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Senator Charles E. 'Chuck' Grassley
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Current Office: U.S. Senate
Seniority: Senior Seat
First Elected: 11/04/1980
Last Elected: 11/02/2004
Next Election: 2010
Party: Republican
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BiographicalVoting RecordIssue Positions
(Political Courage Test)Interest Group RatingsPosition PapersSpeeches and Public StatementsAdditional Biographical InformationCampaign Finances
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Title: MSNBC "Interview With Senator Charles Grassley" - Transcript
Date: 06/01/2009
Interview
MSNBC "Interview With Senator Charles Grassley" - Transcript
Copyright ©2009 by Federal News Service, Inc., Ste. 500, 1000 Vermont Ave, Washington, DC 20005 USA. Federal News Service is a private firm not affiliated with the federal government. No portion of this transcript may be copied, sold or retransmitted without the written authority of Federal News Service, Inc. Copyright is not claimed as to any part of the original work prepared by a United States government officer or employee as a part of that person's official duties. For information on subscribing to the FNS Internet Service at www.fednews.com, please email Carina Nyberg at cnyberg@fednews.com or call 1-202-216-2706.
MS. MITCHELL: Senator Charles Grassley is the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, also a senior member of the Budget Committee, and serves on the Judiciary Committee. You've got a full plate.
Senator, it's great to see you. Thank you very much.
Let's talk about what Senator Ted Kennedy is pushing, which is to have that public option. Why do you disagree? You and I believe also your Democratic chairman, Max Baucus, disagree with that approach.
SEN. GRASSLEY: Well, I can't speak for Senator Baucus. But I can speak for myself that, quite frankly, we want to back up the president's proposal that he had during the campaign that if you want to keep your health insurance, you ought to keep it.
So then what's wrong with what you call a public option? What's wrong with it is the Lewin Group that studies health care deeply, they have estimated crowding-out of about 119 million people. Well, you crowd out 119 million people out of private health insurance, then everybody else's rates are going to go up. And eventually you won't have your own health care system -- health insurance system that you want to keep, as the president promised. That's what we find wrong with it.
MS. MITCHELL: Isn't there a way to do both? Isn't there a way to have the public option as an option? And you know, the insurance companies may not like that, but this public option -- now, there's of course the question of how you're going to pay for it, which was my next question to you -- but why can't you have a combination system, which is what obviously --
SEN. GRASSLEY: Well --
MS. MITCHELL: -- the Kennedy people are pushing?
SEN. GRASSLEY: Well, we already have a combination system. You call it Medicare and Medicaid on the government side, and you can call it private health insurance on the other side. And you know what happens in Medicare? Particularly, this is bad in rural America. The government sets prices. The House of Representatives is talking about setting prices for a public option no higher than Medicare. Well, you get a situation where doctors in rural America aren't taking new Medicare patients.
Do we want to -- we don't want to put in place, then, a system that's going to deny and delay health care. We -- and we think the existing system can be improved by getting insurance for everybody -- we want to do away with preconditions, so that people who can't get health insurance today can get it, and we want to make it affordable.
MS. MITCHELL: When we talk about affordable, how are you proposing that we pay for this? Is there going to be some kind of taxation of benefits and a break between the employer-paid option, which has been traditional, or some other kind of taxation of benefits?
SEN. GRASSLEY: Well, there'd be three sources. One would be what you save from existing Medicare and Medicaid programs, because there is an awful lot of waste in that -- in those programs.
Number two, by capping the employer-provided health insurance at a certain level, maybe the national average, those would -- those two sources come within health care. And there's pretty much bipartisan agreement on some of that.
The third one would bring money in from other sources of taxation where there's quite often controversial and quite often harmful to keeping jobs in the United States that people in my party are a little bit reluctant to go that direction.
MS. MITCHELL: Okay. I wanted to ask you about your role on the Judiciary Committee because I think you were quoted as saying that this is the first time a president has called you for your advice or your thoughts on a prospective Supreme Court nominee. As a member of the committee, what will you want to hear from Sonia Sotomayor when she comes to visit you?
SEN. GRASSLEY: Okay, well, first of all, I think since the president emphasized that this person was a person that was going to bring what you call "empathy" to court cases, that bothers me, pretty much. So I think she has to show me that she's a person that's going to be like Lady Justice over the Supreme Court, the fixture over the Supreme Court door. And Lady Justice is holding the scales of justice because every justice is supposed to be looking at a case impartially; in other words, you wouldn't bring personal views into it that is expressed by the word "empathy."
And so I'm going to be looking for somebody who's going to be very impartial, what we call "judicial temperament." Leave personal views out of it. Just look at the four sides of the law, and keep it within the parameters of law, and interpret law, and not make law.
MS. MITCHELL: But, at the same time, Judge Alito -- Justice Alito, whom you supported, talked about his immigrant background and how all of us are shaped by our backgrounds and by who we are. So how would she possibly separate herself from the way she was raised --
SEN. GRASSLEY: Well --
MS. MITCHELL: -- and from her extraordinary personal story?
SEN. GRASSLEY: I suppose it's somewhat naive. In other words, Senator Grassley talking to you now, you know, there's certain parts of my personal background that probably come to play on making policy. But I'm making policy.
Judges are not supposed to be making policy; they're supposed to be interpreting law. And I think we ought to keep them to the confines of what the Constitution did, realizing that sometimes personal experience is important, but should it help in the interpretation of the law? No, you're supposed to interpret it according to congressional intent.
MS. MITCHELL: And your view on Rush Limbaugh and a lot of the other criticism that has come from non-elected Republicans?
SEN. GRASSLEY: Well --
MS. MITCHELL: What do you think of what Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and others have had to say, calling her -- certainly Limbaugh called her a "reverse racist."
SEN. GRASSLEY: I can't start out with that attitude. I owe her, I owe the American people, I owe the president to look at her just as dispassionately as she comes before our committee the same way that I just explained to you she ought to look dispassionately at the law.
MS. MITCHELL: All right. Thank you so much, Senator Grassley.
SEN. GRASSLEY: Thank you.
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