“Otherwise we’re going to lose all of our manufacturing — or manufacturing jobs — to China because it’ll be cheaper for our manufacturing to go over there than to pay the stiff fees on energy that they’ll have to pay here,” Grassley said.

U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley (Lauren Victoria Burke/WDCPIX.COM)

Last month, the U.S. House passed legislation that would reduce emissions by imposing a national limit, or cap, on greenhouse gases. It would then allow polluters to buy and sell their emissions credits. If a polluter emitted less than its allotment, it could sell the excess.

Opponents of the bill, which includes Grassley, say it will hike up energy costs at a time when citizens can hardly afford it.

“Every time a consumer in Iowa turns on their light switch, they’re going to be paying a tax that they don’t pay today,” he said.

But an equal concern, Grassley said, is that a provision in the House version of the bill that imposes import duties designed to stave off job loss in the manufacturing sector would likely violate international trade agreements.

“So in order to cover their rear end, they needed to put this import duties in so that they can have an excuse that they really aren’t doing anything that hurts American manufacturing when in fact they are,” he said.

On Wednesday, the Senate Finance Committee, of which Grassley is the ranking Republican, will hold a hearing on the international trade issues raised by the cap-and-trade bill.

Grassley has suggested several times that the U.S. wait for an international climate agreement before taking domestic action. A meeting scheduled for the end of the year will attempt to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, an international commitment for the reduction of greenhouse gases that is set to expire in 2012.

The problem, critics say, is that Grassley recently backed those industries in his opposition to legislation allowing judges to renegotiate mortgages.

File photo: Sen Charles Grassley. (Lauren Victoria Burke/wdcpix.com)

“The lobbyists and PAC hosting this event have made it clear that they will continue to fight against the types of financial market reforms now under discussion in Washington,” said David Donnelly, national campaigns director of Public Campaign Action Fund. “In the weeks to come, will Sen. Grassley again listen to them and their campaign money, or to constituents back home who are hurting because of the failures of Wall Street, the banks, regulators, and Congress?”

In April, Grassley fought against legislation that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to renegotiate the terms of mortgages as part of bankruptcy proceedings, a procedure known as “cramdown.” The Mortgage Bankers Association led the successful charge against the legislation, which led sponsoring Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to say of the banks “frankly they own the place.”

Now, critics say the industries who benefited from Grassley’s opposition are thanking him with campaign cash.

Donations ranging from $1,000 to $2,500 per person to Grassley’s re-election committee were required for attendance. According to research by Public Campaign, the event was organized by key members of the mortgage and private equity industries, including Pace Bradshaw of the Mortgage Bankers Association of America; Smith W. “Smitty” Davis, head of the financial institutions policy practice of lobbying firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld; Suzanne Hutchinson, executive vice president and a registered lobbyist for the Mortgage Insurance Companies of America; and the political action committee of Aflac Insurance.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Sen. Grassley has raised nearly $2.8 million from the finance, insurance, and real estate sector over his career for his campaign and leadership political action committee.

(h/t Huffington Post)

“I’ve tried to use every latest technology to keep in touch with constituents. Representative government is a two-way street,” he said. “I’m one half of that, my constituent’s the other.”

When President Barack Obama told Congress that “it’s time to deliver” on health care reform while traveling oversees, Grassley made headlines by telling the president “you got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us ‘time to deliver’ on health care. We still on skedul/even workinWKEND.”

The team at Gawker, a Web site of dedicated to gossip and news, were particularly hard on Grassley, publishing an article titled “Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley Uses Twitter to Exhibit Insanity, Illiteracy.”

Grassley said he met with the president Wednesday and joked about the issue.

“I think he joked something about, Chuck, I thought it was important that I be in Normandy or something like that as a recall,” he said. “And I agree with him that he should have been there.”

He never intended to criticize the president for spending time with his family, only for criticizing Congress when he knew members were working hard on health care legislation.

“I didn’t resent having the president have a night out with his family or sightseeing in Paris,” Grassley said. “So if that was what people thought that was all I was talking about, no. What I was trying to do is express frustration with the president who knows we’re working hard and even expressed at this meeting [Wednesday] how hard we were working — that he would say you’ve got to get it done.  You know, our staffs were working those very Saturdays that he said that.”

The legislation, which is sponsored by Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, makes it easier for labor unions to organize. Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley said his party would filibuster the bill, which led Harkin to predict it would have to be altered to have any chance of passing.

Specter, who once supported the measure (and even sponsored it), came out in opposition to it in March. Most believe the about-face was due to a strong challenge in the Republican primary. Since that time, however, Specter has become a Democrat. U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, a retired Navy Admiral, has publicly expressed an interest in challenging him in the 2010 Democratic primary, pressuring Specter from the left.

