At the beginning of 2018, Utah’s most archaic relic of bigotry and hypocrisy, Sen. Orrin Hatch, announced that he would be retiring. Many of us shed a single scalding tear for the joy we felt, knowing that Orrin Hatch would be gone from our daily lives sooner rather than later. However, Hatch’s announcement has led to one of the worst human beings in the history of the Senate really letting down his serpentine hair. He’s openly described most United States citizens’ belief in affordable healthcare as “stupid.” And his last (fingers crossed) Senate Judiciary Committee appearance included the highlight of calling a sexual assault survivor a liar.
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With Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer sentenced to 36 months in prison and the president himself implicated in numerous federal and state crimes, Sen. Hatch was asked about his feelings on the matter by CNN’s Manu Raju. You know, since it’s kind of a big deal having a suspected treasonous criminal acting as the president of the United States of America and all.
Hatch: I don’t care. All I can say is that he’s doing a good job as president.
Raju: It doesn’t bother you, these crimes he was alleged to be involved with, the president?
Hatch: No, because I don’t think he was involved in crimes. But even then, you know, you can make anything a crime under the current laws. If you want to you can blow it way out of proportion. You can do a lot of things.
All I can say is this: President Trump, before he became president—that’s another world.
Hatch’s argument is that the Trump allegations of criminal misconduct are from “the past.” By Hatch’s definition of the past, what you just read in the last sentence is now “in the past.” I would prefer you don’t hold me to the paragraph above this one, because I was younger then, and this is now. Besides being an obviously dumb thing to say, Sen. Hatch clearly knows better because a.) He used to be a goddamn lawyer, and b.) he’s a part of the LEGISLATIVE BRANCH of the single most powerful democracy in the world. This is the branch that shape and creates and fixes the “laws.”
Calling Orrin Hatch a hypocrite at this point does not scratch the surface of how utterly vacant he is ethically. He is the moral equivalent of soot. Sen. Hatch, as I’ve written before, is one of the first public figures—along with Alfonse D'Amato—I remember my parents warning me about. “He’s not a good man,” my dad said—uncharacteristic for my kind father, I might add—about Hatch, who was on television probably mouthng some lie about how great the newly-elected Ronald Reagan was.
You can watch a man who has given up all pretense of caring about the job he has made his life’s career in the video below.