The Real Orrin Hatch

...But a survey by Utah's Deseret News in August showed that 87 percent of the state's Republicans—and 86 percent of those calling themselves "very conservative" — approve of Hatch's work...

...When he spoke on the Senate floor, Hatch said of his GOP colleagues, "Playing politics with judges is unfair, and I am sick of it...

...But as soon as Hatch took office, he showed he was too independent and not partisan enough to please his benefactors in the conservative movement...

...In grilling Attorney General Janet Reno in Judiciary Committee hearings this spring, Hatch advanced the case for the appointment of a special counsel in the campaign finance scandal by skillfully picking apart Reno's legal analysis rather than taking the low road of assailing her integrity, as have -ther leading GOP spokesmen...

...In 1989, he became a co-sponsor of the more comprehensive Act for Better Child Care Services (or ABC) after Senate Democrats agreed to alter their original proposal to come more into line with Hatch's philosophy, allowing for greater state and local control in setting health and safety standards for day care...

...Hatch didn't want to dishonor the new president's prerogative in naming his own Cabinet with a brash partisan display...

...States could design their own programs or subsidize private insurance plans within federal guidelines...

...district judge...

...There were several twists and turns in the consideration of that legislation, and Hatch led the floor fight against the initial bill, the conference report, and in defeating the veto override...

...Tiiii II I N HATCH BY DAVID BROCK 1-1-' : yen in a period when conservatives are attacking one another with the fervor they 4, used to reserve for the Clintons, the recent assault against GOP Senator Orrin Hatch by conservative movement leaders and the right-wing press stands out...

...Hatch notes that although Clinton has sent seventy nominations to the Senate this year, as of July i, Clinton had nominated fewer than forty judges...

...They are as results-oriented as the left is," said one Republican Judiciary Committee aide of the conservative activists...

...As Hatch sees it, the tenor of our politics, especially in the once august Senate, has changed more than he has in three Senate terms...

...Hatch aides say the Senator's personal background—heapprenticed in his native Pittsburgh as a metal lather in the AFL-CIO under his father, worked his way through Brigham Young University as a janitor, and spent two years in the mission field for the Mormon Church —has shaped his approach to what Hatch calls, somewhat awkwardly, "the human being issues...

...More than a decade ago, noting the increasing numbers of working women in his home state, Hatch infuriated the conservative movement with his introduction of a bill to provide federal money for block grants to states to develop subsidized child-care programs...

...A similar move by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas would have prohibited the Judiciary Committee from moving an appeals court nomination if the majority of GOP senators representing that circuit opposed the nominee...

...For the story of the ultimate enactment of the 1991 bill, direct your attention to the Bush administration and a few other Republican Senators—they cut that deal, not Hatch...

...Hatch responded by recounting his own experiences with religious bigotry as a Mormon...

...Clinton's...

...And in a full-scale attack on Hatch's Senate record, National Review recently branded him a "Latter-Day Liberal," a sobriquet that the Senator considers to be not only false, but also a bigoted reference to his Mormon faith...

...If polls in Utah are significant, he may be right...

...Two others, Bud Stack and Bruce Greer, withdrew when Hatch said they would be defeated...

...For instance, the law includes a provision to discourage private employers from dumping previously insured children into state programs...

...At May's Utah GOP convention, a resolution was passed opposing the Hatch-Kennedy bill, which was roundly denounced on the floor as a new federal giveaway...

...Today, the Hatch-Kennedy collaboration is seen as a strange aberration...

...Hatch-watchers point out that the Senator seems by nature incapable of mustering the political and personal brutality displayed by his Democratic counterparts toward Republican nominees...

...In the past several months, Hatch appeared as the keynote speaker at the fifteenth anniversary tribute to the Washington Times (preceding Reverend Sun Myung Moon at the podium), and he joined an all-star roster of conservative Washingtonians in feting Oliver North on the ten-year anniversary of Iran-contra...

