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Utah: Senior Senator Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) Last Updated July 14, 2003
Orrin Hatch, Utah's senior senator, is a Republican now serving his fifth term, a man who didn't plan a political career but won his seat after filing on the last possible day in 1976. Hatch grew up in Pittsburgh, where his father was a metal lather; he worked his way through Brigham Young University, then Pittsburgh Law School, practiced law there and then moved to Salt Lake City. For a time he was an amateur boxer and at one point he and his wife lived in a refurbished chicken coop. He got into the 1976 Senate race late; an endorsement from Ronald Reagan helped him win the Republican nomination, and in the general he upset three-term Democrat Frank Moss 54%-45%. His toughest re-election fight came in 1982, when he was opposed by Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson; Hatch won 58%-41%. Hatch's Senate career has been shaped by two impulses that are sometimes in tension with each other: a strong conservative philosophy and a sense of responsibility for the superintendency of legislation. He wrote a book about his thinking titled Square Peg. He first attracted attention in a Senate dominated by Democrats when he successfully filibustered the AFL-CIO's labor law bill, which had been expected to pass. Then, after just four years, he became chairman of the Labor Committee after Republicans won a Senate majority in 1980. He worked to convert federal programs to block grants to states, but became a fan of some programs, like the Job Corps. But he remained a strong opponent of the striker replacement law sought by unions. On the Judiciary Committee, he fought abortion and a civil rights bill that produced racial quotas and preferences, and staunchly defended Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. He was the author of the 1994 law limiting the FDA's authority to test and regulate food supplements; Hatch, like many Mormons, is a consumer of food supplements, and Utah has a $3 billion food supplement industry. In 1993 Hatch switched from ranking Republican on Labor to the same post on Judiciary, when it was vacated by Strom Thurmond; in 1995 he became chairman of Judiciary and left Labor altogether. On Judiciary he worked on limiting tort liability and regulatory law and managed the balanced budget amendment to one-vote defeats in 1995 and 1997. He worked also on the flag amendment, which fell four votes short of passage in March 2000, the anti-terrorism law and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. On judicial appointments, Hatch promised in 1995 to cooperate with the Clinton administration; by early 1997 some Democrats were charging that he was stalling approval of nominees, while some Republicans were complaining that he was allowing too many liberal, activist judges on the bench. In 1997 and 1998 Hatch passionately defended Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr against attacks by Clinton advisors. In 1997 Hatch again surprised some on both sides of the aisle when he joined Edward 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 praised the Microsoft antitrust suit in May 1998; one of Microsoft's major competitors was Utah-based Novell. Hatch has worked to allow homeowners to claim capital losses on sales of homes, to bar the federal government from using racial or gender quotas, to stop operation of Oregon's assisted suicide law and to ban stalking of celebrities by paparazzi. He tried to ban lawsuits against gun manufacturers, which he called "extortion." In 2000 he sponsored a bill to extend Schering-Plough's patent on Claritin, for which he was widely criticized. Presiding over hearings on Napster, he opined that the recording industry was going to have to sit down with Napster and owners of other copying software. In 2000 he sponsored a number of bills which were signed into law--a law giving religious groups a federal remedy when their religious rights are violated by land use policies, an increase in the number of H1-B visas, funding for agents and training aimed at methamphetamines. As chairman and, after June 2001, ranking minority member of Judiciary, Hatch defended the Bush Justice Department and judicial nominees against Democrats' attacks; he decried their refusal to hold hearings on many appointees when they were in the majority and their filibusters of judicial appointees after January 2003. After September 11, he was one of the framers of the USA Patriot Act. In January 2003 he said he would not honor the blue slip procedure, by which one senator could stop the nomination of a judicial appointee from his state. But he also took some surprising and bipartisan positions. He and Jeff Sessions sponsored a bill to increase the amount of crack cocaine required for an automatic five-year sentence from 5 grams to 20 grams. He and Herb Kohl sponsored a Safe Explosives Act to require permits, background checks and fingerprinting to buy explosives. He and Charles Schumer sponsored a bill to allow the Dramatists Guild of America to negotiate standard contracts for playwrights. He and Joseph Biden sponsored the provision of the corporate accounting bill requiring CEOs and CFOs to sign their companies' statement of earnings with criminal penalties for inaccurate reporting. He sponsored a successful cyberterrorism amendment and co-sponsored with Joe Lieberman a bill to stimulate private sector development of medicines, vaccines and antidotes to combat bioterrorism. Despite his longstanding opposition to abortion, he supported embryonic stem-cell research and argued that life is created in the womb, "not in a petri dish." He was a co-sponsor of the tripartisan prescription drug plan that came to the floor in July 2002. In February 2003 the Senate passed his bill outlawing computer-enhanced child pornography, which the Supreme Court said was not covered by a previous law. With Charles Grassley and Kohl, he sponsored a bill to restrict class action lawsuits. He said that he would work on the issues raised by digital technology and the movie and record industries' complaints about file sharing. He and Bennett supported a permanent nuclear waste repository in Yucca Mountain, Nevada: better to have the waste transported over Utah than deposited there. The Senate passed his bills to protect the Virgin River dinosaur footprints found in St. George and to make alternate routes of the Pony Express, Oregon, California and Mormon Trails part of the National Historic Trails system. Every senator, it sometimes seems, must run for president, and the time came for Hatch in June 1999. He admitted that it would take a "miracle" to win, but argued that he had more experience in federal office than the other candidates and could work with Democrats, and that he was not "beholden to the Republican establishment." At the August 1999 Iowa straw poll he came in last, with 2% of the votes. He managed to raise $2 million, much of it in $36 "skinny cat" contributions. But in the Iowa caucuses in January 2000 he won only 1% of the votes, fewer than John McCain, who did not campaign in the state. Two days later he withdrew from the race and endorsed George W. Bush. He had one complaint. "I did find that there was a certain amount of prejudice against Mormons. The Gallup Poll said that 17% would not vote for a Mormon for president. … These people think that Mormons are not Christians, when the name of the church is 'Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.' We're very Christian." Hatch's seat came up for election in the fall. He attracted competition for the Republican nomination, and was greeted with jeers as well as applause at the very conservative May 2000 state party convention. But he got 61% of the votes, just above the 60% required to win the nomination without a primary. For the fall campaign he was able to raise much more than he had for his presidential candidacy, and spent $3.1 million; his opponent, for eight years the Democratic leader in the Utah Senate, spent $296,000. Hatch won 66%-31%, and became the first Utahn 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. Hatch's talents, by the way, extend beyond the political. He has long written poetry and in 1995 began writing songs. They have been recorded by a Utah firm, first in a 13-song album of Christmas music; some have been recorded by Gladys Knight, a convert to the LDS Church, and after Christian music publishers seemed uninterested in what Hatch has called his Latter-Day Sound, he began distributing his songs on www.hatchmusic.com. He also appeared in the movie Traffic, but criticized the movie for its frequent obscenities.
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