Harkin, who currently chairs the Agriculture Committee, is second in seniority behind U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) on the HELP Committee, but Dodd has reportedly decided hold on to his chairmanship of the Banking Committee rather than taking over Kennedy’s old seat.

As its name implies, the HELP Committee’s jurisdiction spans a wide swath of domestic policy, including health care reform. Dodd’s decision elevates Harkin to a position of considerable power in both symbolic and practical terms.

An outspoken, politically secure liberal who will not face re-election until 2014, Harkin’s most significant legislative achievement is the Americans with Disabilities Act, which he spearheaded in 1990 at the end of his first Senate term. In 1992, he unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. He is the longest-serving Democratic senator in Iowa history.

Harkin’s move would likely make U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Arkansas) chair of the Agriculture Committee, according to the Post.

With the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy, our nation has lost a great leader. Senator Kennedy fought for what he believed in and cared deeply for our country. He never stopped fighting for working families and those less fortunate than himself. Respected by leaders from both sides of the aisle and people from all walks of life, his tremendous legacy will live on in the Democratic Party and in the Senate.

The United States Senate will never be the same without Ted Kennedy. His presence was enormous. He fought hard, debated intensely and worked tirelessly for what he thought was right. Senator Kennedy and I had a different point of view on most every issue, but he was an ally like few others when he was on your side. Senator Kennedy leaves a legacy as a public servant and policy maker, and my wife Barbara joins me in sending our deepest sympathy to his family.

Here is the governor’s statement:

This is a very sad day for America. My prayers are with the Senator’s wife Vicki, his children, family members and all of those who loved him.

Senator Kennedy was truly the lion and leader of the U.S. Senate, regardless of one’s party affiliation. His record of accomplishment is unmatched. Ted Kennedy was a kind and gentle public servant who cared passionately about people across the country and around the world, especially those without a voice. He fought every day for 47 years in the Senate to improve lives and help people achieve their hopes and dreams.

On a personal note, my father was a dear friend of Ted’s for nearly 60 years. They were teammates on the football field as college freshmen in 1950. In addition, they served together in the U.S. Congress for 16 years. So, Mari and I were very fortunate to spend some wonderful times together with the Senator and his family. We will always cherish those memories and miss him a great deal.

Senator Kennedy had a wonderful sense of humor, he was always there for his family and friends, and he had an unwavering faith and a generosity of spirit. These qualities and his record in public service will continue to serve as an example to all of us.

Today my thoughts are with the Kennedy family as they mourn the loss of their father, grandfather, husband and patriarch. Their grief is shared by all of us in Congress who have lost a friend and role model. I personally was honored to serve with Ted Kennedy and call him my friend.

In Ted, Americans had a staunch advocate for the rights worth protecting: ensuring a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, making sure that every kid has the education and opportunity they deserve and the cause of his life, access to quality, affordable health care for all Americans. I worked side-by-side with him to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act and will never forget his compassion for individuals with disabilities and the opportunity he gave me as a young senator to spearhead that legislation.

As Congress continues its work on these and many other issues, we will remember Ted Kennedy every step of the way. The liberal lion no longer roams the halls of Congress, but his legacy remains.

We must now rededicate our efforts toward passing legislation to provide robust, quality health insurance coverage for all Americans.

Grassley, a major player in the negotiations currently taking place surrounding health care reform legislation, said the wonderful treatment Kennedy is getting now for his brain tumor would instead go to a younger person because they can “contribute more to the economy.”

Here’s what Grassley had to say:

In countries that have government-run health care, just to give you an example, I’ve been told that the brain tumor that Sen. Kennedy has — because he’s 77 years old — would not be treated the way it’s treated in the United States. In other words, he would not get the care he gets here because of his age. In other words, they’d say ‘well he doesn’t have long to live even if he lived another four to five years.’ They’d say ‘well, we gotta spend money on people who can contribute more to economy.’ It’s a little like people saying when somebody gets to be 85 their life is worth less than when they were 35 and you pull the tubes on them.