...With the Senate Republican leadership bending, Speaker Newt Gingrich soon followed suit...

...atch's co-sponsorship with Senator Kennedy of a chil- d z,, dren's health insurance bill in the current Congress has also raised conservative hackles and prompted charges that he has "sold out...

...The Wall Street Journal editorial page regularly chides the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman for being too soft on Clinton nominees, impugns his motives...

...When Hatch 38 November 1997 • The American Spectator balked and suggested that a more moderate Clinton-appointed U.S...

...Earlier in the spring, Trent Lott tried to undermine Hatch by making the unusual move of coming to the Senate floor to oppose the nomination of Merrick Garland to the D.C...

...He stood firmly with Robert Bork during his losing fight for a Supreme Court seat, and his dramatic performance in the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings "saved [Thomas's] ass," as reporter Nina Totenberg memorably put it...

...Circuit Court of Appeals...

...We elect a president to choose our judges...

...41...

...As for quietly achieving conservative goals with respect to the courts, at which Hatch has proved expert—he recently attained the long-time conservative goal of eliminating the liberal American Bar Association's rating system from the Senate's confirmation process—Tom Jipping, who directs Weyrich's judicial project, has flatly told the Hatch staff he's not interested...

...Hatch's insider strategy of wielding power behind the scenes before nominations are made rather than staging public confrontations on nominees has been made possible, of course, only by the administration's strong preference for avoiding the pitched political battles that marred judicial nomination contests in the Reagan-Bush years — an important, and overlooked, legacy of Clinton, who has sought to achieve social change more through the political than the judicial branches...

...GOP Senator Michael DeWine of Ohio closely examined the record and concluded that, while Morrow might well turn out to be a "judicial activist" on the bench, the conservative attackers had ripped her comments out of context and thus failed to prove the case against her...

...Hatch, who also saw the political value in children's issues before the Clintons came to town and seems to have anticipated the fastest-growing segment of the electorate that is concerned with protecting children and helping parents, considers this one of his greatest legislative achievements...

...Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform (and a TAS columnist) labels a child health-care bill Hatch co-sponsored with Senator Ted Kennedy as "socialism...

...Indeed, in desperation, subordinate Presidential aides once surreptitiously enlisted Hatch's aid in the middle of the night to resist Sununu's next concession planned to be offered later that morning...

...Hatch also appears to have short-circuited the anticipated nominations of long-time liberal activist Peter Edelman to the powerful D.C...

...While Morrow's conservative critics claimed some ambiguous references suggested she would be hostile to such initiatives on the bench, Morrow said that she was merely arguing "to strengthen the initiative process by making it more efficient and less costly...

...Rather, it is rooted in their mistaking him from the beginning as a creature of the rigidly doctrinaire New Right...

...Disler also noted that as early as April 1996, Hatch held a hearing designed to boost the anti-quota California ballot initiative Proposition zo9 by calling Gov...

...They'll oppose a liberal who applies the law correctly, and support a conservative who doesn't apply the law correctly...

...Several months ago, when Phyllis Schlafly ran into Hatch at a conservative function, she took him aside and said of the Clinton judges, "Stop them all...

...The idea was widely dismissed as unserious, but most commentators missed the point that the threat itself may have the desired effect of political intimidation...

...He thinks spending money on giving children a good chance at a healthy start in life saves money in the long run," explains one aide...

...The political winds were blowing in Hatch's direction...

...Hatch agreed, but only on the condition that a previous plan drawn up by Kennedy and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts that had an open-ended entitlement and a price tag in excess of $5o billion be significantly re-worked...

...Hatch certainly hasn't stopped them all, but the untold story of Hatch's chairmanship is how many liberal-activist Clinton judicial candidates he has stopped dead in their tracks...

...It was a top-flight research bill that put us on the path of finding a cure for AIDS," Hatch says...

...Yes, mistakes were made," said Hatch, one of two Republican senators who refused to endorse the bipartisan findings of the Iran-contra committee under Senators Daniel Inouye and Rudman...

