Sen. Grassley visits OHS

Mar. 28—OSKALOOSA — U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) visited the George Daily Auditorium to take questions from local students.

Grassley stopped in on Wednesday morning after a townhall meeting in Montezuma. Speaking afterwards, he explained that it's part of his annual tour of all 99 Iowa counties.

"I go to a few high schools every year to get the opinion of young people because they never come to my open town meetings like I recently had in Montezuma," Grassley said. "And it's just very important to keep in touch with people. I get to every county every year for 44 years now to keep in touch with people."

One student came forward with questions about the Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2024, which included $15 million in provisions for electronic tags for cattle. This was then touched on further with a question from OHS junior Justina Falconer, who asked him about the TikTok ban being proposed by Congress.

Falconer asked if it was inconsistent to ban the social media app — which is owned by a Chinese company — when the electronic tags are also from China, while U.S. land is also being bought by Chinese businesses.

"I just felt like it was contradictory considering that we wanted to ban TikTok because it is owned by China, but China owns the ear tags that we are proposing to put on cattle not only, but they own land right beside our military airbase," Falconer said afterwards. "So I kind of feel like it's contradictory that we're banning a social media app, but we're allowing them to know where our agriculture rates are."

"I think the reason it passed the House is fear that the data that they collect on you personally, maybe that's not as big of a thing if you don't mind if your privacy is being compromised, but a lot of information could be gotten that would compromise national security," Grassley said. "And so we would want that to be protected because the No. 1 responsibility of the federal government is to protect our nation's security."

Falconer says she was glad with the effort made by Grassley to answer her question.

"I felt like his response was very detailed for what he knew because I know he said he didn't know a lot about TikTok," she said. "I felt like he answered it the best way he could and I did appreciate the response."

Meanwhile, Grassley said that he was impressed with the questions the OHS students presented, as well as their awareness of the issues.

"For the most part, they were all questions on substantive issues that were dealing with in Congress in the United States. Sometimes, I go to a high school and they're more process — like "How does Congress work?' or 'Why did you vote this way or that way?' or 'What's going on with impeachment?' and stuff like that," Grassley said. "So I was very satisfied that they had very good questions of issues that are before the Congress of the United States, and they were well thought out questions."

Donald Promnitz is the associate editor of the Ottumwa Courier and the Oskaloosa Herald. He can be reached at dpromnitz@ottumwacourier.com. Follow him on Twitter @DonPromnitz.