Grassley went on to say that not all government health care is terrible. For “the little things,” the government can actually do pretty well.

I don’t want to say that every government run program in every country is bad, because I think when it comes to primary care and the little things people need to get done to get well in a short period of time, that level of care may be adequate. But when you run into more complicated things, in particular with older people, you find a great deal of rationing in other countries.

However, as the liberal blog Think Progress points out, the United States has the 10th highest death rate among cancer patients among developed nations.

But the larger problem Grassley ignores is cost. For Kennedy, access to health care is not an issue. Among most Americans, however, staggering health costs prevent more than half of U.S. patients from gaining access to medical care. Last year, 38 percent of U.S. patients did not receive recommended treatment compared to 11 percent in Canada and 6 percent in the U.K. And even among Americans with insurance, 43 percent of adults with chronic conditions nevertheless had access problems because of cost.

According to a study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the U.S. ranks 22nd in life expectancy and 25th in infant mortality. In fact, a study by the policy journal Health Affairs found that the U.S. has more preventable deaths than 18 other industrialized countries, totaling roughly 100,000 a year.

In addition, none of the mainstream health care reform proposals being batted around Congress right now would entail rationing health care services based on a patient’s ability to “contribute more to the economy,” as Grassley claimed.

Below is the portion of Grassley’s radio interview concerning health care and Kennedy, courtesy of ThinkProgress.org.

Harkin was asked to lead the group’s efforts on prevention and public health. Sens. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., were also asked to be a part of the effort.

Doctors and business and consumer groups are gearing up for an effort to improve care and bring about 46 million uninsured people into the system, something Obama and Clinton made centerpieces of their presidential campaigns.

And lawmakers on Capitol Hill are lining up to try to lead what is expected to be a long but high-profile legislative campaign.

“I have a theory about No Child Left Behind,” Kozol told more than 400 people who gathered to hear his reading. “I believe the right wing’s agenda underlying No Child Left Behind is not to help students on the bottom end of the spectrum, but to serve as more of a shaming ritual in the public spectrum to soften the ground for vouchers.”

Kozol, an award-winning author, has recently dedicated his time to public-education advocacy, in particular the NCLB Act, which is currently being considered for reauthorization by the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP). “It’s time for me to bring this battle back to Washington,” said Kozol, who has been lobbying all of the HELP committee members except one. Kozol, ironically, has had trouble getting access to the committee’s chair, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., his own state’s senator.

Frustrated, Kozol fasted this past summer to get Kennedy’s attention and protest NCLB. After Kozol had lost 30 pounds, his doctor put him on a limited fast, and, before he withered away, Kennedy agreed to meet with him in early November. Based on his meetings with other members, Kozol speculated why Kennedy, who co-authored NCLB, was reluctant to meet with him. “Kennedy thought No Child Left Behind would bring a lot more money into education, but what he didn’t realize is that the Bush administration would consistently underfund the legislation’s mandates year after year.”Although Kozol didn’t follow the traditional Prairie Lights reading format, he did thread the book’s content into his non-scripted lecture. His latest book, “Letters to a Young Teacher,” chronicles Kozol’s back-and-forth discourse with first-year teacher “Francesca,” who teaches inner-city first-graders in Boston. “This is the first cheerful book I’ve ever written,” Kozol told the crowd of educators. His other award-winning books; “Death at an Early Age,” “Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools,” “Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation,” and “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America,” expose the dark underbelly of the funding inequities facing inner-city schools — which serve a disproportionally larger rate of minority students

Kozol visited Francesca’s classroom on several occasions to do field research and to visit with the kids. Often, Kozol said Francesca put him on the spot by having him lead the teaching, or, as he puts it, “work as an unpaid substitute.” No stranger to teaching in inner-city Boston, Kozol’s teaching career began in Boston 30 years earlier, when his life was transformed by history during the civil rights period.