...It remains to be seen whether the conservative political class and the GOP leadership will continue to resist Hatch's conservative philosophy of governance or whether they might learn something from it...

...But North has taken a lot of abuse "from people who ought to know better...

...They wanted to ignore our constitutional process," Hatch says of the usurpers...

...To turn conservative suspicions on their head, if anything stands in the way of the media conferring such "statesman" status on Hatch, it would be his dogged adherence to conservative principles...

...You should see him around a kid with HIV...

...Interest groups like People for the American Way have been openly critical of what they see as President Clinton's failure to name sufficient numbers of judicial activists to the bench and his apparent queasiness in picking nomination fights with the Republicans...

...Wrote Disler: Hatch was the first—and for quite some time, the only—Congressional critic of this legislation...

...He knows these kids are not going to have the opportunities in life that his grandchildren do, and he wants to fix it...

...Hatch believes that they are out of The American Spectator November 1997 touch with the grass-roots, not he...

...The bill, paid for with an increase in the tax on tobacco, would have distributed two-thirds of the $3o billion raised over five years to the child health program and one-third to reduce the federal deficit...

...In addition, at least twenty nominees are renominations from the last congressional term that Hatch has not moved because of concerns about their qualifications or activist leanings...

...Partly, this was the result of the liberal judicial activism that conservatives believe many Democrat-appointed judges are increasingly evidencing in their rulings, substituting their personal policy preferences for legal interpretation...

...Opposing children's health insurance would have taken the smiley face off the budget agreement," says one Hatch aide...

...Senator Slade Gorton of Washington wanted the GOP to take the unprecedented position that senators have veto power in the nomination of judges by mandating the traditionally informal consulting role played by home state senators for district court vacancies and extending it to the appellate level...

...The polarization, gridlock, and vitriolic rhetoric of the Senate has led thoughtful, ideologically eclectic members of both parties—David Boren, Sam Nunn, Bill Bradley, Warren Rudman, John Danforth, and Alan Simpson—to retire from the body in recent years...

...When Stephen Breyer was selected next, an agitated former Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio congratulated Hatch on CNN for selecting Breyer, whom most conservatives regarded as the best nominee that could be expected from a Democratic president...

...Mark Disler, Hatch's former chief counsel on the Judiciary Committee, finds this statement "galling," and explained the history behind Hatch's vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1991 in a letter to National Review that was not published...

...The Clinton administration, however, has shown Hatch extraordinary deference in the process...

...The main sticking point, according to Hatch aides, was getting Kennedy to abandon the idea of a legally enforceable entitlement in favor of a voluntary, block-grant program to states that wish to participate...

...I brought the first AIDS bill to the Senate floor...

...Pete Wilson and Ward Connerly to testify...

...Hatch, one observer says, "fought for Garland like he was his brother...

...urveying Hatch's Senate record, which has earned him a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 92 (cornwen pared to 90 for the arch-conservative Strom Thurmond, and only 82 for Bob Dole), it is hard to see how it could be described as anything but rock-solid...

...Earlier this year, Kennedy approached Hatch as a potential Republican co-sponsor of the initiative...

...Kennedy helped write it...

...Even as the ranking minority member of the committee, Hatch exerted more influence than Chairman Joseph Biden in the selection of Clinton's two relatively moderate Supreme Court picks...

...Hatch also played a key role in the passage of civil rights protection for the nation's physically and mentally handicapped, the Americans With Disabilities Act...

...But in conversations with Clinton, Hatch pushed Ruth Bader Ginsburg over front-runner Babbitt, who Hatch feared would take a more political approach to judging...

...More recently, the administration was poised to name Teresa Roseborough, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department, to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta...

...Hatch's critics are right to be frustrated: In his capacity as Judiciary Committee chairman, Hatch has been a less than effective Republican partisan...

