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Grassley says Supreme Court nominees were ‘absolutely’ honest during hearings

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July 12th, 2022 by Ric Hanson

(Radio Iowa) – A few Republicans in the U-S Senate complain they were “misled” by several now-Supreme Court justices about abortion during confirmation hearings, but Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley isn’t among them. Grassley says the nominees were “absolutely” honest with him when they appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “They never know what they’re going to hear,” Grassley says. “You don’t know what’s going to come down the road. You have to give the best answers to questions you can and that’s what they gave.”

Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska say the high court’s recent ruling on Roe versus Wade was inconsistent with precedent. Collins says Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh had said in their testimony how they’d support the nation’s long-standing precedents. Grassley has a different view on affirming views that have stood for decades. “We’re just lucky that precedents can be overturned,” Grassley says. “We’d still have segregated schools in the United States if we didn’t have Brown overturn Plessy 50 years before that.”

Grassley says he has no complaint about the three newest appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court, saying they’re doing exactly what they should be doing, making decisions based on facts and the law. “And that’s what they did in the case of Roe,” Grassley says. “They made a decision based on the fact that the decision made 50 years ago was the wrong decision because there’s nothing in the Constitution about abortion.”

Grassley says the high court’s ruling to refer any decisions on abortion back to the states is the correct one, so those decisions can be made by elected officials and not by appointed justices.