Grassley, president pro tempore of the Senate and the body’s oldest currently serving member, spoke to 2 dozen hospital employees in a conference room on a quiet afternoon at the facility.
He gave detailed answers to questions from attendees, leaving his chair to work the room and elicit laughs from the crowd, who appeared, at times, to be running out of things to ask.
“You folks sit around having coffee and talking about something in D.C. and you say: ‘how come those crazy guys are doing all that?’” Grassley said, “and now you’ve got to me here to ask, and you aren’t asking any questions!”
Still, the session lasted for nearly an hour, during which Grassley ran through several topics on the minds of his constituents.
Regarding partisanship, the senator said the media is partially at fault. “Journalists don’t make anything easier when you look on TV and everybody’s fighting,” said Grassley. “It looks like Democrats never talk to Republicans. But that’s not true.”
“If the media would give a more clear picture of people not always fighting and arguing and disagreeing, you’d have a different view, and you’d have more confidence in the institutions of government,” he told the room.
He also addressed the national deficit. Grassley said the budget has only been balanced four times in his 44 years in congress. “The situation is really dire now,” he said, adding he was “embarrassed” that he did not have better news to share.
One attendee asked the senator about social security, which, without intervention, will be insolvent by 2032. Grassley said the country has faced similar issues before, but never in this highly partisan political environment.
“I try to explain it this way: there aren’t any Tip O’Neills or Ronald Reagans in Washington anymore. Because when social security was in the same situation in 1983 Tip O’Neill, a Democrat, was the speaker of the house, and Reagan was a Republican. They got together and said, ‘we’ve got to fix this system,’ and what’d they do? They increased the age, they increased taxes, they changed some formulas.”
Those efforts are known as the Social Security Amendments of 1983 and are applauded as an example of bipartisanship at work. Such efforts are a thing of the past, Grassley said.
“It takes people with guts [to do that], and we don’t have people with enough guts.”
The 2026 mid-term elections loom as the biggest political event of the year. Trump won Iowa in 2024 by over 13 percentage points. Will the support hold, not only in Iowa but across the country? Grassley recognized the results of the New York mayoral race, recent special elections, and gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, all of which resulted in wins for progressive or Democratic candidates as evidence that “Democratic voters are very motivated right now.” Trump must rally his base, Grassley said.
“He’s got the bully pulpit. Even if congressional Republicans did everything perfectly while campaigning, it wouldn’t have the impact that he has. It is absolutely necessary that he get out and campaign real hard in order to turn out his people.”
Grassley does not face re-election this year. His term runs through 2028 when he will be 95 years old. He has floated the idea of running again. When he does give up his seat, he said he hopes his successor will be “somebody attuned to Iowa agriculture and American agriculture because there are only three or four of us in the U.S. Senate who know firsthand about agriculture.”
During his visit, Grassley also outlined his legislative efforts to support rural healthcare and his plans to bring down prescription drug costs by increasing transparency in the pharmaceutical industry.
