsored Juvenile Justice Reform bill, which would improve to the way young people area treated in the criminal justice system,  the cleared the Senate and will now move to the house. The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act co-sponsored with Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, which would address mandatory minimums and culling recidivism rate, was first broached in the last congress but remains in committee this session.