...And he fought Helms on the Senate floor over a so-called hate crimes bill requiring the government to compile statistics for crimes committed against people due to their religion, race, or sexual orientation...

...As the budget bill moved through Congress, Kennedy and Hatch persisted, leading several Republican senators — including Al 40 November 19 97 • The American Spectator D'Amato of New York and Frank Murkowski of Alaska—to conclude that the issue of insuring low-income children, favored by more than 70 percent of the electorate according to opinion polls, was not going away...

...Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation calls Hatch a "liar" and says he needs "psychological help...

...In the meantime, President Bush's chief of staff, John Sununu, assuming the bill would sail through Congress, offered disastrous concessions to Senator Kennedy...

...Lott and other conservatives argued that there was no need to fill the vacancy, but Hatch saw this as a phony stratagem for denying a seat to a well-qualified (and fairly conservative) nominee...

...In the early Eighties [Hatch] forcefully criticized race and gender preferences — and in 1991, he supported their extension," National Review reported without further elaboration...

...Case in point: The nomination of Margaret Morrow, the first woman president of the California Bar Association and a business litigator in Arnold & Porter's Los Angeles office, to be a U.S...

...Since politics is the art of compromise, few Republican politicians, including such stalwarts as Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, have been spared the sort of treatment Hatch has received of late...

...ly crossed swords with Weyrich, who denounced him for being insufficiently vocal in opposing Paul Warnke, President Carter's nominee to head the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency...

...district judge, Frank Hull, would have clear sailing, Hull was nominated instead...

...It is this threat to their control of the debate over spending and the exposure of their "do-nothing" social agenda, more than anything, that Hatch suspects may be inflaming his conservative detractors...

...White House pussy-footing, PAW has charged, has resulted in almost ioo seats now being vacant 39 on the federal courts...

...The deeper problem, as Hatch and his supporters on the Judiciary Committee see it, is a new effort by conservative activists to politicize the judiciary...

...With seventeen grandchildren, Hatch's concern for the health needs of young children brought him into collaboration with Kennedy on the bill to provide health insurance for children who are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid but whose parents lack family insurance and can't afford to purchase it on their own...

...Hatch says the fact that Joe Kid is not guaranteed anything under the bill thwarts any hopes for nationalization...

...But this effort should have come as no surprise to conservatives, because it did not represent an overnight conversion on issues of children and health...

...Few senators fit this mold anymore...

...The appearances go against the advice given Hatch by political consultant Roger Stone in a 1979 memo often trotted out by the Senator's conservative critics as a "smoking gun," supposedly proving his apostasy...

...In making the case that Hatch has changed his spots, his detractors have sometimes misrepresented his record...

...While Republicans were in power, conservatives supported the idea that a president has the authority to pick judges who share his vision for the courts, and they cried foul when liberals tried to defeat otherwise qualified Republican court nominees based on their judicial philosophy...

...Repeatedly warning his col37 The American Spectator • November 19 9 7 leagues of the bill's flaws in committee, the Senate floor, and by detailed letters, he rallied opposition to the bill...

...Bruce Babbitt, to the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, among others...

...In recent Republican White Houses, candidates for federal district court and circuit court vacancies were rarely vetted in advance through the Democratic-controlled Judiciary Committee...

...Three district court nominees pending at the end of 1996, Wenona Whitfield, Sue Myerscough, and Faith Hochberg were not renominated in the current Congress when Hatch let the White House know he would oppose them...

...Hatch's aides say they worked hard to meet the criticisms of the bill from conservatives...

...Two proposals were offered in the Senate Republican Conference that would have taken the responsibility for vetting judicial nominations out of Hatch's hands and shifted the power to block Clinton nominees to the Republican Conference...

...Raised in next year's election cycle by the Democrats, they feared, it would become one of those now-classic "stealing thunder" issues if they didn't climb onboard...

