PERRspectives: Orrin Hatch: New GOP Majority the Solution to Republican Failures

December 8, 2009

Orrin Hatch: New GOP Majority the Solution to Republican Failures

From 2001 through 2008, what Thomas Frank deemed the Republican "wrecking crew" essentially demolished U.S. prosperity and the American dream. For the eight years George W. Bush presided in the White House and the six that the GOP controlled Congress, Republican stewardship produced endless budget deficits, a massive tax windfall for wealthy Americans, an unnecessary war in Iraq, sharp increases in poverty and those without health insurance and, of course, the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. But as Utah Senator Orrin Hatch announced Monday, the solution to the problem of Republican mismanagement is to return the GOP to the majority.

Appearing on the Fox Business channel, Senator Hatch assured host Alexis Glick that the prescription for the malignant cancers caused by the GOP was to introduce more Republican carcinogens into the American body politic:

FOXBIZ: What are your solutions to jobs, the unemployment situation, rising health care costs, energy costs that are rising, inflation that is still a concern, how do we solve these issues right now? Are we trying to do too much too quickly?
HATCH: Number one you get the arrogance of power by throwing the Democrats and get the control back into conservative Republican hands. Number two we should not do away with the Bush tax cuts, those marginal tax cuts are a major help to try and keep the economy going. Number three we should use fifty state labratories to do health care.

Of course, Hatch's comical call for a new Republican majority comes just one month after he warned about a future with Congress in Democratic hands. As he made clear, the GOP is worried not that Obama's health care initiatives might fail, but that they might succeed.

As he did in his pivotal effort to block Bill Clinton's health care efforts starting in 1993, conservative strategist Bill Kristol warned his Republican allies then as now that that a victory for President Obama would earn his party the thanks of a grateful public and guarantee Democratic majorities for the foreseeable future. In an interview with CNS in November, Senator Hatch revealed that was his darkest fear as well:

HATCH: That's their goal. Move people into government that way. Do it in increments. They've actually said it. They've said it out loud.
Q: This is a step-by-step approach -

HATCH: A step-by-step approach to socialized medicine. And if they get there, of course, you're going to have a very rough time having a two-party system in this country, because almost everybody's going to say, "All we ever were, all we ever are, all we ever hope to be depends on the Democratic Party."

Q: They'll have reduced the American people to dependency on the federal government.

HATCH: Yeah, you got that right. That's their goal. That's what keeps Democrats in power.

Of course, President Obama and the Democratic Party have no interest in fostering dependency among Americans, but instead seek to remedy the crippling health care crisis which threatens their financial security and the nation's future. As with their staunch opposition to Social Security and Medicare, programs which dramatically reduced poverty among the elderly, Republicans now want to stop at all costs the third pillar of the Democratic social contract. And what keeps the Democrats in power (among other things) is the inescapable truth that it comes to GDP, employment, the stock market or just about any other measure of the health of American capitalism, the economy almost always does better under Democrats.

As for Orrin Hatch, he apparently has his own formula for why the GOP deserves control of Congress once again:

For Republicans, nothing succeeds like failure.

UPDATE: Hatch's latest plea for a new Republican majority came just four days after he whitewashed the entirety of the Bush years:

"I dream some day of having the Republicans have 60 votes. I'll tell you one thing, I think we would finally have the total responsibility to get this country under control and I believe we would. But we never come close to that. There are essentially no checks and balances found in Washington today just an arrogance of power with one party ramming through unpopular and devastating proposals on after the other."

—Perrspective 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) |

4 Comments

With so many things to list, you forgot that Bush and his cronies *lost a major American city* due to their incompetence before, during and after Katrina. I won't ever forget that one.

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