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Former Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah died Saturday at the age of 88.
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Hatch’s Senate career spanned more than four decades, overseeing a long list of accomplishments.
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Hatch died in Salt Lake City surrounded by his family, the Hatch Foundation announced.
Longtime Republican Senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch, died Saturday at the age of 88.
The Hatch Foundation announced in a statement the former senator passed away at 5:30 pm in Salt Lake City surrounded by his family.
After growing up in poverty-stricken Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during the Great Depression, Hatch rose through the ranks of society to become a lawyer and one of the longest-serving legislators in United States history.
A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Hatch graduated from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, before earning his Juris Doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh in 1962. He practiced law in Pittsburgh before moving to to Utah in the late 1960s.
Hatch, an amateur boxer in his early years, decided to challenge three-term Democratic Senator Frank Moss in the 1976 Utah Senate race. After unseating Moss, Hatch began a career that would span 41 years and a wide range of accomplishments while chairing powerful finance, judiciary and labor committees.
He ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, losing to then-Texas Governor George W. Bush.
In the closing weeks of Hatch’s Senate career, President Donald Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor bestowed on civilians by the commander-in-chief.
Hatch retired from the Senate in January 2019.
Hatch’s career in the Senate spanned decades
Known among the Capitol press corps for his quick wit and off-the-cuff remarks, Hatch first entered the Senate in 1977. His career was long and successful, passing more than 800 bills during his tenure.
Hatch shares rose in Washington during the Reagan administration.
President Ronald Reagan had Hatch on his list of finalists to be nominated for the Supreme Court. But according to a 1987 report of The New York Times, Hatch was unable to serve because of limitations on the selection of legislators for positions in which Congress raised pay while he served in Congress.
During the Bill Clinton administration, Hatch guided one of his signature achievements through the Senate, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Associate with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, CHIP provided health insurance coverage to millions of children in the United States.
In the eight years under President Barack Obama, Hatch was like most Republicans, fighting tooth and nail against Democratic gains like the Affordable Care Act.
Hatch at one point referred to supporters of the landmark healthcare law as stupid and “fools.”
“That was the dumbest, dumbest bill I’ve ever seen,” he said during a speech at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Now, some of you may have loved it. If so, you are one of the dumbest, dumbest people I’ve ever met.”
In the final years of his Senate term, Hatch played a pivotal role in some of the most high-profile achievements of the all-Republican-led administration between 2017 and 2018, while serving as Senate President pro tempore. He led the Senate Finance Committee during the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017, widely regarded as the crowning legislative achievement of the Trump presidency.
Hatch was a member of the Judiciary Committee during the tumultuous confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who saw Republicans and Democrats in the other’s throatmoment that he lamented in his farewell speech as one of the low points of the Senate.
“If I were to identify the root of our crisis, it would be this: the loss of courtesy and genuine good feelings among Senate colleagues,” he said. “Courtesy is the cartilage of the Senate: the soft connective tissue that cushions the impact between opposing joints. But in recent years, that cartilage has become a bulge. All movement has become bone on bone.”
“Our ideas collide with each other more and more often, and with nothing to absorb the friction. We limp to bring any bipartisan legislation to the full Senate, much less to the president’s desk,” Hatch added in his last speech just before Christmas in 2018. “The pain is unbearable and is felt by the entire nation.”
In 2019, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney succeeded Hatch in the seat he vacated after his retirement.
How it changed over the years.
In some areas, Hatch has changed and evolved over the years. In the field of LGBT rights, Hatch was an ardent supporter of keeping marriage between a man and a woman. Early in his career, he took such a harsh tone toward American homosexuals to the point of claiming they had a “psychological deficiency.”
“I would not like to see homosexuals teaching in school any more than I would like to see members of the American Nazi Party teaching in school”, Salt Lake Tribune reported Hatch saying in 1977.
Decades later, he changed his tune. In 2018, Hatch gave an impassioned speech in defense of LGBT Americans.
“LGBT youth deserve our unwavering love and support,” he said during Pride Month 2018. “They deserve our validation and reassurance that not only is there a place for them in this society, but it’s much better off because of them.” .
“These young people need us, and we desperately need them,” he added. “We need their light to illuminate the richness and diversity of God’s creations. We need the grace, beauty and brilliance they bring to the world.”
A hawk during Clinton’s impeachment proceedings in 1999, Hatch took a more lax approach to the spate of criminal prosecutions of Trump’s associates late in his career.
“No, because I don’t think he was involved in crimes, but even then, you know, you can make anything a crime under current law,” Hatch told CNN when asked if he was concerned that so many close Trump allies were facing legal battles and investigations, some of which the president has been involved in. “If you want, you can blow it out of proportion, you can do a lot of things.”
“Since he became president, this economy has moved forward,” he added. “And I think we should judge it on that basis, as well as trying to bring things out of the past that may or may not be true.”
In both the way he changed and the way he stood strong during his lifetime, Hatch’s legacy will be felt in many areas of society, through legislation he personally handled in the Senate, his lasting impact on institution as a whole and his long career as one of the most prominent Mormon politicians in United States history.
“When we listen to our best angels, when we listen to the voices of virtue native to our own nature, we can transcend our tribal instincts and preserve our democracy for future generations,” Hatch said in his final Senate address. “That we can do it is my humble prayer.”
Read the original article at Business Insider
Reference-ca.finance.yahoo.com