Congratulating Senator Grassley On Casting His 12,000th Vote
Floor Speech
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Mr. President, last week the Senate marked two milestones. First, our colleague from Vermont cast vote No. 15,000. We all noted it at the time. And then our colleague from Iowa cast vote No. 12,000, and that is what we would like to note now.
It is true that Senator Grassley still has some catching up to do if he wants to overtake the Senator from Vermont, but there is more to this story than the top-line number. Out of those 12,000 votes our colleague has taken, the last 7,474 of them were taken consecutively. He hasn't missed a single vote since 1993. He has the second-longest consecutive voting record in Senate history, second place out of 1,963 Senators. That is pretty impressive.
Even so, we know our colleague never likes to settle for second. It is good for him, then, that he will soon grab gold in a different way. He is just a few months out from becoming the longest serving Senator in Iowa history, and yet he is one of the most energetic guys around here--a runner in every sense of the term.
He has a lot of fans in Iowa too. I don't think it is any great mystery why the people of Iowa keep sending him here. This is a Senator with a deep love for his State and a simple philosophy. When he is here in Washington, he is voting. When he is back in Iowa, he is out meeting Iowans. He makes a point to hold townhall-type events in each of Iowa's 99 counties every single year. He hasn't missed a single county in over three decades. No wonder he began his ascent into Twitter legend with four simple words: ``Attending events in Iowa.'' That tweet is hardly as infamous as ``assume deer dead'' or ``staff has now informed me of what a Kardashian is, I'm only left with more questions.'' It captures our colleague perfectly in less than 140 characters.
Here is something that captures him in at least that many calories. At the end of every annual 99-county swing, Senator Grassley has a ritual. He gets a Blizzard from Dairy Queen--sometimes chocolate, sometimes vanilla, but always, always swirled with Snickers. This year, he got to DQ so early he had to wait in the parking lot for it to open, and of course since this is the senior Senator from Iowa, he tweeted about it. Here is what he said: ``I'm at the Jefferson Iowa DairyQueen,'' he wrote, doing ``you know what!!!'' That is some tweet. But in this Dairy Queen story, you have the perfect metaphor for our colleague from Iowa--early riser, driven, devoted to tradition, open to change, and never afraid to mix it up. For this lover of dairy and devotee of his home State, it makes perfect sense. The people of Iowa are lucky to have him here fighting on their behalf.
Here is to another 99 counties. Here is to the 12,000-vote milestone the Senator from Iowa crossed last week.
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