Republican Tea Party voters defeated long-time Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, and replaced him with fiscal hawk Mike Lee during the 2010 midterm elections. Heading into the 2012 election cycle, a state senator from Utah is talking the talk about following the same path to defeating Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, in the name of cutting government spending.
“God bless Orrin Hatch for his service to this state,” said state senator Dan Liljenquist, R, who is strongly considering a run against Hatch, in a recent telephone interview. “I was two years old when he was elected and he’s been there a long time representing the state. But elections really are about the future, and I’m looking for leadership on these entitlement issues, the issues I focused on in the Utah legislature: long term spending, the long term trajectory of our budgets, and trying to make sure those issues are tackled before they become disastrous.”
The implicit commentary, that Hatch — a 36-year U.S. Senator — has been in Washington too long, calls to mind Hatch’s original campaign for Senate against an 18-year incumbent, Democrat Frank Moss. “What do you call a Senator who’s served in office for 18 years?” Hatch asked of the incumbent Senator in 1976. “You call him home.”
Liljenquist, who recently received the “Legislative Entrepreneur of the Year Award” from the conservative group Freedomworks, is willing to put a sharp edge on the apparently positive gloss on Hatch’s career. “He’s certainly an institution, but there’s a whole new generation of people getting involved in politics who are saying, ‘where have our leaders been, how did we get here, and who is going to get us out of it?'”
Congress has “driven more and more decisions away from Utah and to the federal government — from 1979 when Sen. Hatch and others voted to establish the federal Department of Education — to as recently as this decade, with the massive expansion of entitlement programs.”
Liljenquist even laid the aspects of Obamacare most detested by the Tea Party at Hatch’s door. “It was this generation of politicians, Republicans and Democrats, that laid out the constitutional argument for individual mandates in the early 90s,” he said, “As states, we deal with the aftermath of these decisions, and in many ways we’re being blackmailed with our own money.”
Were he to run for Senate and win (and he certainly sounds like a candidate), Liljenquist says he would want to lead the charge on entitlement reforms, while emphasizing the need to honor commitments made to seniors dependent on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. “We as a country will not survive unless we put Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security on a sustainable footing,” he said. Liljenquist promised to advocate The Path to Prosperity proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. He allowed, however, that Newt Gingrich’s critique of the plan — that the change in Medicare should not be mandatory — identified an imperfection in Ryan’s plan.
“People in my generation, we need a different deal,” Liljenquist concluded. “I think people in my generation are willing to make that tradeoff. They’d rather have a free country and have the government do a little bit less for them than to be ensnared, entrapped, and crushed by debt. The time for that debate has come, and that’s exactly where I’m interested in stepping up.”
Liljenquist told The Washington Examiner that he will announce his final decision on whether to run in January.
