With the choice committee assignments that come with that seniority, and the head-of-the-trough position he enjoys in bringing home federal pork to fund Utah projects, the 72-year-old Hatch is right when he says he is well-positioned to keep helping the state prosper. That position would be further enhanced in January when a re-elected Hatch would be chairman, or vice-chairman, of the powerful Senate Finance Committee.
In short, replacing Hatch with his Democratic challenger, Pete Ashdown, would sharply and unacceptably reduce the effectiveness of the state's congressional delegation in advancing Utah's interests in Congress. For that reason alone, voters should return the incumbent for a sixth term.
Regular readers of this newspaper's editorials know that The Tribune Editorial Board is often critical of Utah's senior senator over issues ranging from his pro-administration positions on Iraq, tax cuts and Big Pharma-friendly Medicare reform, to blocking FDA oversight of the nutritional supplement industry, to changing the Constitution to criminalize flag-burning, to rank partisanship in vetting nominees to the federal judiciary, etc., etc.
Suffice to say that a complete list of Hatch's negatives might exceed this space, especially if it included some of Hatch's more outrageous statements on public policy issues such as citing author Michael Crichton as an authority on the science of global warming, or suggesting that House Republicans' failure to act on former Rep. Mark Foley's sexually explicit e-mails to congressional pages may be attributable to their desire not to appear homophobic.
That is not to say, however, that the conservative Republican hasn't received the board's well-earned praise for his efforts to block storage of high-level nuclear waste near the Wasatch Front, to remove radioactive tailings threatening the Colorado River, to expand the missions performed by Hill Air Force Base, to gain federal compensation for Utahns exposed to radiation from nuclear testing, and, perhaps most important, his unstinting support for biomedical and stem-cell research.
There have been other good works, but this space would probably be ample to enumerate them.
Yet, for all its many reservations, the Editorial Board believes Hatch's seniority in the Senate is of overriding importance to a state that needs all the clout it can get in Washington, D.C.
Ashdown is a bright, articulate voice for many sound solutions to the pressing problems facing the country. But on matters pertaining to Utah, Hatch's voice is the one that would be heard.