Specter’s speech this weekend in Pittsburgh appears to signal another change in opinion that could give the Democrats the votes needed to overcome a filibuster and make Harkin’s bill a reality.

“If you want to be elected in this state, you have to come to labor,” he said. “I know that. I owe my re-election in part to the endorsement the AFL-CIO has given me in the past.”

Specter was then interrupted by a man in the crowd who declared “you want my vote, I want yours,” referencing Specter’s position on the bill.

“I understand your job’s on the line,” Specter said. “I think you’ll be satisfied with my vote on this issue.”

The contentious portion of the bill involves language that would allow unions to be certified by the National Labor Relations Board if a majority of workers sign cards designating the union as their bargaining representative. It would not do away with secret ballots for union organizing, but they would no longer be required. Union activists and anti-labor groups both agree that the change would make it easier for unions organize.

Opponents say that without a secret ballot, workers will be intimidated into joining a union. Supporters of the bill counter that employees already face intimidation from their employer when contemplating a union vote. Under the current law employers can veto workers’ decision to organize through majority signup and force them into the election process where, according to a recent study, a pro-union worker is illegally fired in a quarter of all organizing drives.

“Today, we’ve reached a fork in the road”, Grassley said. “The president this very day, this afternoon can make a very big difference” on whether it’s a bipartisan bill or not.

When he met with Obama last month the president said he’d “rather have a bipartisan bill that didn’t have everything he wants than a partisan one that would include 100 percent of what he wants,” Grassley said. With the scale change being talked about, moving forward without Republican input would be a mistake, he said.

“Health care is 16 percent of our Gross [Domestic] Product, and I happen to think that if Congress is going to pass one bill restructuring 16 percent of the Gross [Domestic] Product… that you’d want a broad based consensus of how you ought to do that.,” he said.

Grassley, as the senior Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee, is expected to be highly involved in crafting health care legislation. Several reports indicate that Democrats will insist that a public health insurance option be included in any health care legislation, an idea Grassley has spoken publicly against several times.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers Tuesday released a report detailing the potential economic gains from reform, finding it could result in an additional $10,000 in income by 2030 for a family of four.

The report found that in Iowa the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family coverage rose from $5,952 in 1996 to $11,070 in 2006.

Health care expenditures currently account for 18 percent of our nation’s GDP, the report said, and “if we remain on our current path, health care spending is expected to reach 34 percent of GDP by 2040.”

But Robert Reich, secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton and professor at the University of California at Berkeley, says Medicare’s fiscal problems are actually a big reason to support a public option for health insurance.

Medicare provides health insurance to about 45 million people, mostly senior citizens. The impending eligibility of Baby Boomers, who can start joining Medicare in 2011, coupled with an unrelenting increase in health care costs, have heightened concerns in recent years about the program’s long-term viability.

Wednesday’s report issued by the programs’ trustees predicts Medicare’s hospital fund will be exhausted by 2017, two years earlier than predicted a year ago.

“Medicare’s financial problems underscore how it doesn’t make sense to create a government-run health insurance plan, which is very much a controversial part of our health care reform debate,” Grassley said. “We can’t afford the public plan that we already have, and if we create a government-run health care plan that’s unaffordable and unsustainable, it isn’t going to be any good for anyone.”

Reich disagrees, saying fixing the rate of growth of medical costs is how you solve the Medicare problem, and to do that the country must have a public option when it comes to choosing insurance plans.

“Medicare is a terrible [problem], but the problem is not really Medicare; it’s quickly rising health-care costs,” Reich said on his blog. “Look more closely and the real problem isn’t even health-care costs; it’s a system that pushes up costs by rewarding inefficiency, causing unbelievable waste, pushing over-medication, providing inadequate prevention, over-using emergency rooms because many uninsured people can’t afford regular doctor checkups, and spending billions on advertising and marketing seeking to enroll healthy people and avoid sick ones.”

The government can use its bargaining power with drug companies and suppliers of medical services to reduce prices, Reich said.

“And, as I’ve noted, keep pressure on private insurers to trim costs yet provide effective medical outcomes,” he said.

“No other image depicts as clearly the freedoms and ideals of our country than the American flag.  It’s the symbol our men and women in uniform have fought for over 200 years,” Grassley said in a prepared statement. “The American flag has been proudly flown in times of battle, of victory, and of national tragedy. It is the most recognized symbol of freedom and democracy in the world.”

Grassley has cosponsored similar legislation twice before. In 2006, the amendment passed the Senate Judiciary Committee but fell one vote short of the two-thirds of the Senate needed for the amendment to be sent to the states for ratification. In 2000, the Senate fell four votes short.

