Orrin Hatch launched his career in public life by campaigning on the promise of term limits, defeating Democrat Frank Moss and ending his 18-year tenure in the Senate.
As NPR recalls, Hatch would say during his campaign, “What do you call a senator who served in office for 18 years? You call him home.”
Forty-two years later, Hatch is now departing the Senate.
A cynic would chalk Hatch’s lengthy reign up to political hypocrisy, but as Hatch has made clear during his farewell tour around the Capitol, he learned some things. Consider that Hatch, according to a report by the Salt Lake Tribune, once likened LGBT people to Nazis. Now, he calls the disproportionately high suicide rates of young LGBT Americans a “public health epidemic.” It’s fair to say that Hatch has evolved.
Hatch leaves behind not just a legacy of conservative orthodoxy, and one of the greatest Twitter accounts of any politician, but also some advice for his fellow senators.
The Hatch Discourses book series compile some of the senator’s speeches and statements from over the years into three succinct volumes with specific topics: the Senate as an institution, the protection of religious liberty, and the restoration of civility.
For a senator who spent much of his time on the federal judiciary and healthcare, the subjects of the Hatch Discourses certainly depart from the realpolitik. That he chose these three topics as his swan song in particular is telling. The Senate would be wise to listen.
The speeches chosen in defense of the Senate highlight the importance of the Senate as a bulwark against fickle trends of the public. In a speech from 2014, he warned the Senate that invoking the nuclear option would present unintended consequences. On multiple occasions, he laments that bipartisan friendships like his and the late Ted Kennedy are increasingly becoming extinct in the Senate.
He’s not wrong, and it’s a point that directly ties into his “call to our better angels” and a return to civility.
“Although nowhere mandated in our Constitution, civility is no less essential to the proper functioning of our government than any amendment, court ruling, or at of Congress,” writes Hatch. “These writings — which include a series of Senate floor speeches and essays written for national publication — provide a blueprint for fixing out broken politics.”
Standards of the Senate, civility, and a basic respect for others’ rights all guide that blueprint. Hatch isn’t using his farewell address to score an extra political point or two, but to provide genuine guidance to fix the actual function of the government and society at large.
“When we hearken to our better angels — when we listen to the voices of civility and reason to our very nature — we can transcend the tribalism of our time,” Hatch writes. “That we may do so is my humble prayer.”
