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WASHINGTON - Sen. Charles Grassley may be the Senate's best-known watchdog, a relentless critic of government waste, fraud and abuse. But as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the Iowa Republican has endured a lot of abuse himself lately.
In trying to write a tax bill to pass the closely divided Senate, Grassley angered conservatives by proposing a plan that fell far short of President's Bush proposed $726-billion in tax cuts over 11 years.
House Republicans vowed to punish the three-term senator for initially dropping Bush's centerpiece proposal: elimination of the tax on stock dividends. Knowing that a final version of the bill will come out of a House-Senate conference, Grassley took the threats in stride.
"Well, I'm probably punished every day, but don't know it. If you're worried about what everybody thought about what you did, you'd ... be a nervous wreck," he said in an interview.
At age 69, the Senate's only working farmer and Iowa's most popular politician could be excused for settling back into some comfortable overstuffed chair.
Instead, Grassley remains the same gadfly he was 21 years ago when, as a new senator, he had little leverage but a lot of indignation over government waste and abuse.
"I found out as a freshman senator that there's a lot of things you can't get done around here because you are not a committee chairman," he said. "But you can do oversight by yourself."
Whistle-blower protections. Nursing home quality. Opening the Supreme Court to television cameras, cracking down on wasteful defense spending, fighting government secrecy and reining in what he sees as an abusive, arrogant FBI.
These are only a few of Grassley's diverse interests, and they have earned him plaudits from consumer advocates who don't generally view Republicans as their allies.
"He has been a visionary on the importance of whistle-blowers in protecting the taxpayer's interest," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group.
A former chairman of the Senate Aging Committee, Grassley is respected by advocates for the elderly for his investigations into nursing home neglect. But lawyers and lobbyists for nursing homes say Grassley panders to elderly voters rather than working on fixing problems.
A General Accounting Office analyst told Grassley in a 2000 committee hearing that the system used to rate homes for quality of care is deeply flawed. But Grassley still issues negative press releases against nursing homes based on the ratings - which suggests he wants to score political points rather than address difficult issues, one industry representative said.
Still, Grassley has been willing to take some tough votes. In 1991, for example, he was one of two Republican senators to vote against the congressional resolution authorizing the Persian Gulf War, saying he preferred sanctions against Iraq to military action.
But last year, when President Bush asked Congress to approve his campaign to topple Saddam Hussein, Grassley voted yes. Iraq's repeated flouting of United Nations resolutions in the 1990s led Grassley to conclude Hussein had to go.
Grassley's often-unconventional positions mirror those of the politician he most admires, another Iowa congressman named H.R. Gross.
Harold Royce Gross, a Republican, used his mastery of House rules and his willingness to hang around the chamber at all hours to object to pork-barrel spending deals.
"Gross was willing to be disliked. He took it as a kind of badge of honor," said Tom Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archives in Washington.
When Gross retired in 1974, Grassley won his House seat and assumed his mantle as taxpayer watchdog. In 1980, he was elected to the Senate, stumbling three years later into the national spotlight when he invited a low-level Defense Department analyst named Chuck Spinney to brief him on the Pentagon budget.
Spinney had a reputation as an expert, and Grassley wanted to pump him for information about wasteful defense spending. But Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger wouldn't let Spinney visit the senator.
So Grassley went over to the Pentagon and started roaming the halls, looking for Spinney. A Weinberger deputy intercepted the senator and offered to brief him instead. Grassley said: "Well, you can brief me, but I'm going to go see Spinney!"
It wasn't so easy. Grassley had to hold a congressional hearing to finally meet Spinney, whom he made his star witness. Reporters caught wind of the controversy and packed the hearing room. And the obscure budget analyst ended up on the cover of Time magazine for a story about wasteful Pentagon spending.
The publicity gave Grassley momentum for passing what would become his best-known legislative accomplishment: the 1986 whistle-blower amendments to the False Claims Act.
Grassley's legislation allowed private citizens to initiate court cases when they had evidence that their employers were defrauding the government. Whistle-blowers get on average 15 percent of any settlement or award.
The government, meanwhile, has recouped more than $10-billion from private companies and individuals, many accused of fraud in defense contracting or Medicare, since Grassley's amendments passed in 1986.
More recently, Grassley has been on the FBI's case for its alleged harassment of internal whistle-blowers. His support for the FBI's Minneapolis counsel Coleen Rowley, who exposed missteps in the Zacarias Moussaoui case, helped protect her from reprisals after she spoke out.
Grassley also demanded an explanation from the FBI for why it seized, without a warrant, an unclassified FBI document mailed from an Associated Press reporter in the Philippines to a colleague in Washington last year.
Grassley speaks in a slow, flat Midwestern accent and returns to Iowa most weekends, where he sometimes helps his son, Robin, work the family farm. They grow corn and soybeans, and the house in which Grassley was born still stands on their land.
He has always been interested in government. In 1947, when he was in the seventh grade, Grassley saw a list of Harry Truman's Cabinet members on a classroom blackboard. Problem was, the names were all wrong, Grassley told the teacher.
"She said, "If you're so smart, who are they?' And I could list every one of them," Grassley recalled, laughing.
Grassley is neither a far-right conservative nor a closet Democrat. He reliably supports the party line on issues such as the confirmation of conservative federal judges.
He rarely votes with liberal groups and earns a respectable 83 out of 100 rating from the American Conservative Union. The National Taxpayers Union gives his voting record a B.
Rather, his passion is for Congress' constitutional role as a check on the executive branch. He once held up the confirmation of Richard Holbrooke as U.N. ambassador until President Bill Clinton reinstated an American budget analyst demoted after exposing the United Nations' free-spending ways.
Grassley's real beef is with government secrecy. He criticized President Bush for an executive order in April that delays the automatic release of government documents more than 25 years old. "I heard the story that it was in the early 1990s there was still a document from World War I that was classified. Give me a break," Grassley said.
He is diplomatic about his dealings with the Bush administration, though, calling it "at least as difficult as with other administrations."
"So this has led me to conclude it's kind of an institutional disease," Grassley said.
"You're always sending back another letter, or you're having another hearing. And what it boils down to is, whether it's Republican or Democrat, it's like pulling teeth to get any information," he said.