Free Republic

President Barack Obama will eventually raise taxes on the entire middle class because he has no plans to stop spending, the GOP’s soon-to-be senior senator tells Newsmax. And the success or failure of the president’s bid to increase tax rates for the top two percent of earners is irrelevant in the matter, said Sen. Orrin Hatch in an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV. The Utah senator—who will become the senior Republican in the new Congress set to convene next week—said that Republicans are leery of increasing taxes on Americans in any income bracket because they believe Obama will spend the money...

The Obama administration’s efforts at extending executive authority were dealt a setback on Tuesday. The bipartisan Government Accountability Office flagged the administration’s end run around Congress in its July memo announcing changes to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) act, aka “welfare reform.” The GAO said that the White House needs to give Congress the chance to block its plan that permits states to tweak the work requirements that needy families must satisfy in order to receive government assistance under the program. The official word came in the form of a letter to lawmakers from GAO’s general counsel, Lynn...

A Coverup That Won’t Stay Covered by Paul Craig Roberts CNN recently reported that "the Justice Department is re-examining its investigation into the 1995 death of a federal prisoner that the victim’s family alleges was murder at the hands of the government." The victim was Kenneth Michael Trentadue. At 7 AM on August 21, 1995, officials from the Oklahoma Medical Examiner’s office arrived at the new Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center for the body of a man recently picked up for parole violation who allegedly was a suicide by hanging. The astonished state officials saw a body with scalp split...

Across the country, Republicans are fighting off tea party threats while Democrats are dragged down by anti-incumbent sentiment and a president who remains unpopular in many competitive states. But on Tuesday, Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch is expected to defy those trends and win re-election handily, with experience and a novice challenger helping to boost his odds. Similarly, Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel certainly has years of congressional service on his side--41 to be exact--and faces lesser-known opponents, but redistricting changes could thwart the Congressman's chances of winning.

From the Daily Caller: Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch has joined his congressional colleagues in demanding Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation in the wake of Operation Fast and Furious. Hatch made the call during a Wednesday interview on former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s radio show. “Well if he doesn’t cooperate with the Congress on this Fast and Furious, where one of our agents was killed because of the stupidity of this administration, then he ought to step own,” Hatch said. “He’s basically a nice man, but by gosh he’s been so partisan in that job that I’m very concerned about...

Senator Hatch promised the crowd of business leaders that if he were re-elected and became Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, he would be well-positioned to help take down the Affordable Care Act. "If we take over in the majority, we're going to try and repeal Obamacare, and see if we can get it right," he said. Hatch and Wyoming Senator John Barrasso said they were currently focused on repealing provisions of the law including a tax on the medical device industry and on health insurance providers. Democratic Utah state Senator Pat Jones is on the Salt Lake Chamber's Health...

Sarah Palin has just announced that she is endorsing Sen. Orrin Hatch in the Utah Senate primary. Palin revealed this on Greta Van Susteren’s show. She emphasized Hatch’s record and position on balancing the budget........"

Sarah Palin said she is joining the ranks for Mark Levin and Sean Hannity to endorse Orrin Hatch for Senate in Utah, which will undoubtedly cause some friction for those who are fighting so hard to defeat him in Utah:

It’s probably not the endorsement that incumbent Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch needs right now, as the Republican is locked up in a primary challenge from Dan Liljenquist. But Saturday on Melissa Harris-Perry’s MSNBC show, former Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, the co-author of “Life Among the Cannibals: A Political Career, a Tea Party Uprising, and the End of Governing As We Know It,” pleaded with Utah voters to keep their senior senator. Specter told Harris-Perry that the current climate in Washington, D.C. isn’t lending itself to electoral success for moderate incumbents, which he said has been the focus of a crusade...

Former Republican Rep. Tom Davis told The Hill newspaper: “The middle is getting squeezed,” but his comment vastly understates the crisis in the capital. Activists in both parties have declared war on moderates. The ideological gap between the two parties is widening rapidly. Paralysis is pervasive. Political scientist Keith Poole of the University of Georgia, who studies voting patterns, told the National Journal: “We are clearly as conflicted as we’ve been since 1905. The parties are, I think, completely dysfunctional and incapable of acting on major policy.” The National Journal reports that as recently as 1999, more than half of...

