Republican Orrin Hatch, Utah’s senior senator, was first elected to the Senate in 1976. Like few others in Congress, he has been consistent in his inconsistency—he veers between collaborating enthusiastically with Democrats and attacking them with unusual vigor. Read More

Republican Orrin Hatch, Utah’s senior senator, was first elected to the Senate in 1976. Like few others in Congress, he has been consistent in his inconsistency—he veers between collaborating enthusiastically with Democrats and attacking them with unusual vigor.

Hatch grew up in Pittsburgh, where his father was a metal lather. The family lost their home during the Depression, and lived for a time in a shelter made of salvaged wood and metal and without plumbing. He worked his way through Brigham Young University as a janitor and a metal lather, like his father. He went on to get a law degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and practiced law there. He and his wife and their young family moved to Salt Lake City, and the newly minted lawyer got interested in politics. In 1976, he ran for the U.S. Senate. An endorsement from Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan helped him get attention and he ultimately won the GOP nomination. In the general election, he upset three-term Democrat Frank Moss 54%-45%. His toughest re-election fight came in 1982, when he was opposed by Democratic Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson. Hatch won 58%-41%.

Hatch has been in the Senate longer than any Republican except Richard Lugar of Indiana. His Senate career has been shaped by two impulses that are sometimes at odds with each other: a strong conservative philosophy and a sense of responsibility to pass legislation. When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, Hatch expressed a willingness to work with his longtime friend, the ailing liberal Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy, on comprehensive health-care legislation. “I would like to do (health care reform) as a legacy issue for (Kennedy), if I can—this would mean a lot to him,” Hatch told The New Republic. But even before Kennedy’s death in August of that year, Hatch was assailing the measure as big-government overreach. In January 2011, he became the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee and took the lead on his party’s efforts to repeal the law, sponsoring bills to end the individual mandate and the employer mandate for coverage.

In March, he was one of just nine senators to oppose a fiscal 2011 budget deal that staved off a government shutdown, arguing that it did not cut spending enough. He also called on the Treasury Department to delay implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial services overhaul law and ratcheted up criticism of the Justice Department for alleging not doing enough to fight obscenity and pornography. He also opposed the nomination of Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan, whom he had voted to confirm as solicitor general. In recent years, his unbroken streak of conservative positions was an acknowledgment that he was heeding the message Utah Republicans sent in 2010, when they dumped three-term Sen. Robert Bennett at their state party nominating convention after he was perceived to be insufficiently conservative on issues. The move paved the way for conservative Republican Mike Lee to win Bennett’s seat that fall. With an eye toward the 2012 state party convention, Hatch told a conference of conservatives in Washington in February 2011, “I’m prepared to be the most hated man in this Godforsaken city in order to save this country.”

But over the years, Hatch has taken some surprising and bipartisan positions. In 1997, he joined Kennedy in sponsoring a $24 billion program to get states to provide health insurance for children of low-income working parents who don’t qualify for Medicaid. Hatch, however, voted against reauthorizing the State Children’s Health Insurance Program in 2009, saying Democrats improperly modified it. In 2004, he gained wide bipartisan support for setting up a trust fund to handle asbestos cases, and two years later, the Senate passed a measure Hatch sponsored with Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin that toughened federal regulation of dietary supplements and over-the-counter drugs. Hatch has expressed doubts about the use of mandatory minimum sentences in some drug cases. And with then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., he got a provision in a tax bill to bar bankruptcy courts from preventing the carrying out of charitable and tithing pledges. The title of his 2002 autobiography summed up his idiosyncratic political style; it’s called Square Peg.

Yet Hatch has also defended traditional Republican positions to the hilt, sponsoring bills to restrict class action lawsuits and to set limits on medical malpractice cases. He introduced his own comprehensive immigration bill in 2010 that focused heavily on enforcement and has repeatedly sponsored a constitutional balanced budget amendment resolution. As chairman of the Judiciary Committee from June 2001 to January 2003 and as the ranking minority member, Hatch defended the Bush Justice Department and judicial nominees against Democrats’ attacks, and took them to task for refusing to hold hearings on many appointees. After same-sex couples in Massachusetts started obtaining marriage licenses, Hatch supported the amendment sponsored by Colorado Republican Wayne Allard that would ban same-sex marriage altogether. Hatch has opposed federal gun control measures and in 2003 sponsored a bill to make it easier to carry handguns in the District of Columbia.

Another of Hatch’s preoccupations is the issue of protecting intellectual property in the face of technological advance. He supported the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 banning unlawful downloading of copyrighted music and movies and backed the record industry against the threat raised by Napster. In 2004, the Senate passed his bill, co-sponsored with Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont, to authorize the Justice Department to bring civil lawsuits as well as criminal actions for illegal downloading. He and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., introduced a bill in 2010 creating an international group to police criminals using computers to steal or destroy information.

Hatch’s interest in these issues is not just theoretical. He has long written poetry and in 1995 began writing songs. He has since written hundreds, some of which have been recorded by a Utah firm, including a 13-song album of Christmas music. Some of his songs have been recorded by singer Gladys Knight, a convert to the Mormon Church. His music has earned praise from Bono, the lead singer of the popular and politically-oriented rock band U2. In 2003, the two men met to discuss the AIDS crisis in Africa, and the singer suggested for Hatch the stage name “Johnny Trapdoor.” One of his songs, “Souls Along the Way,” was written for his friend Kennedy and was used in the movie Ocean’s 12. In 2009, he even wrote a Jewish holiday tune called “Eight Days of Hannukah.”

On the Judiciary Committee, he has fought abortion rights legislation and a civil rights bill that produced racial quotas and preferences. In earlier major battles over Supreme Court nominees, Hatch staunchly defended conservatives Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. In 1995, when Hatch became chairman of the committee, he worked on limiting tort liability and regulatory law and managed the balanced budget amendment proposal to one-vote defeats in 1995 and 1997. He also helped draft the 2001 USA Patriot Act, the Bush administration’s centerpiece anti-terrorism law, and in 2004 defended it against attempts to eliminate some of its main provisions. “It seems to me that we should not make it any harder to go after suspected terrorists than after suspected drug dealers,” Hatch said. During negotiations to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Hatch supported a provision to grant retroactive immunity to phone companies that had participated in the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Hatch described the phone companies as “patriotic” in a speech on the Senate floor. The FISA reauthorization passed the Senate in 2008 with retroactive immunity for the companies.

Every senator, it sometimes seems, feels compelled to run for president, and the time came for Hatch with the 2000 election. He conceded that it would take a “miracle” to win, but argued that he had more experience in federal office than the other candidates and that he had demonstrated he could work with Democrats and was not “beholden to the Republican establishment.” In the Iowa caucuses in January 2000, he won only 1% of the vote, fewer than Republican John McCain, who did not campaign in the state. Two days later, he withdrew from the race and endorsed George W. Bush. In the 2008 presidential primaries, Hatch endorsed fellow Mormon Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. But after Romney dropped out, Hatch endorsed his colleague John McCain of Arizona and wrote a patriotic campaign song for him called “Together Forever.”

In 2000, Hatch won 66%-31% and became the first Utahan popularly elected five times to the Senate. The only other five-term senator in Utah history, Reed Smoot, who served from 1903 to 1933, was elected to his first term by the legislature. In 2006, he won 63%-31% and after he was sworn into his sixth term, became the longest-serving senator in Utah history. But his 2008 vote in favor of the bailout of the financial industry—highly unpopular with the state’s conservatives—and the thinking among some Republicans that he has been in office too long ensures his path to victory in 2012 may not be so easy.