Background and career
Charles Ernest Grassley (born September 17, 1933) is an American politician serving as the senior U.S. senator from Iowa, a seat he has held since 1981. Since 2025, he has been the president pro tempore of the United States Senate, a position he also held from 2019 to 2021. He is a member of the Republican Party. Grassley was first elected to public office in 1958, serving in the Iowa House of Representatives from 1959 to 1975. In 1974, he was elected to represent Iowa's 3rd congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1980 and reelected in 1986, 1992, 1998, 2004, 2010, 2016, and 2022. During his four decades in the Senate, Grassley has chaired the Finance Committee, the Narcotics Control Caucus, the Judiciary Committee, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and the Aging Committee. When Orrin Hatch retired in 2019, Grassley became the Senate's most senior Republican and its president pro tempore. When Patrick Leahy retired in 2023, Grassley became the dean of the Senate. Grassley is one of the longest-serving elected politicians in U.S. history, having consistently held elected office since 1959. At 93 years, 1 month and 13 days old, he is the oldest sitting United States senator, the longest-serving Republican in congressional history, and the sixth-longest-serving U.S. senator in history. He served as president pro tempore emeritus of the Senate from 2021 to 2025 before returning as president pro tempore.
Grassley was born on September 17, 1933 in New Hartford, Iowa. He is the son of Ruth (née Corwin) and Louis Arthur Grassley. He was the third of five children, with two brothers and two sisters. His paternal grandparents, Gottlieb and Bertha (Waak), emigrated from Germany and used the last name "Graeessle". Gottlieb committed suicide by hanging in April 1900. Gottlieb's son, Charles, also died by suicide, shooting himself in his car on November 4, 1935. In August 1920, Ruth Grassley was among the first four women to vote in Iowa. Her son did not know about this until many years after her death, when a constituent showed him an article about it. The women had voted in a school election. In 2019, he gave a speech describing her achievement. Grassley was raised on a farm; his childhood home did not have electricity or indoor plumbing. Grassley's parents were originally Democrats but switched their allegiance to Republican after Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for a third term. Grassley graduated from New Hartford Community High School in 1951. He was class president three times and valedictorian of his class of 17 students. At Iowa State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Iowa), he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1955 and a Master of Arts in political science in 1956. He pursued a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Iowa, but did not complete the degree. During his time as a student, Grassley joined the social-professional Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity. In 1955, Grassley's brother Louis Grassley Jr. died as a result of a traffic accident in New Hartford. His brother Kenneth died in 2001 and his sister Lois in 2006. Chuck became the last surviving Grassley sibling in 2014, when his sister Genevieve died.
While he was at the Teachers College, Grassley had a job in Waterloo running an IBM machine. In the 1950s, he worked in factories in Iowa, first as a sheet metal shearer at Universal Hoist Company in Waterloo. He worked in an assembly line at Waterloo Register Company from 1961 until it closed in 1971. From 1967 to 1968, he taught at Charles City College.
Grassley first ran to represent Butler County in the Iowa House in 1956, announcing his candidacy in February 1956. He ran in the Republican primary against Wayne W. Ballhagen. Grassley lost with 1,042 votes to Ballhagen's 1,122. Grassley then ran in 1958 and won, representing parts of Butler County in the Iowa House of Representatives from 1959 to 1975. At 25, he was the youngest member of the Iowa House when he started his career. During his tenure, Grassley released "Grassley Reports", a weekly newsletter on the happenings in the Iowa State House published from 1959 to 1974. Grassley served in the United States House of Representatives from 1975 to 1981.
In November 1981, Grassley was one of 32 senators to sign a letter to President Reagan supporting Director of the Office of Management and Budget David Stockman. In August 1982, while the Reagan administration tried persuading senators to approve legislation authorizing the creation of a radio station for broadcasting to Cuba, Grassley joined fellow Iowa senator Roger Jepsen and Edward Zorinsky in seeking an amendment to the bill barring the Reagan administration from operating Radio Marti on that frequency or other commercial AM frequencies. In October 1983, Grassley voted against establishing a legal holiday to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. In 2015, an aide to Grassley said that he voted against the holiday due to an "economic decision both in the cost to the broader economy in lost productivity, and the cost to the taxpayers with the federal government closed". In 2004, Grassley co-sponsored legislation giving King a posthumous award, which became law on October 25 that year. On November 1, 1984, Grassley signed a one-page citation of contempt of Congress against Attorney General William French Smith due to Smith's not turning over files on an investigation into Navy shipbuilding. Assistant Attorney General Stephen S. Trott called the citation "out of place" since Grassley was not acting at a session of the Judiciary panel he led. In May 1987, the Senate Appropriations Committee defeated an attempt by Grassley to hasten payments of corn and other feed grain subsidies ahead of the scheduled payment taking place after October 1. Grassley's measure was also designed to unravel an accounting device lawmakers had used to make it appear that they were reducing spending for the incoming fiscal year. In October 1987, during a press briefing, Grassley accused Reagan of being "asleep at the switch" and botching the handling of Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination, adding that Bork's nomination had convinced him that the Reagan administration "has been terribly lucky for the last seven years" in other matters, including the economy and foreign policy. Later that month, Grassley likened the groups lobbying against Bork's nomination to the McCarthyism of the 1950s: "The big lie is standard operating procedure for some of these groups. All you have to do is repeat the same outrageous charges, and repeat them so often that people believe they are true." In November, as party leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee met on the Supreme Court nomination of Douglas H. Ginsburg, Grassley released the text of a letter he intended to send to the American Bar Association suggesting the association was dragging its feet in reviewing Ginsburg's record. After Ginsburg admitted having smoked marijuana, Grassley said, "You like to think people who are appointed to the Supreme Court respect the law." Grassley joined Jesse Helms in resisting the nomination of Anthony Kennedy, Reagan's next choice for the Supreme Court; he indicated that he would have preferred that Reagan instead nominate Judge Pasco Bowman II or Judge John Clifford Wallace. Grassley expressed distaste for "the people who are committed to changing the judiciary" and taking "the path of least resistance". In January 1989, as the Senate voted to schedule a vote within a month on a pay increase, Grassley asked how senators would decline federal program increases "come March and April if the first thing out of the box is a pay raise". In February, he was one of six senators to testify against the 50% pay increase scheduled to take effect the next week. In October, he was one of nine senators to vote against legislation intended to outlaw flag burning and other forms of flag defacement and joined Bob Dole and Orrin Hatch, the other two Republicans to vote against the bill, in voicing a preference for a constitutional amendment.
In January 1991, Grassley was one of only two Republican senators to vote against joining the international coalition to force Iraq out of Kuwait, the other being Mark Hatfield of Oregon. In August 1991, he became one of six Republicans on the Select Senate Committee on POW-MIA Affairs that would investigate the number of Americans still missing in the aftermath of the Vietnam War following renewed interest. In July 1998, President Bill Clinton listed Grassley among the members of Congress who had made it possible "for me to sign into law today the Internal Revenue Service Restructuring and Reform Act". On February 12, 1999, Grassley was one of 50 senators to vote to convict and remove Bill Clinton from office.