Grassley said that the American flag should be protected from those who would desecrate it and demonstrate a basic lack of respect for our national heritage.

Overturning a Texas law in 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that burning an American flag in protest is a form of political speech protected under the First Amendment. Congress later passed a federal anti-flag-desecration law, and the high court invalidated it on the same grounds in 1990.

“I expressed my concern last week about her connection to the abortion doctor,” he said. “Not so much just the connection, but the lack of candidness with the reporting of how much help she got from him.”

Anti-abortion groups have been lobbying Republican senators to vote against Sebelius, criticizing her support for abortion rights and her ties to a late-term abortion doctor who donated to her campaigns. Sebelius initially underreported to senators the size of those donations, though she apologized and said it was an inadvertent error.

“I’m not saying she was not trying to be candid. It might be an oversight,” Grassley said. “But it’s one thing to be for or against abortion. It’s another to be close to somebody who practices late-term abortions.”

Grassley said he has no questions of Sebelius’ qualifications for the job, but he will still vote against her nomination “to express regret about her lack of candidness.”

The Senate is still expected to approve her nomination today. The lack of a HHS director was especially noticeable Monday as the White House turned to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to help lead its response to the swine flu outbreak.

Bill Salier, who ran unsuccessfully for the right to challenge U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin in 2002 and later chaired Tom Tancredo’s Iowa Caucus campaign, told Henderson that Grassley “isn’t even close to the same conservative” he was when he was first elected. When asked if Grassley would face a primary, Salier said that while that’s unlikely it isn’t a completely ridiculous notion.

Do you think he’ll face a primary?

“There is a certain amount of angst for folks when they look at running against somebody who is an icon in Iowa, having been there so long and, you know, he wins by tremendous percentages in the general,” Salier replied. “But if anybody was ever vulnerable to a primary who is an icon, itwould be Chuck Grassley now…People become more and more and more incensed the more they start to pay attention to how far he has drifted.”

Salier said Grassley’s tepid response to the recent Supreme Court ruling overturning Iowa’s ban on same-sex marriage could be the tipping point for social conservatives.

In an interview with the Des Moines Register, Grassley declined to comment on whether he believes the Legislature should pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

“You better ask me in a month, after I’ve had a chance to think,” Grassley, the state’s senior Republican official, said after a health care forum in Mason City.

The anger at Grassley has slipped onto the conservative blog TheIowaRepublican.com, which is run by former Republican Party of Iowa Political Director Craig Robinson. In a post Friday, former state House candidate and conservative radio personality Jamie Johnson pointed to an incident last year to show anger brewing at Grassley.

Last fall, after voting for President Bush’s $850 billion bank bailout, Grassley received an icy reception at the Iowa Republican Convention. It was especially noticeable because he spoke after U.S. Reps. Tom Latham and Steve King, both of whom had voted against the bailout, and both of whom received standing ovations.

“It was apparent to everyone,” said a middle aged delegate from Linn County. “Chuck’s not used to that. He’s usually the star, but I’m afraid his star is fading.”

While the scene Johnson depicts may have taken place, some of his facts are confusing. If he is referring to the Republican Party of Iowa’s convention, it was held July 12, nearly three months before the bailout vote.

Grassley is up for re-election in 2010. A recent Des Moines Register poll shows him with a still healthy 66 percent approval rating, down from 75 percent in January.

King scored a 96 out of 100, losing out on collecting the group’s “Defenders of Liberty” award due to his vote last year to override President George W. Bush’s veto of the $307 billion farm bill. The entire Iowa delegation voted to override.

Iowans were not completely shut out of the group’s awards, though. Rep. Dave Loebsack, D-Mt. Vernon, received the “True Liberals” award for voting against all 25 of the bills used to determine the rankings, scoring a perfect zero.

Rep. Tom Latham, R-Ames, scored an 88 percent, losing points for supporting an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and tax credits for alternative energy sources. Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Waterloo, scored a 4 percent, voting against the group’s position on 24 of 25 issues (he initially voted against the financial services bailout but supported a later version). Rep. Leonard Boswell, D- Des Moines, also scored a 4 percent (he supported a bill permitting D.C. residents to own firearms in response to a Supreme Court decision).

In the Sentate, Republican Charles Grassley scored a 76 percent and Democrat Tom Harkin scored scored a 4 percent.

The 25 bills which the group used to compile its ratings reflect a cross-section of issues, including taxes, energy, climate change, unions and culture topics like abortion and gun ownership.

The ACU has issued its rankings every years since 1971, providing a numerical indicator of how much  lawmakers agree with the group’s conservative ideals. The group was founded in December 1964 following the defeat of Republican Barry Goldwater in that year’s presidential election. It is probably best known as the sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference.