Grassley Joins Senate Career and Technical Education Caucus
WASHINGTON – Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa has joined the Senate Career and Technical Education Caucus, focused on making sure students have the technical skills needed to succeed in highly specialized workplaces.
“I met with several Iowa students who asked me to join the caucus,” Grassley said. “They emphasized the important point that job success and economic growth are tied to skills training. Students who have the training employers need have the best chance at filling jobs in high demand fields. I hear from employers across Iowa who are looking to fill good, well-paying jobs if they can find skilled employees. We need to make sure Iowans are in a position to take advantage of those opportunities.”
The caucus holds briefings and other events on developments in the field to help make sure Congress is hearing the latest information to inform policy debates that support career and technical education.
Career and technical education programs help ensure that students have the skills needed for high wage, high skill and high demand career fields. These fields include nursing, allied health, construction, information technology, energy, cybersecurity, sustainability and other areas that keep the United States competitive in the global economy. Iowa employers with needs for highly skilled workers include the fields of advanced manufacturing, biosciences and financial services.
Fields requiring skilled trades are the hardest jobs to fill. Career and technical education programs help employers close the skills gap needed to fill jobs and propel economic opportunity and growth. The Senate and the House of Representatives each has a Career and Technical Education Caucus, demonstrating the strong recognition in Congress for this area of education as a priority.
Grassley has a long record of supporting career and technical education. Last week, the Senate passed his resolution with Sen. Joni Ernst honoring Iowa community colleges on 50 years of service. The community colleges partner with employers on education and training to meet local workforce needs.
The education law enacted last December included bipartisan provisions from Grassley and co-sponsors that make certain the needs of high ability students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, are included in federal education policy. The bipartisan measure is the TALENT Act, or the To Aid Gifted and High-Ability Learners by Empowering the Nation's Teachers Act.
On foster youth, the law included the bipartisan Educational Stability of Foster Youth Act, which Grassley co-authored, that supports students in the foster care system by strengthening connections between child welfare agencies and state and local education institutions. Often, schools may be the only familiar place for a child in foster care, and the measure helps make sure that those kids can go to school in a safe, stable environment. Grassley is founder and co-chair of the Caucus on Foster Youth.
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Prepared Floor Statement of Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa
Chairman, Senate Committee on the Judiciary
The Supreme Court vacancy, Executive Power, and Checks and Balances
Monday, March 7, 2016
Mr. President, the American people are divided. And the divided government the American people delivered over the last several election cycles reflects those divisions.
Our constitutional republic is designed with a series of checks and balances.
As any branch gets too powerful, or exceeds its authority and tries to impose on the American people policies they don’t want, the people express their will through the electoral process.
This is what we’ve witnessed during the last several election cycles.
Over the last few years, our current President has engaged in a systematic and massive overreach of his executive power.
But as he has done so, the people responded.
Since he was first sworn into office in 2009, nearly 70 additional Republicans were elected to the People’s House.
And there are 13 more Republican senators today than there were in January of 2009.
In January of 2014, frustrated that the people’s representatives wouldn’t enact his liberal policies, the President said, famously, that he’d use ‘a pen and a phone’ and impose his agenda anyway.
Just a few months later, in November 2014, the people spoke and sent 9 additional Republicans to the United States Senate.
This is the beauty of our system of checks and balances, and our constitutional design.
Mr. President, the Framers knew a thing or two about executive overreach.
They had first-hand experience with an executive who imposed his will on the people unilaterally.
That’s why we have checks and balances.
That’s why we have separation of powers.
And that’s why our Constitution is designed so that no President can appoint a Supreme Court Justice with a pen and a phone.
So, as we continue to discuss what’s at stake during this presidential election, and whether the American people want to elect a President who will appoint yet another liberal Justice, I wanted to take a few minutes to review some of this President’s efforts to expand the reach of his power and impose his will on the people.
This President has pushed the envelope at every turn.
In my view, he has sought to impose his will on the American people in ways, and to a degree, that this nation has never before witnessed.
What is striking about this President’s record before the Supreme Court, is that even with a court as liberal as ours, the Obama Administration still has the lowest winning record of any President going back to at least the Truman Administration.
Now, when presented with this undeniable fact, the President’s apologists quickly grasp for nearest bogus defense: most notably, they claim the Supreme Court is more ideologically hostile to this President than previous courts were to other Presidents.
That's a crafty argument.
But it's what Justice Scalia would have called 'pure applesauce.'
Leading Supreme Court analysts declared the last term of the Supreme Court, even with Justice Scalia, as the most liberal since the 1960’s.