Candidate for Senate Dan Liljenquist (left) pledged to The New American that should he be elected to the U.S. Senate he will offer legislation explicitly repealing the indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). In a press conference held on April 24 at 2:00 p.m. (MDT), the former Utah State Senator and current GOP challenger to six-term Senator Orrin Hatch described the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA as “an overreach and a violation of the Bill of Rights.” He said that had he been in office when Congress voted to pass the NDAA he would have...

After 6 terms in the United States senate, long time RINO Orrin Hatch will face his first primary battle after failing to attain the necessary 60% of delegate votes at Saturday’s Utah Republican convention. After falling 32 votes short of the required total on the final ballot, Hatch will take on conservative Republican Dan Liljenquist on June 26th. In 2010 Hatch watched nervously as Utah colleague Robert Bennett was removed from the Senate in his own primary contest, a victim of having too often sold-out the conservative Republican base. Concerned with mounting criticism of his own predilection for confirming Marxists...

After 6 terms in the United States senate, long time RINO Orrin Hatch will face his first primary battle after failing to attain the necessary 60% of delegate votes at Saturday’s Utah Republican convention. After falling 32 votes short of the required total on the final ballot, Hatch will take on conservative Republican Dan Liljenquist on June 26th. In 2010 Hatch watched nervously as Utah colleague Robert Bennett was removed from the Senate in his own primary contest, a victim of having too often sold-out the conservative Republican base. Concerned with mounting criticism of his own predilection for confirming Marxists...

The Tea Party movement is alive in Utah. With representatives from FreedomWorks in the audience, delegates at the Utah Republican Convention managed to force Sen. Orrin Hatch into a June 26 primary. He got 59.2 percent of their votes against Dan Liljenquist, a 38-year-old state senator. Hatch needed 60 percent to avoid the primary. He couldn’t do it. In two rounds of voting, he went from 2,243 votes to 2,313 votes. If he’d gotten 32 more votes, he would have wrapped this up… FreedomWorks and other Tea Party groups now have two Causes to distract them from their failure to...

FARMINGTON, Utah -- Sen. Orrin Hatch predicted President Obama's campaign team would use Mitt Romney's Mormon faith against him in the general election. Speaking to a group of GOP delegates at a campaign stop Tuesday, the six-term Republican incumbent warned, "You watch, they're going to throw the Mormon church at him like you can't believe." Asked to elaborate in an interview later, Hatch fingered campaign adviser David Axelrod and White House aide David Plouffe as the masterminds who would insert the issue into the campaign. "Let me tell you something. The Obama people have some of the best political consultants...

The United States is now, officially, the worst place to do business in the developed world. On Sunday, Japan lowered its corporate tax rate in the hopes of luring business to its shores, handing the title of highest tax rate to the Land of the Free. The market reaction on Monday will tell whether money will begin flowing away from us and toward the more business-friendly Asian country. Japan’s combined corporate tax rate went down from 39.8 percent to 36.8 percent on its way to 34.5 percent within a few years. The U.S. federal rate is 35 percent and the...

Today may be the most important day of Sen. Orrin Hatch’s (R) bid for a seventh term. The Hatch campaign, fending off state GOP convention challenges from conservative opponents, has recruited and trained thousands of people to run as delegates for Hatch in tonight’s local caucuses being held around the state. The 4,000 delegates elected will go on to vote at the April 21 convention, where a nominee can emerge with 60 percent of the vote. If no one cracks that mark, the top two finishers go on to a June 26 primary. “The campaign has been working toward caucus...

Do I agree with Obama's interpretation of Luke 12:48? No. Do I agree with Obama in his 2004 interview "I have a deep faith" in which he said that there many paths to heaven/the Father and his words which were contrary to Jesus saying He is the "Way, Truth, Life...no man comes unto the Father but by me." Absolutely not. Do I agree with Mormon teaching that Jesus and Satan are brothers? Again, absolutely not. (link below in comments section.) The point of the this thread is to point out that Orrin Hatch was wrong. In fact, I believe that...

Congressional support for controversial online piracy legislation eroded dramatically on Wednesday in the face of an unprecedented online protest supported by tech titans such as Google, Wikipedia and Facebook. Several key senators withdrew their support from the Senate's Protect IP Act (PIPA), including Tea Party favorite Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), an elected member of his party's leadership. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who leads the Senate GOP's campaign team, said the legislation should be put on hold, while Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a sponsor and the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, retreated from the...

