An open letter to Sen. Grassley

The following is an open letter to Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley:

Dear Sen. Grasssley:

Over the past several years, I have had the honor of interviewing you a few times. You had a special relationship with my former boss and you visited Belle Plaine several times. On several other occasions, your staff called our office to set up phone interviews with you from your Washington office.

So it is with these memories in mind that I must regretfully say I am disappointed in you. For many years, you have represented this state admirably. In fact, on at least one occasion I was able to tell you that even though I am a registered Democrat, I always voted for you when I had the chance. You always represented your constituents well, often going against the wishes of your party. Your service has been a no-nonsense style as you often were not afraid to cut through the red tape that Washington seems so fond of to get results for us.

But now, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, you have apparently fallen in line with your party's leadership, drank the Kool-Aid of obstructionism and decided you will not allow any discussion of a nomination for a judge to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court.

What happened to you? Surely with your experience, you have the opportunity to show the way to other members of the Senate and allow the government to function even in an election year. Of course, President Obama is not from your party. But he has shown that he won't make any radical nominations. In fact, one of the rumored candidates is a woman from our state who you wholeheartedly supported for another judgeship. She went on to gain unanimous approval from the Senate.

Don't you think there is a good chance that our president, who has 12 years experience as a constitutional professor, realizes the gravity and importance of this nomination?

You have said that you think that the new justice should be appointed by the next president. Are you saying that President Obama should refrain from doing his job for his last year? If you employed a worker for your farm and signed him to a multi-year contract, surely you would not want to pay him for the final year of that contract if he failed to do the work. Perhaps more importantly, would you trust a President Trump (God forbid) to nominate the next justice?

I can only guess that you think that if you join your Republican colleagues in blocking this nomination you can somehow save a dying political party. But you risk doing this at the expense of what has been a truly noble legacy of your service. Do you want to be remembered as someone who allowed partisan politics to govern his final months in office? You are running for re-election, but this move might be just the thing that pushes the voting majority to the other candidate.

You still can change your mind. Take the high road. Please reconsider.

Currently a disappointed constituent,

Jeff Orvis

What's this Trump candidacy all about?

By Jeff Orvis

At first it seemed like just another publicity stunt. It had been a few minutes since Donald Trump had been the center of attention on a TV show, voting people off with a robust “You're fired!” But when he announced he would be a candidate for president, I doubt few took him very seriously.

From the outset, the Trump candidacy was anything but normal. As the richest person vying for the nation's top office, he vowed that he would not need to solicit campaign funds, that he was his own man and would fully fund his own campaign. On the plus side, he would not have to answer to any big campaign contributor. On the down side, he would apparently not have to answer on any of the voting public.

Many of us thought this must be a joke, that we would wake up one morning and he would say, “April fool!” There would be plenty of time to turn our attention to more traditional candidates to decide who would be the leader of the free world. So far, we haven't heard those words and as the weeks and months continue to dwindle before the November election, Trump continues to jet around the country on his own plane, telling it like it is, at least how he thinks it is. He continues to draw media attention with more and more outrageous statements each day.

Many of us are far from happy with the way we elect our president and other public officials. The little guy seems less and less important and thanks to Supreme Court rulings and the failure of Congress to pass any meaningful election spending reform, money means more than votes when it comes to winning an election.

So after months of growing weary of constant campaign commercials and appearances by dozens of candidates, I suspect that some people are drawn to Trump as a sort of anti-candidate, as some kind of a joke.

The thing is, there are a growing number of voters who aren't laughing anymore. They are being won over by his campaign style, his bluntness and unfortunately aren't considering just what four years of a Trump presidency might be like. And I'm beginning to wonder if even Trump himself has stopped to realize what at least four years in the White House might really be like.

Being the President is much more than brokering a business deal, or building a Manhattan high rise or an Atlantic City casino. It is not a monarchy. You have to know how to compromise with 535 other men and women in Congress. And as much as we might like, it's tough to fire them if you can't get them to act as you think they should.

Despite how we might not agree with some of the decisions our Presidents have made, we have grown to expect them to know how to rejoice in national accomplishments as well as know how to lend a sympathetic ear to people grieving from the loss of soldiers or innocent people in the line of fire during domestic massacres.

