Sen Orrin Hatch: Year in Review – Restoring the Senate for the American People
Last November, the American people went to the polls to register their disgust with Washington’s gridlock and President Obama’s liberal agenda. In doing so, they elected a Republican majority to the United States Senate for the first time in eight years.
When Republicans assumed the majority at the beginning of this year, we faced the daunting task of getting the Senate back to work for the American people. Under the previous Democratic leadership, the Senate had become a wasteland of partisan warfare, misusing most of its time on “show” votes meant to buttress flimsy election-year arguments and rushing through as many of President Obama’s nominees as possible on a bare partisan majority. After a year of hard work, the new Republican majority made significant progress. We have delivered meaningful results and demonstrated a capacity for responsible governance against the odds.
First, we have enacted a number of major, bipartisan reforms that the country badly needed. Upon taking office, our new majority was faced with a difficult obstacle: Democrats could still use the Senate’s rules and President Obama’s veto pen to block many conservative priorities from becoming law. Rather than perpetuate the pointless partisan warfare of the past, our senior Republican leadership team--on which I serve as Senate president pro tem--chose to focus the Senate’s valuable floor time on bills that could actually become law. While this ambitious approach requires hard work and difficult compromises, it is the only viable path to enacting the conservative reforms that our country so desperately needs.
Consider a few of the most prominent examples. We passed Trade Promotion Authority into law for the first time in more than a decade, creating a framework to ensure that strong trade agreements are enacted by prescribing negotiating objectives for future agreements, providing transparency for the American people in examining proposed agreements, and establishing a viable pathway to congressional ratification by an up-or-down vote. We also enacted the Every Student Succeeds Act, which represents—in the words of The Wall Street Journal—“the largest devolution of federal control to the states in a quarter-century” by abolishing federal test-based accountability, ending the Obama administration’s much-abused waiver authority, and stopping the federal government from mandating any particular set of standards such as Common Core. We secured crucial long-term enhancements to our national security by enabling information-sharing between the private sector and the government to fight cyber-attacks, and we reformed how the Pentagon buys new weapon systems to ensure that each precious dollar does more to protect us in these dangerous times.
Second, we have stood up to President Obama’s overreach. The first bill we passed authorized the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which was stalled for years by the administration’s political manipulations. Under our new Republican majority, the Senate passed its first ever Obamacare repeal, creating a viable pathway for full repeal under a future Republican president. And recognizing the damage inflicted to our economy and our constitutional system of government by President Obama’s lawless regulatory overreach, the Senate passed legislation to repeal some of the Obama administration’s most onerous regulations such as the Clean Power Plan and the “Waters of the United States” rule.
Third, our new Republican majority has aimed to shed Congress’s (unfortunately well-deserved) reputation for careening from one crisis to another and instead demonstrate our capacity for responsible long-term governance. Chief among these responsibilities is exercising the power of the purse. Despite protracted intransigence from the far right and the far left, the Senate reached a bipartisan budget agreement that averted another government shutdown and avoided a disastrous default on our national debt. Likewise, we passed a spending agreement that, while far from perfect, achieved important conservative victories such as lifting the oil export ban and prohibiting the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to U.S. soil.
But our new Republican majority’s achievements extend well beyond simply keeping the lights on; we have also aimed to end Congress’s bad habit of kicking the proverbial can down the road. The new Republican Senate’s record of responsible governance also includes: (1) permanent and other long-term extensions of key tax relief to give businesses and families crucial certainty in their budgets, creating critical momentum for comprehensive tax reform; (2) the first long-term highway bill in ten years, a crucial boon for the nation’s infrastructure that is fully paid for without adding a dime to the deficit or raising taxes; and (3) a permanent fix to how Medicare reimburses physicians, ensuring that seniors get the care they deserve and ending a series of irresponsible patches with a long-term solution that includes a down payment on real entitlement reform.
But what’s most important about each of these achievements is not how they are received in the back and forth of Washington politics, but rather how they represent meaningful wins for Utahns. From growing jobs and making family budgets go further to repairing our roads and putting Utah parents and teachers back in charge of our schools, the Senate Republican agenda has produced tangible benefits here in our daily lives. Much can only be done once we elect a Republican president. But in the meantime, I will continue to use my influence to advance commonsense, conservative reforms that deliver meaningful results for Utah families.
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