...With his constituents boiling over in frustration, Clinton has tried to shift the blame for the "vacancy crisis" onto Hatch, pointing out that so far this year the Senate has approved only eighteen of Clinton's nominees to the federal bench: "We can't let partisan politics shut down our courts and gut our judicial system," Clinton has charged...

...Hatch once half-jokingly suggested to former White House counsel Jack Quinn that the White House send up a clearly unqualified nominee that Hatch could oppose to appease the conservatives...

...Going back to the mid-198o's, Hatch's single-minded support for providing Stinger missiles to the rebels in Afghanistan marked a critical turning point in the Cold War...

...Hatch's conduct of the confirmation process has recently come under attack from the White House, which itself has been under attack from critics on the left for ceding too much ground to Hatch...

...While the slowdown has been effective from a conservative standpoint, conservatives haven't risen to Hatch's defense...

...Most infamous among these was Carter-appointed federal district judge Thelton Henderson's ruling that Proposition zo9, approved by California's voters last November, violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution...

...Helms had branded the Hatch-supported bill "the flagship of the homosexual-lesbian agenda...

...1 ' he conservative dissatisfaction with Hatch manifested — itself earlier this year in a serious challenge to his authority as chairman of Judiciary that received little attention in the media...

...As one of them said: "He's had other senators say to him, 'They did it to us, we should do it to them.' And his answer is, 'By God, I won't let that happen.'" The courtly Utahn —known for giving away his colorful ties to friends and foes alike —has restored to the committee a decent and responsible process...

...Telling Joe American what did not happen does not resonate," Jipping told me...

...But Hatch's problem with the conservatives is not, as they have charged, that he "has grown in office," presumably moving in a liberal direction to advance his career since coming to Washington in 1976...

...But these programs are sort of the exception that prove the rule...

...And 93 other Senators ended up voting for it, not just Hatch...

...Circuit, and Andy Hurwitz, former chief of staff to Arizona Gov...

...A new conservative group, the Utah Republican Assembly, was formed in part to oppose Hatch's efforts on behalf of children...

...Although Hatch argues that he succeeded in crafting the bill within the contours of what the GOP under Ronald Reagan once celebrated as "the new federalism," the plan was immediately attacked by Trent Lott as a "big government program" and pronounced dead in the water...

...On background, Hatch aides will say that at a time when conservative interest groups are bereft of issues and searching for the golden egg, groups like Weyrich's Judicial Monitoring Project, whose research materials are incorporated in Christian Coalition voter guides and broadcast to 367 pressure groups and a network of right-wing radio and television shows, are seeking political influence and raising money by turning liberal judges into the new villains...

...About ten million American children are uninsured...

...he bipartisan balanced budget bill signed into law by Clinton provides $24 billion for health coverage for uninsured children, much of it paid for with a cigarette tax...

...Republicans have become more ideologically conservative, which is fine as long as it doesn't become an oppressive ideological dictatorship...

...Over the vocal opposition of Senator Jesse Helms and other Senate conservatives, in 1990 Hatch teamed up with Kennedy—a pairing that dates to 1981, when Hatch took the chairmanship of the Senate Labor Committee from Kennedy—on a number of bills providing funding for AIDS treatment and research, including an amendment honoring Ryan White, an eighteenyear-old who contracted AIDS from an infusion of contaminated blood...

...GOP nominee Bob Dole, by contrast, hemmed and hawed before endorsing zo9 a few days before the election...

...hough Hatch and the conservative activists agree on judicial philosophy, as seen in their alliance when Republican presidents were making nominations, they have parted company, sometimes bitterly, on what course to follow with the Democrats in control of the White House...

...He believes the government spends too much...

...Kennedy also initially resisted the deficit reduction component...

...While eschewing public controversy and putting forth many moderate nominees who decide cases incrementally and pragmatically, however, the White House has not given up entirely on nominating reliably activist judges of the type associated with the Warren Court when it sees an opportunity to make a difference, particularly in circuits that are closely divided along ideological lines...