Washington, DC --(Ammoland.com)- Two pro-gun conservatives recently announced they were running against Utah Senator Orrin Hatch. This is welcome news for gun owners. In a Senate career that has lasted more than thirty five years, Hatch has not been a particularly good friend of the Second Amendment. During negotiations over the 1986 McClure-Volkmer Firearms Owners Protection Act – designed to protect gun owners from abuses of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms -- Hatch sat at the negotiating table next to officials of the ATF and argued against the pro-gun positions of Sen. Jim McClure. Though a senior member...

Will it be enough to rein in FDA’s outrageous power grab? ANH-USA, together with a number of supplement trade organizations, went to Capitol Hill to plead our case about the FDA’s profoundly flawed NDI (new supplement) draft guidance in the offices of two powerful senators and longtime friends of natural health, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). Our visit was preceded by all the letters you have been sending to Congress, which have immeasurably increased the visibility of this issue. As you know, if this draft guidance stands, it would allow FDA to arbitrarily deny the sale...

1. Ben Nelson, D-Neb. 2. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. 3. Jon Tester, D-Mont. 4. Scott Brown, R-Mass. 5. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah 6. Dick Lugar, R-Ind. 7. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio 8. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. 9. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine 10. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.

Liberal group takes credit for audience member asking Obama to raise taxes By Alicia M. Cohn - 09/28/11 09:32 AM ET Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, a campaign by the progressive group The Agenda Project, on Tuesday took credit for a member of the audience who asked President Obama to raise his taxes during a town hall meeting in Silicon Valley on Monday. “Will you please raise my taxes?” the man said. “It kills me to see Congress not supporting the expiration of the tax cuts that have been benefiting so many of us for so long." It was a...

Not only are factions of the Tea Party working to dump Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, but now they're attacking the movement's darling, Sarah Palin, for going all lovey-dovey over Hatch.

GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz had raised the hopes of grass-roots conservative activists outside the Beltway for months with strong indications that he would mount a David vs. Goliath challenge to the four-decade incumbent Hatch: The Chaffetz calculus is not simple. On one hand, Hatch is widely seen as vulnerable to a conservative challenger and Chaffetz is well-known and liked among Utah’s tea party base. However, Chaffetz was a leading spokesman for House conservatives during the recent debt ceiling debate and sponsor of the Cut, Cap and Balance proposal, which advocated slashing government spending and requiring Congress to pass a balanced...

Link only, per FR posting rules

As faithful readers of this blog know, I was reporting on the Tea Party movement long before it was even called the Tea Party movement — and long before a legion of Johnny-come-latelys in Washington had grabbed their fiscal conservative costumes and joined the parade. I can remember not being able to get mainstream media coverage on the day of one of the first taxpayer protests in Denver in February 2009. We’ve come a long way, baby. From day one, I emphasized that the grass-roots activists leading the Tea Party charge have been as opposed to Big Government Republicans as...

I am not a Sarah Palin hater. As an Alaska native, I have some appreciation for the political skill needed to knock off Frank Murkowski and Tony Knowles in the same election – political skill that simply isn’t possessed by idiots. And I’ve watched with admiration as she has continually kept herself in the news while shaping the national conversation in subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) ways. But over the last several months, Palin’s unique brand of activism seems to have shifted – whether consciously or unconsciously – towards the will of the Republican Establishment. Consider: Palin’s first break with grassroots/TEA...

I just read a very bizarre blog post about entrenched incumbent Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch by Fox News anchor Greta van Susteren and then watched an equally distressing interview van Susteren conducted last night with Sarah Palin regarding Hatch. First, the title of van Susteren’s blog post: “Is someone trying to manipulate the UTAH Tea Party vote unfairly away from Senator Orrin Hatch?” Van Susteren absurdly suggests that dark, sinister, unnamed, and uninformed forces in Utah with outside backing are somehow trying to take away Hatch’s seat through nefarious means. She’s clearly talking about D.C.-based fiscal conservative groups like FreedomWorks...

Calling himself a tea party true believer, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) on Tuesday in the same interview both praised the debt ceiling deal and said he plans to vote against it. Hatch, who faces a looming primary challenge from the right from Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), took to Fox News’s “Fox and Friends” to tout his own tea party credentials. “Look, I think the tea party people deserve a lot of credit,” he said in response to a question about Democrats and Vice President Joe Biden reportedly calling freshman GOP members of Congress terrorists. “We wouldn’t be where we are...