A former president said, “The buck stops here.” We expect our president to know more than how to invest that buck. In fact, one of the things Trump would have to do if he was elected would be to surrender all of his financial dealings to a blind trust until he left office. For someone who has spent years playing with vast amounts of money, can we really expect him to turn over the keys to someone else while he motorcades to Andrews Air Force Base to meet a military transport with the bodies of dead soldiers?

I guess I'm not fully convinced Trump will see this campaign through until November. As the Republican party scrambles to find someone who can sideline him, he continues to laugh all the way to the ballot box in one primary after another.

It's clear that Trump is a guy who likes to be in charge. When he suddenly realizes that even as president, he can't fully be in charge, he might decide to end his candidacy and throw his support behind someone else. Of course, he has alienated virtually every other candidate of both parties. But maybe that's what he wants. The next few months will be very interesting.

Looking for a holy endorsement?

By Jeff Orvis

As we are thankfully entering the home stretch in the presidential caucus race lunacy, have you noticed the latest weapon in the arsenal of several candidates? God.

Some of the folks who want to be our next president have recognized that many of us who live in this state are proud, God-fearing folks. I'm sure they would love to have a verbal endorsement from the Big Guy, but short of that, their campaign commercials assure us that they are true believers. Of course then in their next commercial they claim they are the best bet for keeping us safe by pledging to bomb our foes into oblivion. Then they say the other candidates are no good for us and we are certain to face disaster if the other guy is nominated and elected.

At least so far they have stopped short of claiming that they are more religious than their opponents, but stay tuned, there's still time for that.

Then there are the people who are campaigning to let God in our schools and in our city halls and court houses. I've probably written about this before, but as a reminder, wasn't this country founded, at least in part, by people who were attempting to escape the government-mandated religion of England?

I understand where some of my well-meaning friends are coming from. Many of us are taught from an early age that belief in God is the only way to live and to eternal life. We are also instructed to share our belief with everyone we meet. But I have never heard, at least from the New Testament, any decree that we must cram our beliefs down the throats of our neighbors, my way or the highway.

What makes this country great is the fact that we are a wonderful melting pot of folks with all sorts of beliefs. One of our basic beliefs is that we should not infringe on the rights of others to believe what they want, as long as they do it in a peaceful manner.

Several years ago, my mom was facing emergency surgery. She was a life-long Christian who took every opportunity to profess her belief. As she was meeting with her surgical team, she told them that she believed that there would be someone else in that operating room guiding their every move. She told them God would be there. Then her anesthesiologist had a perfect two-word comment, “And Buddha.” Those words assured her that while he was not necessarily a Christian, he believed in a superior being that guided his every move as well.

And that's why I object to having one organized religion as a part of our public school curriculum, why I don't think a monument of the Ten Commandments has any place on public property and why we should question any candidate for any office that seems to indicate that a vote for him or her is necessarily a vote for God.

The day we elect a president with only a Christian-based agenda is the day we relegate our Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim and other neighbors to second-class citizenship. I don't have any problem with a candidate professing his or her faith and saying he or she lives by the principles they believe in. But the inference that if you aren't Christian, you should look for somewhere else to live is just plain wrong. What do we say to that Buddhist anesthesiologist or that Jewish lawyer or merchant or that Islamic professor of ancient history?

There would be great value in a public school unit on the world's comparative religions. It could lead to greater understanding an tolerance. But only if it was taught with the help of representatives of other religions as well as Christianity.

Late on Christmas Eve, I watched a tremendous special, “May Peace Prevail on Earth.” It was presented by a group called the United Religions Initiative. According to the group's web site, “URI is a global grassroots interfaith network that cultivates peace and justice by engaging people to bridge religious and cultural differences and work together for the good of their communities and the world.”

While it was billed as a “Christmas special,” it did not attempt to promote one religion over another, but to recognize that billions of people around the world viewed Christmas Eve as the ultimate holy night and to celebrate those beliefs.

In an era where we are increasingly suspicious of some small factions of certain “religions” for their professed violent beliefs, isn't this the best time to check out what the URI is attempting to put forth? Isn't tolerance and understanding and not only what this country was founded on but a gift from God?

Something to think about.