So the President’s defenders can’t blame the court’s make-up for its rebuke of his expansive claims of power.
And of course, this explanation fails to account for the facts that President Eisenhower took office and litigated in a Supreme Court with eight Justices appointed by Democrats, or that President Nixon’s administration began with an even more liberal court than Eisenhower.
No, this President hasn’t lost cases because the court is ideologically hostile.
The court has rejected this President’s power grabs because they are based on ideology and an unwillingness to recognize that the law constrains that power.
And of course, all too often, the President's claims are supported by an Office of Legal Counsel and Solicitor General’s office that seem unwilling to tell the President that his impulse for expanded power is flatly contrary to law.
Let me briefly describe a few examples.
The President's lawyers argued he could ignore the Senate’s determination of when it was in session in order to make recess appointments.
No President in our history ever claimed that recess appointments were permissible in that situation.
But the Office of Legal Counsel, once considered the ‘crown jewel’ of the Department of Justice, offered a tortured justification to sanction that assertion of power.
If this view of presidential power were allowed to stand, the President could bypass the Senate with ease to install individuals in powerful government positions, with no check from the Senate, as the Constitution envisions.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court disagreed, 9-0.
But this isn’t the only example.
The Obama administration argued the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could resolve an employment discrimination case between a minister and the church that fired her.
With this argument, the Supreme Court found, the Obama administration managed to violate two different provisions of the First Amendment at the same time.
It violated the Free Exercise of Religion Clause, because if the President’s argument carried the day, the government could interfere with a church's religious doctrines.
And it violated the Establishment Clause, because if this President had his way, the federal government could get into the business of selecting a church’s ministers.
The Supreme Court rejected those claims, 9-0.
On the regulatory front, in a series of rulings, the Supreme Court rejected the President’s arguments that agencies can deny the ability of private citizens to seek relief against regulatory overreach.
For instance, the court rejected the EPA’s power to force a homeowner – through escalating fines – to comply with an order, while at the same time denying that homeowner the ability to challenge the order in court.
The Supreme Court rejected the EPA’s claims, 9-0.
In another case, the court held, contrary to the position advanced by the Army Corps of Engineers, a landowner can sue in court for just compensation for a taking when the government-caused flooding of his property is temporary and recurring.
Again, the Supreme Court rejected the government’s position, 8-0.
When the IRS attempted to enforce a taxpayer summons, while at the same time denying the taxpayer the right to question the IRS officials about their reasons for the summons, the Supreme Court rebuked the administration 9-0.
In still another case, the court rejected the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s argument that its decisions aren’t subject to judicial review when it concludes, by its own estimation, it fulfilled its duties to attempt conciliation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Once again, the Supreme Court rejected this claim, 9-0.
Similarly, when a veteran’s benefits were denied, and the appeal wasn’t filed within a certain time period, the Department of Veterans Affairs turned around and denied that veteran the ability to seek judicial review.
The Supreme Court rejected the VA’s position, 8-0.
And when the FCC changed its policies midstream regarding isolated examples of indecent language, the Supreme Court found, 8-0, the FCC had violated due process.
These are important rulings.
Far too often, this administration imposes government power against the people, while brushing aside important procedural safeguards.
And as Justice Frankfurter once wrote, “The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.”
Consider, as well, areas in criminal law where the Obama administration pressed positions that erode individual freedom.
This President’s lawyers argued the police could install a GPS device on a vehicle, and then use that device to monitor the car’s movements, without a search warrant under the Fourth Amendment.
I don’t know what would be left of the Fourth Amendment if the Supreme Court had upheld the President's claim that the government could operate in that manner.
Thankfully, the Supreme Court rejected that argument, as well. The vote tally was 9-0.
The court blocked Justice Department’s prosecution of a person under the Chemical Weapons Convention because the Convention didn’t reach the defendant’s simple assault.
Again, the Supreme Court rebuked this President, 9-0.
These are not the rulings of a Supreme Court that is ideologically hostile to the Obama administration.
Every one of these rulings was unanimous. Every one.
And there are still other Supreme Court decisions rejecting this President’s power grabs, where the vote tallies were much closer.
The President and his lawyers made utterly baseless arguments for executive and regulatory power in case after case.
In so many of these cases, the unifying thread underlying this President’s litigating position is the notion that the People are subservient to the federal government and its agencies, rather than other way around.
So far, the Supreme Court hasn’t agreed.
But, during this Presidential election, the American people should consider whether they want to elect a President who may nominate a Justice who will embrace such a vast expansion of executive and regulatory power.
I yield.
