U.S. Senate leader gives Jefferson Dairy Queen a shout out

Who needs sprinkles and nuts when you get glowing Congressional floor speech topping your ice cream.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky Tuesday talked about Jefferson’s Dairy Queen while spinning anecdotes about colleague Charles Grassley, the Iowa lawmaker who just passed the 12,000-vote milestone — the last 7,474 of them consecutive.

McConnell recognized Grassley’s work ethic, noting that besides not missing a Senate vote since 1993, the Iowan visits all 99 counties in his state every year — a feat known nationally — and generally spoken with great fondness and affection — as “The Full Grassley.”

Recently, Grassley, an Iowa Republican, completed another Full Grassley. And McConnell delighted in telling his Senate colleagues about Grassley’s way of treating himself after the town-hall, school-visit, business-tour endurance test.

“He gets a blizzard from Dairy Queen,” McConnell said in his Leader’s remarks to open Senate business. “Sometimes chocolate. Sometimes vanilla. But always swirled with Snickers. This year, he got to DQ so early he had to wait in the parking lot.”

And where was the Dairy Queen?

“He Tweeted about it,” McConnell said. “Here’s what he said: ‘I’m at the Jefferson Iowa Dairy Queen doing you know what.’”