Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who as chair of the Judiciary Committee is on the front lines of Republicans’ battle to block President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, accused conservative Chief Justice John Roberts of being “part of the problem” when it comes to the politicization of the Supreme Court.
In remarks he made from the Senate floor Tuesday, Grassley referenced comments Roberts made at a forum days before Scalia died. At the forum, Roberts presciently decried the “sharply political, divisive hearing process” involved in Supreme Court confirmations which he said led the American public to wrongly believe that justices were either Democrats or Republicans.
Grassley said Tuesday that the “public’s perception is at least sometimes very warranted.”
“The Chief Justice has it exactly backwards. The confirmation process doesn’t make the justices appear political. The confirmation process has gotten political precisely because the court itself has drafted from the constitutional text and rendered decisions based instead on policy preferences,” Grassley said.
He added that the “the justices themselves have gotten political.”
“In fact, many of my constituents believe with all due respect that the Chief Justice is part of the problem,” Grassley said. “They believe that a number of his votes have reflected political considerations, not legal ones.”
He then referenced an article that appeared in the New York Times in which legal scholars suggested Roberts should weigh in on Republicans’ refusal to approve a nominee to the court until after a new president is elected.
“Now that’s a political temptation that the Chief Justice should resist,” Grassley said. “I can’t think of anything any current justice could do to further damage respect for the court at this moment than to interject themselves into what Chairman Biden called the political caldron of an election-year Supreme Court vacancy.”
(Grassley was alluding to a speech that Vice President Joe Biden made in 1992 when he was chair of the Senate Judiciary committee discouraging then President George H.W. Bush from filling a hypothetical Supreme Court vacancy. Biden now says Republicans are taking the speech out of context.)
Grassley brought up again Roberts’ concerns that Americans view the Supreme Court as a branch no different than the two others in its politics.
“I think he is concerned with the wrong problem,” Grassley said. “He would be well served to address the reality, not the perception, that too often there is little difference between the actions of the court and the actions of the political branches.”
“So physician, heal thyself,” he added.
