Deather Chuck Grassley's Many Healthcare Duplicities Earn Him This Week's GOP Hypocrite Award

Chuck Grassley

While the whole death panel lie has mostly been propagated by unemployed people, especially those who don't have the responsibility of an elected office, there is at least one notable exception to be found in the senior senator from Iowa.

Thing is, we've got to take this one nice and slow, because Sen. Chuck Grassley's hypocrisy on this one issue is onion-like in its many layers.

Even though he's been granted the status of a major player in the reform debate, Grassley clearly has no problem lying about the healthcare bill making its way through Congress. He's even gone so low as to lie about Britain's system and suggest that Sen. Ted Kennedy would be allowed to die if he were a citizen there, a statement one British surgeon called "the most ludicrous thing I've heard."

But it's not the lies that earned Grassley the prestigious GOP Hypocrite of the Week Award. It's his duplicity. As we reported earlier this week:

Although many a Republican has tacitly approved of the "deather" cause, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has been quite the proponent. After repeating wild claims about death panels well after they were debunked, Grassley announced last week they would be stripping end-of-life counseling services out of the healthcare bill moving through the Senate "because of the way they could be misinterpreted."

Hmm, misinterpreted? Perhaps he's referring to the people who believe that President Obama wants their grandma dead. I wonder where anyone would get that idea!

Oh, that's it; people got that "misinterpretation" from Grassley himself, the lawmaker who recently said, "We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma."

Amy Sullivan at Time's Swampland Blog points out that, like most Republicans who were around to vote for Bush's Medicare overhaul in 2003, Grassley approved of "death panels" when he voted for the boondoggle that is the Medicare prescription drug program.

And hypocrisy doesn't always have to operate backwards in time. On Dylan Ratigan's "Morning Meeting" this Monday on MSNBC, Grassley blamed the whole deather story on "distortion from the far left bringing up these end-of-life concerns, which are not the issues we ought to be talking about."

As Professor Darren Lenard Hutchinson points out here, Grassley's hypocrisy has many levels. The senator's supposed distaste for government intervention in the highly private decisions over life and death apparently does not extend to abortion, the death penalty, or Terri Schiavo. In each of these cases, Grassley thinks the government should be able to decide who lives and who dies.

But allowing doctors to bill Medicare for end-of-life consultations? Only Hitler would do that!

The idea that anyone would paint the Grassley as a bipartisan deal-maker at this point is absurd. Ezra Klein summarized Grassley's retreat from bipartisanship thusly:

If the Gang of Six reaches a compromise that the Senate Republicans don't support, Grassley will abandon that compromise, regardless of the fact that he's the guy who built it. The Gang of Six, in other words, falls apart if it can't assure a vote of 76. Since it seems virtually impossible that such a vote will manifest, it seems similarly unlikely that Grassley will sign his name to the final bill. And Grassley, remember, was willing to say all this publicly. His version of bipartisanship is strikingly partisan.

The fact that Grassley is considered a leader in the reform debate in this country after all of his lies and hypocrisy is a sad commentary on the state of healthcare itself. Which is why he's our GOP Hypocrite of the Week.

Remember our motto: So many Republican hypocrites, so little time.

Catch up with you soon.

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This is Chuck Grassley's first GOP Hypocrite of the Week Award. Welcome to the club. You can see a list of all previous nominees here.