In 1964, Kozol had returned to the U.S. from Paris, where he had lived after attending Oxford University in England. He had planned on pursuing a doctorate degree in English literature at Harvard, but the news of the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi struck Kozol’s sense of justice. “That was the first time it dawned upon me that a terrible injustice had occurred in our nation,” Kozol said. “I couldn’t understand why it had taken so long for me to see what was happening to minority students in our schools. They are the outcasts of our ingenuity.”

Three years after the murders, Kozol landed his first teaching job in the Boston public school system, where he was fired during the final week of the school year. “On a whim, I decided to pick up a Langston Hughes book of poems at our local communist book store, I mean Harvard University book store, and I read one poem. The next day I was fired for `curriculum deviation.’”

Despite being fired, Kozol was hired by the top suburban school system in Boston, which doubled his previous salary while cutting his class size almost in half, from 35 to 19. “It was then I realized and learned how unjust our country can be to children – a gratuitous self-inflicted wound for a modern Democracy, if you will,” Kozol said. “We have the tools and means to provide every student with a top-tier education, and the fact that we don’t do this is as if we’re committing an act of social suicide. It’s not just that it denigrates people, but it’s something deeper than that and more pathological. We boast that we’re the greatest country, but we could also be the most decent and wisest nation in the world, but we are not.”

During his stint with Francesca and her students, Kozol gathered combined observational research to examine NCLB by putting a collective face on the legislation. While observing Francesca’s rapport develop with her students, Kozol witnessed a mystical chemistry evolve. “There’s nothing like that kind of chemistry in NCLB, which is more fear-based.”

“Francesca refused to teach a test-prep lesson, refused to drill her 6-year-olds for standardized exams, but rather, instilled her own sense of contagious jubilation and exhilaration into learning,” Kozol added. “In the end, most of her kids did very well on their exams, which suggests that the satisfaction found in the act of learning is always more effective, and certainly more enjoyable than learning from a feared exam.”

While traveling around the country and visiting schools, Kozol also witnessed another trend regarding the mission statement of schools located in urban school districts. “Children in these schools are being trained, specifically, to help achieve economic purposes. At a school in Columbus, Ohio, they had a mission statement posted on the wall of a first-grade classroom that read: `The mission of our school is to develop products that will sharpen our nation’s competitive edge in the competitive market place.”

Francesca’s response to this, when Kozol told her about it was: “Why would I give a damn about the global economy in my classroom? Better yet, why should first graders be worried about this? I refuse to steal away their childhood.”

Kozol highlighted a number of other consequences related to the fallout of NCLB, including the toll it has taken on new teachers entering the profession. While out recruiting teachers, Kozol observed that the quality of teachers entering the profession today is far superior to what he witnessed during the `60s. “Francesca is one of these people; however, 50 percent of her peers quit within the first three years of teaching,” Kozol said. “And, invariably, the number one reason these teachers quit is attributed to the current mania of testing that’s being forced upon them by the federal law of NCLB.”

Julie Englander, the host of Prairie Lights Live, asked Kozol why teachers are reluctant to express their feeling about the problems that exist in the public school system. Kozol argued that, traditionally, teachers have been trained that a professional doesn’t engage in anything provocative or overtly adversarial. “Another reason I think teachers are often silent right now is because this right-wing juggernaut has put everyone on the defensive, so they’re scrambling to pump out these test scores,” Kozol added. “Teachers are the best witnesses as to what happens in the classroom, not the think tanks or bureaucrats who run around pushing their testing agenda. Teachers need a national network where their voices can be heard.”

Putting his words to action, Kozol helped create “Education Action,” an online network for teachers, parents, students and community members who want to advocate for justice in the public schools and start holding politicians accountable. “There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that would hold a little third-grade girl accountable for her performance in a standardized exam, but does not hold the president and Congress accountable,” Kozol said. Education Action’s web site has a number of suggestions for revising NCLB.

Kozol, who says he has been under constant fire by members of the political right wing, refuses to give any ground when it comes to standing up for restoring a more just and equitable education system. “I don’t care what they do to me now. I’m too old to bite my tongue,” he said. “No matter who I am and no matter what the price is to pay, I intend to keep on fighting in this struggle.”

Jonathan Kozol signs books after the event