Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
In an attempt to figure out how he went from Democrats’ only hope for a bipartisan health care reform bill to the guy convincing constituents the government wanted to “pull the plug on grandma,” Time Magazine takes a look at U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley’s long, strange summer.
Calling Iowa’s senior senator “cantankerous and quirky,” the magazine walks through the early stages of Grassley’s health care effort, where Grassley and the other members of the Senate Finance Committee worked behind closed doors to craft a bill that could garner widespread support.
No Republican received more TLC from Barack Obama, who has met with Grassley three times at the White House and called him three times more just to keep in touch. White House aides reckoned that if Grassley, with his conservative credentials, could find a health-care deal he liked, a significant number of other Republicans might be persuaded to climb aboard. “Health care not only is 16% of the gross national product, but it touches the quality of life of every household as few others do,” Grassley declared back in April. “I’m doing everything I can to make the reform effort in Congress a bipartisan one.”
That was then. And that was before he came back to Iowa and delivered the now infamous tall tale about an end-of-life provision in a version of the bill passed in the House.
When the Iowa Senator actually gave credence to the absurd notion that the House version of the legislation might allow the government to decide when, in his words, to “pull the plug on Grandma,” Democrats decided he was past the point of any hope. And then came Grassley’s late-August coup de grâce, a campaign fundraising letter. “The simple truth is that I am and always have been opposed to the Obama Administration’s plans to nationalize health care,” Grassley wrote. “Period.”
Time goes on to surmise that the rightward drift of the Republican Party in Iowa may have played a part in Grassley’s change of heart. There have been rumblings for months that a social conservative primary opponent could jump into the race against Grassley. Those rumblings grew louder when Grassley gave a lukewarm response to a question about the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
Time also notes that if GOP leadership is upset with him he may not get the coveted spot as ranking Republican (or perhaps chair) of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2011.
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