Grassley Once Called Nussle a ‘Little Grassley’

It’s often said that in politics – or in life, for that matter – who you know is more important than what you know.

If that’s true, then credit unions should be in great shape when it comes to their federal tax exemption.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has decided to give up the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee and take over the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee. If you remember, CUNA President/CEO Jim Nussle was a Republican House member from the Hawkeye state from 1991 to 2007.

So, it would stand to reason that Nussle and Grassley had at least a casual acquaintance.

But it goes much further than that.

In 2007, President George W. Bush nominated Nussle to head the Office of Management and Budget. And when Nussle testified before the Senate Budget Committee in July of that year, Grassley introduced Nussle to the panel.

“I have known Jim Nussle for nearly 27 years,” Grassley told the panel. “I first met him when he was a student at Luther College in Northeast Iowa. He drove me around in an old Ford during my campaign in 1980. He did not charge anything for doing it.”

And when Nussle decided to run for Congress at age 29, Grassley was more than happy to help him. He explained that he had five kids and wanted one of them to be in politics.

“They hated politics because I had been in it and spent so much time with it,” Grassley said.

He added, “So I saw Jim as a little Grassley.”

Well, if blood is thicker than water, there are worse things for Nussle to be called than “a little Grassley.”

Banking Committee Democrats Angling

There is no shortage of prospective Democratic candidates for president and several of them are sitting senators.

During the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, three potential Democratic candidates, Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kamala Harris of California and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, took center stage.

But in the upcoming Congress, the Senate Banking Committee, the hotbed of most credit union-related legislation, will have two of its own vying for attention.

It’s been well known that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been exploring the possibility of running for president. She has made consumer protection the hallmark of her time in the Senate.

Well now, fresh off his reelection victory, the Banking Committee’s ranking Democrat, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, says he’s thinking of throwing his hat in the ring.

Ohio is a swing state in any presidential election and it was clear this election that Buckeye State voters were willing to split their ticket, reelecting Brown while voting against Democrat Richard Cordray in the gubernatorial race.

Brown may be the quintessential anti-Trump. He prides himself on being a bit rumpled and speaks bluntly in a gravelly voice.

And in the most radical difference between himself and the incumbent president, Brown actually likes journalists.

In fact, he’s married to one: Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz.

Is That the Best They Can Do?

When Congress established yet another bipartisan, joint committee to examine the budget and appropriations process this year, budget watchers were understandably dubious.

After all, Congress has studied and studied and studied the budget process, and nothing has happened. And Congress has a budget process, but the House and Senate don’t use it.

It’s got deadlines and everything. But year after year, it’s ignored.

Well, this new select panel is supposed to issue its recommendations by the end of this month.

So far, the co-chairs of the committee, House Budget Committee Chairman Steve Womack (R-Ariz.) and House Appropriations ranking Democrat Nita Lowey of New York, have issued their proposal.

The committee started marking up that plan earlier this month and is scheduled to resume Nov. 27 – three days before its deadline to issue recommendations.

And what’s the revolutionary idea the panel has come up with so far?

Biennial budgeting.It’s an old idea that’s been kicking around for years. It’s been proposed and proposed and proposed. And it’s been rejected and rejected and rejected.

The congressional committee and its chairs simply did not want to give up all the power they had to screw up the budget process every year in favor of one that would allow them to screw it up only every two years.

We’ll see what happens this time around, but don’t bet the farm on it succeeding.

Fake News

I recently did something that gave me a great deal of satisfaction – I called out a Facebook acquaintance for posting fake news. (I can’t call him a Facebook Friend because he dumped me a couple of months ago for causing a kerfuffle.)

Anyway, I periodically look at his postings just for fun. This time, I found one that sounded particularly fishy – and it was. The story was posted in the wake of the Trump White House having revoked the White House credentials of CNN reporter Jim Acosta.

President Obama, as the story goes, had Brenda Lee, a Georgia reporter, forcibly removed from Air Force One because of her anti-abortion position. The story came with a photo of Lee being carried by security personnel on the tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport, with Air Force One in the background.

Surely, we all would have heard about this, right?

A cursory search would show that Lee was never on the plane, most likely never had White House credentials and was being carried on the tarmac as a result of refusing to obey instructions from security personnel.

I flagged the content as questionable and sent my acquaintance a note saying the story had been debunked and was phony, and I requested he take it down. It disappeared, either because Facebook took it down or he did.

And it gave me a nice feeling of satisfaction for having done it.

Try it yourself.

David Baumann is a correspondent-at-large for CU Times. He can be reached at dbaumann@cutimes.com.