Orrin Hatch, the former seven-term Republican U.S. senator from Utah who died on April 23 at age 88, was one of the finest public servants of my lifetime.
Hatch’s dogged and principled conservatism created a legacy in which his civility was legendary, his legislative triumphs legion. Conservatives thrilled at his hard-fought Senate victory in 1976, which provided that year’s signal solace in the wake of Ronald Reagan losing the Republican nomination for president, and conservatives still celebrated his work 41 years later as he shepherded a major, well-designed tax cut through a partisan Senate. In between, he sponsored more than 750 bills that were enacted into law, not to mention thousands of amendments to other bills.
On reducing taxes, limiting spending, and expanding free-market solutions for healthcare, Hatch was unrelenting. For example, inexpensive generic drugs were far from common until their modern superabundance was catalyzed by the Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984. That act significantly changed regulatory policy and patent law to encourage generics yet still incentivized medical research and innovation by brand-name manufacturers through two other provisions.
Hatch will best be remembered, though, for his decades fighting, usually successfully, to confirm conservative constitutionalist judges. In the most important of those battles, it is beyond dispute that without Hatch’s extraordinary efforts, legendary conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas would not have been confirmed in the midst of the smear perpetrated against him by law professor Anita Hill.
“It helps immensely, as a lawyer, if you genuinely believe your client is in the right,” said Miller Baker, then a top Judiciary Committee aide to Hatch and now a judge on the U.S. Court of International Trade. “Senator Hatch genuinely believed that Clarence Thomas was innocent of Anita Hill’s allegations.”
Hatch was as fine a man as he was a legislator. “A patriot and a gentleman,” Baker said of him, “and the best possible boss.” All the encomiums since Hatch died praised his remarkable willingness to forge common ground where possible (and sometimes when seemingly implausible) with Democrats in Congress. Some of us still believe this is a necessity for our republic’s health.
“We [in public office] don’t mirror the political culture as much as we make it,” Hatch said in his valedictory Senate speech. “If we abandon civility, then our constituents will follow … So to mend the nation, we must first mend the Senate.”
Hatch, who grew up in frightful poverty, had to fight his way to better things, but the effort made him grateful and eternally hopeful rather than bitter. It also made him a champion for great human interest stories, a trait he shared with Reagan. The Gipper’s personal diaries recount a fair number of meetings with Hatch on the Voting Rights Act, budget problems, and other legislation but also note with obvious joy two personal interest visits Hatch made to the White House.
“Orrin Hatch brought in a 13 year old boy Jason Hardman and family,” Reagan wrote on Aug. 4, 1983. “The boy single handedly created a public Library in his small town, collected 13,000 books and serves as librarian.” And, on May 19, 1986, “Congressional photo time” with a “young couple and their little baby girl”: “Sen. Orrin Hatch had brought to my attention a few months back the case of a baby needing a liver transplant. We were able to do it – last minute – baby in coma. And [now] here she was a beautiful little girl.”
This was a good man, this Orrin Hatch, he was. In the long run, it was that bedrock goodness that, more than anything else, made him a truly great U.S. senator.
