Sen. Grassley shuns Obama's bipartisan praise

  Sen. Grassley responds to Iowa town hall question

Senator Charles Grassley R-IA apparently did not want to be seen as getting to close to the Obama health care plan, so one day after President Obama praised him for his bipartisan work, Grassley shunned Obama’s praise by catering to his Republican base and perpetuating the fear over the so-called "death panels".

On two separate occasions during town hall meetings in Iowa, Grassley spread the fear on the now “dead” end-of-life counseling sessions which Republicans sunk their teeth into and literally ripped apart. In their usual hateful, paranoid style, they turned simple living will consultations between a patient and his or her doctor, into some sort of imaginary government run death panel that was going push grandpa over the cliff and force grandma to sign a death waiver so they could pull the plug on her and save health care money.

Early on Wednesday, Grassley said:

"But there’s some people in Washington that think it’s a terrible problem that grandma’s laying in a hospital bed with tubes in her, and think that there ought to be some government policy that enters in to that. I’m just on the opposite. (‘Bless his sweet soul’ - applause) I think that’s a family and a religious and or ethical thing that needs to be dealt with. And there’s some fear because in the House bill, there is counseling for end-of-life, and from that standpoint, you have every right to fear. You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life. You ought to have counseling 20 years before you're going to die. You ought to plan these things out. And I don't have any problem with things like living wills. But they ought to be done within the family. We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma."

Later that day at another Iowa town hall meeting, he revisited the same subject, and as federal politicians often do, he had trouble remembering whether he was talking from a church pulpit or acting as a Senator of the United States.

But let me tell you why you get that people worked up about it. He gets worked up about it because of this business of if you’ve got a government run health care program, and then you’ve got the crowding out that you have and then you go to a Canadian style plan, and then everybody starts studying what England does…(Woman says evenly without shouting: “but you know that’s not what they’re asking for.”) “Let me finish.” (Crowd uproar over interruption) Grassley shouts, “I didn’t say that. I didn’t say that see. I didn’t say that. When you couple this with all the other fears that people have, and what they do in England, then you get the idea that somebody’s going to decide grandma’s lived too long. (Woman responds unintelligibly) (Crowd murmurs)

Grassley continues, “Now I think, I think the best thing to do, if you want to get people to think about end of life, number one, Jesus Christ is the place to start. (“Amen!” applause).After that and the physical life as opposed to your eternal life, Uh, it ought to be done within the family and considered a religious and ethical issue and not something politicians deal with.(applause).

Where was Chuck Grassley’s wish to keep the government out of family end-of-life decisions in 2005 when Terri Schiavo’s husband Michael Schiavo was trying to carry out his wife’s end-of-life wishes? Instead of letting the courts rule on the disagreement between Michael Schiavo and Terri’s parents, the United States House of Representatives and Senate feverishly worked on a bill to overrule the court’s anticipated decision, in favor of Michael Schiavo to have her disconnected from artificial methods of nourishment. President Bush cut his vacation short and rushed back to Washington to sign the bill before she was disconnected. Chuck Grassley is right the government has no business interfering in life and death decisions whether it be to sustain life or end life.

But Chuck and the Republicans always want it both ways, no government involvement unless they want the government to be involved for religious moral reasons. In the end, he and his self-righteous moral crusaders have won, as they succeeded in killing the end-of-life provision. Too bad Terri Schiavo hadn’t had a living will. It would have saved Michael Schiavo seven years of heartache, it would have saved the government thousands upon thousands of dollars in court costs, and George W. Bush could have finished his vacation.

Photo credit: Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, answers a question from Sheryl Prather during a town meeting on health care reform Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009 in Adel, Iowa. (AP Photo/Steve Pope)