The National Republican Senatorial Committee gave $43,100 to Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch’s campaign, despite recent pleas from Tea Party activists that the organization wait until a Republican nominee is selected before supporting a candidate. New filings show that the NRSC also contributed the same amount to Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar, who is also facing a GOP primary challenge. That candidate, Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, also enjoys the support of Tea Party activists. A spokesman for the NRSC said its standard practice for the organization to give money to incumbent senators. “The NRSC would not exist were it not...

Last week, we wrote about how Rep. Anna Eshoo (whose district covers much of Silicon Valley) is apparently so incredibly out of touch on what PROTECT IP is about (despite it having a huge impact on the economy of her district) that she thought it was really about immigration. We were willing to chalk it up to a busy staffer sending out the wrong form letter, but there's growing evidence that our elected officials simply don't know what PROTECT IP is about at all. David Segal from Demand Progress was kind enough to pass on that they've been watching the...

Welcome to extreme makeover, the Sen. Orrin Hatch edition. The Utah Republican — fearful that 3,500 locally elected grass-roots, state GOP delegates could boot him from office 10 months from now ­— has spent the past several months recasting his image in a bid for a seventh term. He’s shining a spotlight on his 34-year Senate voting record as a conservative stalwart while minimizing his penchant for bipartisan deal-making. (snip) Cognizant of his precarious position with grass-roots Republicans and tea party activists in a way that Bennett was not, Hatch is determined not to let the same thing happen to...

The door is that way, Senator. You can walk out it or be thrown out it. The choice is yours. This is closed circuit to Sen. Orrin Hatch, a good man who is facing a hard decision. Specifically, he is deciding how his political career will end. He may not understand that that is the decision he is making, but it is. In the coming weeks and months he is deciding how it all comes to an end. With his head held high and to the gratitude of constituents, or in the humiliation of public rejection and political loss. Don't...

SALT LAKE CITY — A majority of Utah voters believe Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, has been in office too long and should be replaced, a new Deseret News/KSL-TV poll shows. The poll by Dan Jones & Associates found only 38 percent of registered voters agree that it's important to re-elect Hatch in 2012 because of his seniority. Fifty-nine percent said after 36 years, it's time for someone new.(snip) Hatch's most likely GOP challenger appears to be Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah. In a primary race, 40 percent of poll respondents said they would vote for Hatch and 41 percent for Chaffetz....

On Thursday, Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced the Federal Land Asset Inventory Reform (FLAIR) Act into the Senate. The FLAIR Act would require the federal government to work with the private sector to create a single, up-to-date, inventory of federal land holdings. This bill will reduce waste, improve government operations, potentially help the economy, and benefit private property-owners. This legislation is long overdue, for several major reasons. First, the current system of government land inventory is a Kafkaesque amalgamation of literally hundreds of different databases, which are neither mutually compatible nor checked for redundancy. As former...

Conservative PAC FreedomWorks, a prominent Tea Party group chaired by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, is targeting Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch in the 2012 Senate race. The group, arguing Hatch has insufficiently conservative economic views, is launching the so-called "Retire Orrin Hatch" campaign at Utah's Republican Convention on Saturday. "It's clear that Senator Hatch is trying to capitalize on the popularity of the Tea Party movement by reinventing himself as a fiscal conservative," said Russ Walker, Vice President of Political and Grassroots Campaigns for FreedomWorks PAC, in a statement. "But his recent rhetoric and actions in favor of limited...

The 18 Senators Who Approve Breaking The Internet To Protect Hollywood from the not-cool dept Last fall, we noted that the Senate Judiciary Committee had unanimously voted to approve COICA, a bill for censoring the internet as a favor to the entertainment industry. Thankfully, Senator Ron Wyden stepped up and blocked COICA from progressing. This year, COICA has been replaced by the PROTECT IP Act, which fixes some of the problems of COICA, but introduces significant other problems as well. A wide cross section of people who actually understand technology and innovation have come out against PROTECT IP as written...

(CNSNews.com) – Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) issued a press release today stating his intention to introduce a resolution next week disapproving of the policy concerning Israel that President Barack Obama announced on Thursday. “Israel is the United States’ strongest friend and ally,” Hatch said in the statement. “By calling for a return to the pre-1967 borders, President Obama has directly undermined her.”

