Sen. Orrin Hatch, Congress’s longest-serving member, is privately planning to retire at the end of his term, according to a report from the Atlantic on Friday.
The Atlantic also reported that if Hatch retires, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney will likely run to replace him. From the story:
Hatch spokesman Dave Hansen contested the report, saying the Atlantic’s anonymous sources were not in the know on the senator’s thinking and that Hatch had not made a final decision about whether to seek re-election.
Romney’s jumping into the race would be both a godsend and a complication for Republicans worried about preserving their slim Senate majority next year. On the one hand, Romney is extraordinarily popular in Utah, and would likely coast to election; Hal Boyd, opinion editor for the Deseret News, told the Atlantic in April that a Romney campaign “would be the easiest Senate bid in the history of the United States of America.” Senate Republicans privately worry that Hatch, who promised during the 2012 election that he would not run again, would be vulnerable to a far-right challenger in the vein of Alabama’s Roy Moore or Arizona’s Kelli Ward. Candidate Romney would certainly assuage these fears.
But Romney has also been one of the right’s most outspoken critics of the antics of President Donald Trump, calling him a “fraud” and writing that his Charlottesville comments had “caused racists to rejoice.” If Romney brings that rhetoric to Washington, it could upset the uneasy peace that currently exists between the White House and the Senate.
