It was time — past time, depending on your perspective — for Sen. Orrin Hatch to “hang up the gloves,” as he put it this week.
But that doesn’t mean the decision was easy for him or that his announcement Tuesday was merely a formal acknowledgment of a foregone conclusion reached months ago. In fact, those close to Hatch say the senator was conflicted about his future until very recently.
Hatch was under intense pressure from President Donald Trump to stay in the Senate and maintain their flowering bromance. But closer to home, Hatch’s family — particularly his wife, Elaine, whose health is not as good as her husband’s — was urging him to walk away.
In Utah, big-money backers of Mitt Romney had been busily building an off-ramp that could ease Hatch out of the Senate. They laid the groundwork for the Hatch Center, which will presumably be hosted by the University of Utah, a legacy project for the senator that would house his papers and foster policy research.
The money behind the Hatch Center will come from some of Utah’s most well-known names — real-estate developer and Romney friend Kem Gardner, the Eccles family and Zions Bank President Scott Anderson.
But the holdup in that plan was Hatch. He bristled at the perception that Romney people were putting him out to pasture and he pushed back each time there were anonymously sourced media reports that Romney was growing frustrated waiting for the senator’s inevitable announcement.
Just a few weeks ago, Hatch was saying at public events that he planned to run again. That was in the thick of the fight over the tax bill and around the time Trump visited Utah to shrink the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments — a visit in which the president very publicly praised Hatch and expressed his hope that the senator would serve many more years.
It was, it seems, the passage of the tax bill shortly before Christmas that may have changed the senator’s perception. As he left for the break, the pendulum was swinging back toward retirement.
Even those closest to Hatch didn’t know for sure what he was going to do until Tuesday morning, when he broke the news to his staff in a private meeting, called his political team and then recorded a video message to announce his decision to Utahns and the country.
So now what? Now, it appears, it will be Romney Time.
Yes, there are Democrats and likely some Republicans he’ll have to beat, but challengers suffered a blow when they traded a hobbled Hatch for a robust Romney, who won more than 72 percent of the vote last time he was on a Utah ballot.
Popular support, however, doesn’t translate into the kind of legislative clout that Hatch wielded.
Romney will join the freshman class as one of the most junior senators in a body ruled by seniority. The notion that he would leapfrog senators like Louisiana’s John Kennedy or Indiana’s Todd Young, much less those like Utah’s Mike Lee and Florida’s Marco Rubio, without a full-scale revolt is ludicrous. It will be years before Romney sees real institutional power in the Senate.
So he’s going to have to fashion his own bully pulpit, but he may have the tools to pull it off.
With Trump critics like Sen. Jeff Flake and Sen. Bob Corker retiring, and Sen. John McCain’s cancer fight reducing his prominence, Romney can fill the vacuum — if he chooses — as the voice of the Republican resistance to Trump.
He wouldn’t be the bomb-throwing resistance, like we saw from Romney in 2016, when he called Trump, “a phony, a fraud … [whose] promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University.” Instead, he’d be a voice of the Republican establishment, helping to counterbalance the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Indeed, if you’re dreaming Romney will go to Washington to rattle cages or wage war against the Trump regime, brace for disappointment. We’re talking about the Romney who swallowed his pride and entertained the idea he might be secretary of state. And it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t have voted for the tax bill or Obamacare repeal.
“He’s not going into this as a ‘never Trumper,’” Romney’s top money man, Spencer Zwick, told FoxBusiness. “What Mitt has proven time and time again is that he will call things out as he sees them. Whether it’s against the Senate, the House or the president, that’s who Mitt Romney is.”
Romney has one other important factor working to his advantage: House Speaker Paul Ryan. By all accounts, Romney and Ryan — running mates on the 2012 ticket — remain close, a relationship that could be mutually beneficial when it comes to pushing a policy agenda.
All of this, of course, assumes Republicans keep control of Congress, or at least the Senate. If that falls apart in the midterm elections, then Romney’s relevance takes a big hit, and his time in the Senate would be a lot less fun.
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