US Senator Orrin Hatch took questions and comments for two and a half hours Wednesday evening at a town meeting at American Fork Junior High. Hatch began by thanking the crowd of approximately 400 for choosing to attend the meeting on a night when the Utah Jazz, BYU Cougars, and Utah Utes were all playing basketball. Then he invited the audience to speak its mind.
Questions and comments ranged in topic from reforming Social Security to Hatch’s opposition to gay marriage, but focused mostly on three related subject areas: the economy; the size and cost of the federal government; and the need to put fiscal and political conservatives in control of Congress. Asked repeatedly why Washington conservatives were making no legislative progress on important issues, and how things could be changed, Hatch emphasized the need for voters to replace liberals, especially fiscal liberals, with more conservative candidates. “You give me 60 votes … and there will be a lot fewer agencies in the federal government,” he promised. He described his own extensive past and present fund-raising activities in behalf of Republican candidates and suggested that there would be four fewer Republicans in the US Senate now, were it not for fund-raising he led for the 2008 elections.
Hatch repeatedly urged conservatives to work within the Republican Party to make it more conservative, instead of “fracturing” the party and throwing elections to liberals. He cited the example of former Oregon Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican whom he characterized as conservative on fiscal issues, but not on social issues. In the 2008 election, a more conservative third-party candidate drew enough votes away from Smith, Hatch explained, to hand the election to one of the most liberal Democrats now in the Senate, who will likely be able to serve as many terms as he cares to.
Several times Hatch emphasized that at no time in his 34 years in the Senate has there been a reliable majority of fiscal conservatives. Even when there have been Republican majorities, he noted, some Republicans would vote as liberals on fiscal issues. “If we didn’t have [the filibuster] rule, we’d be overrun by the left on all economic matters,” he said. Hatch pulled few punches in speaking of President Obama and Democratic leaders generally, saying they are “trying to push more people into dependency.” He explained that a few years ago the lowest 40 percent of earners paid no income taxes, but received payments from the government. Now that figure is nearer 49 percent, and the Democrats are trying to get it to 60 percent through nationalized health care and other measures. He said this is because Democrats consider dependent citizens to be “a natural Democratic Party constituency.”
Hatch spoke positively of the “tea party” movement in general. “I like the movement,” he said. But he warned that, if it tries to become a third party, it will wreck the country. “Some of you are as anti-Constitution as [the Left],” he said. “Don’t fracture the party,” he repeated near the end of the evening, again citing the case of Senator Gordon Smith. “I’d like us to come together.” Once a practicing attorney, Hatch was elected to his first term in the US Senate in 1976, in his first run for public office. He is now in his sixth consecutive term, having most recently won reelection in 2006. He is the longest-serving US Senator in Utah history.
—David Rodeback
