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Nobody expects this to be an easy day for Loretta Lynch. President Obama's choice for attorney general is appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. That committee, like the rest of the Senate, is now led by Republicans who are at odds with the president. The man leading the hearings is not precisely a new face. Senator Charles Grassley has been deeply involved in policy debates for decades. But Grassley is in a new job as chairman, the first non-lawyer to chair the judiciary committee. Here's NPR's Ailsa Chang.
AILSA CHANG, BYLINE: Republican Chuck Grassley is at the age where people like to use numbers to describe him. He's shown up for more than 7,240 consecutive votes in the Senate, the most of any current senator. At 81, he runs at least 3 miles four times a week and says he's never had a running injury.
SENATOR CHARLES GRASSLEY: Well, see, I didn't start running until I was 65. So I've only been running 16 years.
CHANG: Another notable number - he's been with his wife, Barbara, for 60 years. Grassley picks up a small copper music box in his office. It's a replica of a small church in Nashua, Iowa.
GRASSLEY: My wife and I were married at the Little Brown Church. I don't know the song.
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CHANG: He was 20 at the time.
GRASSLEY: The Iowa law said that if you were under 21, your parents had to sign for you to get married, but the woman could get married at 18 without her mother's signature...
CHANG: (Laughter).
GRASSLEY: Without their parent's signature. Now obviously that's been changed.
CHANG: There's one thing that hasn't changed during the entire 34 years Grassley has been in the Senate. He has always served on the judiciary committee, a committee he now finally gets to chair. And in a chamber where more than half the members are lawyers, Grassley is the first guy without a law degree to lead judiciary. He's a corn and soybean farmer.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I think all the non-lawyers see themselves, including Chuck Grassley, as bringing some common sense to the debate, not meaning lawyers don't have common sense, but that the legalese by which they think of public policy is a little bit different than us non-lawyers think of public policy.
CHANG: Today, Grassley will get to put that on display. Republicans expect to go hard at attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch about the constitutionality of the president's executive action on immigration. They'll also press her about political decision-making at the IRS and other things. Grassley says he'll keep the hearing going until the senators run out of questions. And as for the farmer shtick - Grassley's good friend, Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, says don't believe it.
SENATOR ORRIN HATCH: He plays the innocent farmer about as well as anybody I've ever seen, but he's not innocent. He really knows his stuff.
CHANG: Grassley's invited critics of the Obama administration as witnesses to Lynch's hearing, including a group that's advocated for more voter ID laws. And last weekend, at a conservative Republican rally in Iowa, Grassley previewed what his main theme will be at today's proceeding - executive overreach.
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GRASSLEY: The president is not above the Constitution. Congress is a co-equal branch of government. The Constitution established a system of checks and balances precisely in order to check abuses of power. We remember George III, one person telling 13 colonies what they could do or not do.
CHANG: Grassley says more rigorous oversight of the government will be his priority. Friends note the senator has always been an equal-opportunity watchdog. Matt Whitaker served as the U.S. attorney in Des Moines during the Bush administration and says even then Grassley wouldn't let up.
MATT WHITAKER: I'd go out to Washington, D.C., and I would have, you know, the executives in Main Justice asking me, you know, what Senator Grassley's problem with the FBI or with the Department of Justice because, you know, he was asking difficult questions.
CHANG: Somehow a man who's been in federal office for four decades still maintains he's an outsider keeping government in check, just a farmer from Iowa. Ailsa Chang, NPR News, the Capitol.