...In Hatch's first Senate campaign—his first political race—ties between Hatch and Beltway conservatives like Weyrich were a marriage of convenience...

...Right-wing pressure on Hatch over his handling of judicial nominees had been bubbling up for several months...

...Tobacco interests marshaled their forces on the Hill...

...There used to be 62 Democrats and 12 of them were free-marketeers and socially conservative...

...Ideologues typically reserve their harshest judgments for those on their own side who they see as turncoats...

...Hatch, who is the first to admit that some judges who have been approved by his committee have turned out to be "bad," is nonetheless confronted with the choice of letting the suspect candidates through because he has no credible basis on which to oppose them, or The American Spectator • November 1997 "borking" them, distorting their records and conducting show trials to defeat them...

...But there is no denying that Hatch has always seen an affirmative role for government in "fixing" certain targeted social ills...

...Though Dole as majority leader had put down a conservative insurrection against then Appropriations Committee Chairman Mark Hatfield in deference to Senate protocol, Trent Lott did nothing to defend Hatch's prerogatives and let the challenge come to a vote...

...Stone had urged Hatch to "begin systematic withdrawal of appearances at New Right functions...

...Several of the decisions conservatives have objected to, however, have been quickly overturned on appeal, as was Henderson's opinion...

...To that pledge, Hatch has remained true...

...This hardly seems like someone polishing his image for the liberal establishment...

...In the House, GOP Whip Tom DeLay suggested impeaching judges based on their judicial philosophy...

...He has been consistently pro-life and tough on crime, and has fought for an end to racial preferences and to enact the balanced budget amendment since he first introduced it in 1982...

...DeWine joined Hatch and Senators Fred Thompson and Spencer Abraham in supporting the nominee...

...Since 1994 alone, Hatch was the prime force 36 November 1997 The American Spectator 0 behind the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the child pornography bill, and major habeas corpus reform...

...Weyrich's group turned up an article she had written questioning the process California uses to place initiatives on the ballot...

...In an emotional showdown, with one committee chairman reportedly on the verge of tears in support of Hatch, the challenge was narrowly beaten back...

...Before the GOP take-over of the Senate in 1980 and the emergence of the sound-bite attack ad, major bills almost always had Republican and Democratic co-sponsors...

...One thing I am not going to be is a captive of the ultra-conservatives in Washington," Hatch told Weyrich two decades ago...

...With a Democrat-controlled Senate, Clinton could have confirmed virtually anyone he wanted for the high court...

...He always talks about kids who can't see the blackboard in school, or can't hear their teachers," one aide says...

...The problem for Hatch is that the administration has taken pains to find stealth candidates for these seats—rarely, if ever, are they drawn from the ranks of academe or the lower courts—who have no paper trail that would reveal their activist leanings...

...Conservative editorialists, noting that the inspiration for the proposal was Hillary Rodham Clinton's Kidcare program, which was listed by her health care working group in 1993 as a fallback option to the more expansive ClintonCare plan, denounced the expansion of federal responsibilities as the first step toward nationalizing the health care system, an expressed long-term goal of Kennedy's (and Mrs...

...But his sponsorship of a new role for government and more social spending within the context of a balanced budget will likely make it much harder for conservatives to resist new programs solely on the easy argument that they are unaffordable...

...When that happens, the party is insensitive to human needs and in some cases bigoted...

...Now there are zero," Hatch says...

...The activists are frustrated that Hatch's approach—which has resulted in only four roll-call votes on 204 federal judges and no defeats—has denied them the opportunity to give the White House a black eye and build their grass-roots base with public bloodlettings...

...five committee Republicans, however, abandoned Hatch and voted no...

...Garland was confirmed...

...He quickDAVID BROCK is an investigative writer for The American Spectator and author of The Real Anita Hill (Free Press) and The Seduction of Hillary Rodham (Free Press...

...Now, Hatch says, "there are Republicans who want ideological litmus tests...