Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Thursday sought to clarify a series of remarks he made over the course of this week about how he thinks Senate Republicans should approach President Obama’s nominee to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. But in doing so, Grassley offered an incomplete timeline of his remarks and left his position on the confirmation process unclear.
The senator said earlier this week that he had not yet decided whether to hold a hearing on the nomination, but those comments followed a statement his office issued in which he indicated that he felt the nomination should wait until after the 2016 presidential election.
The Judiciary Committee chairman made his first comments about Scalia’s death to the Des Moines Register on Saturday.
“I wouldn’t make any prognostication on anything about the future because there’s so many balls in the air when those things are considered,” he said at the time.
Grassley then issued a statement later on Saturday, in which he said that Scalia’s successor should be chosen by the next president.
“The fact of the matter is that it’s been standard practice over the last nearly 80 years that Supreme Court nominees are not nominated and confirmed during a presidential election year,” he said. “Given the huge divide in the country, and the fact that this President, above all others, has made no bones about his goal to use the courts to circumvent Congress and push through his own agenda, it only makes sense that we defer to the American people who will elect a new president to select the next Supreme Court Justice.”
On Tuesday, he told Radio Iowa that he had not decided whether he would hold hearings on Obama’s nominee.
“I would wait until the nominee is made before I would make any decisions,” Grassley said. “In other words, take it a step at a time.”
Speaking to reporters Thursday after speech at a high school in Jackson County, Iowa, Grassley trie to reconcile the conflicting comments. He explained that he learned of Scalia’s death Saturday from the Des Moines Register reporter who called asking for a comment, according to the Dubuque Telegraph Herald. The senator said that he should have waited for a couple hours before giving a comment.
“But, I said, I thought, I gave him my opinion on Scalia, and then I said, ‘I think we ought to wait to make some more decisions, you know?'” Grassley said, according to the Telegraph Herald. “And then nothing more was said until Monday. I gave a Radio Iowa interview, and I said we ought to take it a step at a time.”
A reporter then reminded Grassley of his Saturday statement that called for the next president to choose the next Supreme Court justice.
“Then that statement ought to preempt anything that I said about a committee meeting, you know?” Grassley said. “Is it kind of common sense that if I said this whole thing ought to wait until the next election and let the people decide, doesn’t that preempt anything else?”
The Telegraph Herald then asked Grassley why he felt his statement should preempt his remarks to the media. Grassley said that when responding to the Des Moines Register, he “didn’t have a chance to think things through.”
The Iowa senator also discussed his view on the nomination process during an afternoon town hall on Tuesday.
“I will take it a step at a time,” Grassley said at the town hall, according to the Des Moines Register. “The president hasn’t nominated anybody yet.”
He later told reporters that a New York Times headline about his Iowa Radio interview was “not entirely accurate.”
According to the Des Moines Register, the New York Times headline initially read, “Key Senator Says He Might Hold Hearings on Supreme Court Nominee.”
