Grassley defends blue slips at Union County stop

A private session with employees of White River Nutrition Wednesday encompassed Senator Chuck Grassley’s Union County stop in his annual tour of Iowa’s 99 counties.

Following the meeting, Grassley took time to speak with the media regarding the stop and a number of national issues involving Iowa. The senator said it was important to talk to employees of White River Nutrition because of the company’s rarity.

“There’s only five plants like this in the entire United States,” Grassley said. “[Meeting at businesses] gives me a chance to learn about what’s going on in Iowa with specific businesses. If I’m down at the city hall, these folks can’t come there, so I go to places where these folks can come to me.”

A common topic with Iowa politicians is supporting farmers. Grassley said he was pleasantly surprised with how Iowa farmers were being impacted by recent tariffs, a subject he was originally very against.

“If you’d asked me a question about trade in February, I would have been very negative because I’m a free trader and what the president’s doing is not what you would call free trade,” Grassley said. He explained that after negotiations with various large trade partners, he believed the country was seeing major success. “Right now, I’d say that maybe the president’s on the right track and I hope he succeeds.”

Grassley said while agriculture is usually the first thing to be hit when changing trade relationships with other countries, he has seen no issues thus far.

“At this point, I can’t say there’s any loss, even though we have extremely unprofitable soybean prices and unprofitable corn prices,” Grassley said. “In fact, because of the president’s activities, I see some things going on as a result of his negotiations that I never thought was possible: getting beef into Australia, getting beef into Ukraine, getting rice into Japan.”

Blue slips

While trade has been a popular topic all year, one subject has blown up nationally in the last week. Grassley and President Donald Trump have been going toe to toe on the subject of “blue slips.”

A blue slip is a form that is signed by senators from the state where a federal judicial nominee resides either in favor or against the nomination. This practice is tradition, not law, but something historically used across party lines as a way to provide advice to the president and a check on their powers.

“[The president] may not know what’s going on in those particular states, so getting input, forcing input, without the blue slip, you wouldn’t be able to get any input into who the president might appoint for that position,” Grassley said. “Your senators and your congressmen know more about Iowa and the people we should have in that position.”

In the past few weeks, Trump has pushed against the blue slip process and has attempted to get Grassley, the senate judiciary committee chairman, to abandon the practice.

“All Republican senators support the blue slip, but I think all Democrat senators support the blue slip,” Grassley said. “Let’s say we do away with it. You might not even get his nominees out of committee if you don’t have the votes to get them out.”

The senator also shared an example in which the blue slip process worked in the Republican party’s favor.

“There’s about 28 vacancies on the district court level in various states, [which] exist because the senators from those states didn’t want the judges that Biden wanted to put on,” Grassley said. “Those vacancies exist because of the blue slip, and the president, wouldn’t he rather appoint conservatives to these 28 positions instead of letting Biden put 28 liberals on the courts?”

Despite bipartisan pushback, Trump is still trying to get rid of the blue slip practice.

“This is based on an old custom. It’s not based on a law. And I think it’s unconstitutional,” Trump told reporters. “And I’ll probably be filing a suit on that pretty soon.”

Looking ahead

While the U.S. Senate is out of session until Sept. 2, Grassley did point out a number of issues Iowans should pay attention to in the near future.

“By Sept. 30, we have to have all the appropriations bills passed or continue a resolution or our government’s going to shut down,” Grassley said. “Beyond Sept. 30, getting prescription drug prices down and passing legislation to make sure the middle people between the consumer and pharmaceutical companies, what they do when they drive up the price of drugs... We need to have that be transparent.”