Orrin Hatch, the senior senator from Utah, didn't mince words the other day on Hugh Hewitt's national radio show. The Democrats, he said, "play politics very, very tough, they play it well, and they don't give a damn about what's right and what's wrong." He was speaking about battles in Washington, but an even more vivid example can be found in Wisconsin, where the Democrats are still trying to overturn the 2010 elections. Blindsided last fall by the election of Gov. Scott Walker, the loss of both houses of the legislature and the US Senate seat held by ultraliberal Russ...

Several national publications recently speculated that Sen. Orrin Hatch was purposely deleting pages from his official website in an attempt to preserve his conservative bona fides. Hatch's office, however, squashed the rumors by thoroughly clarifying that the elimination of certain web pages was an "internal decision" related to the launch of "a brand new website." Here's a timeline of what transpired: Darren Elliot wrote a piece for Salon on Thursday revisiting the Presidential Eligibility Amendment, a 2003 bill introduced by Hatch that would allow foreign-born American citizens to run for president — a stance which at the time was primarily...

Suddenly Obama doesn't seem so unqualified... Top Senate Democrats sought to recruit Ken Jennings to challenge Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) back in 2004, the "Jeopardy!" contestant revealed Thursday. Jennings is famous for holding the record for consecutive wins on the quiz show. His streak of 74 straight victories brought him to the attention of the Democratic Senate leadership in 2004..... More at The Hill According to the article Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer PERSONALLY reached out to Jennings to run. Do you think Sharon Angle would've won if she was able to run ads showing how Reid thought...

“It’s good to allow them to work out their own problems rather than a one-size-fits-all federal government, dumb-ass program. It really is an awful piece of crap.” – Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) on POTUS Obama’s health care law.

"Every state has different demographics, every state has different problems. It's good to allow them to work out their own problems rather than a one-size-fits-all federal government stupid, dumbass program," Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said at Utah State University.

This is a poor quality video to say the least... but here is a video showing Orrin Hatch at CPAC. Hatch defiantly says he would vote for TARP / bailouts again. Sadly, some of the CPAC crowd stand and applaud. It seems like only the Ron Paul nuts are heckling him. What the heck? Is it "conservative" to support TARP? Is it "conservative" to support bailouts? I hope the Utah Tea Party will show Hatch the door like they did Bob Bennett.

This is a tale of two senior senators, both Republican, both up for reelection in 2012, both eager to win. And their approaches to the tea party couldn’t be more different. Six-term Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) of Utah is wooing the populist conservative movement. At a Tea Party Express town hall Tuesday night at the National Press Club, Senator Hatch said that he’s “very impressed” by the role the tea party is playing in helping “America to take back America.” Sen. Richard Lugar (R) of Indiana, also in his sixth term, is pushing back hard, telling the tea party: “get...

The Tea Party doesn't have a leader, but it does play favorites. Several of them turned up Tuesday night for a Congressional town hall hosted by the Tea Party Express and billed as the first of its kind. Crammed into an airless conference room at Washington's National Press Club, the standing-room crowd was energized and eclectic. A tricorn-hatted revolutionary hovered near a woman in a hijab. Activists snapped pictures and gave rousing ovations as movement stalwarts Rand Paul, Michele Bachmann, Steve King, and newcomers Allen West and Mike Lee pledged fealty to Tea Party principles. The senior statesman of the...

Six-term Republican Senator Orrin Hatch is trailing in a hypothetical primary challenge. The Utah Republican just saw his counterpart Bob Bennett knocked out of office last year in a Republican primary. Hatch ran for President in 2000, but did not get more than 3% nationwide. Hatch's last competitive race for Senate was in 1982. Utah Policy came out with a new poll of that state's Republicans, in which Hatch was placed third against former Governor John Huntsman and current representative Jason Chaffetz.

(RTTNews) - A prominent Tea Party group sent a message to members on Monday identifying five current Republican Senators that they intend to target in 2012. Tea Party Nation named Sens. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, Scott Brown, R-Mass., and Bob Corker, R-Tenn., as Republicans that need to be sent into retirement, accusing them of being Republicans In Name Only, or RINOs. The message cited Lugar's vote against a ban on earmarks as well as a his votes in favor of the DREAM Act and the START Treaty. Hatch was also criticized for being a "pork...