page_title: Orrin Hatch
section_title: Judicial nominations
hierarchical_section_title: Orrin Hatch / U.S. Senate tenure / Political positions and votes / Judicial nominations
caption_attribution_description: English: Following his nomination to the Supreme Court, then-Judge Samuel Alito visits with Senator Hatch, who has overseen the Senate-approval process of eight of the current Court justices.
context_page_description: Orrin Grant Hatch is an American attorney, retired politician, and composer who served as a United States Senator from Utah for 42 years. He is the longest-serving Republican U.S. Senator in history and the longest-serving U.S. Senator from Utah.
  Hatch chaired the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions from 1981 to 1987. He also served as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 2001 and 2003 to 2005. On January 3, 2015, after the 114th United States Congress was sworn in, Hatch became President pro tempore of the Senate. He served as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee from 2015 to 2019. Hatch led the efforts to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. He retired in January 2019 and was succeeded by the former 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney.
context_section_description: As ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hatch fought hard to get conservative judges nominated to the Supreme Court. He took a leading role in the Senate confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas in October 1991. He was also a strong supporter of Jay Bybee during Bybee's confirmation hearings for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, stating "I've seen a lot of people around and a lot of judges and I don't know of anybody who has any greater qualifications or any greater ability in the law than you have."
  Nevertheless, in 1993, Hatch recommended Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom he knew personally, to President Bill Clinton to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court, even as he knew she was a political liberal. Clinton had not previously considered Ginsburg, and Hatch, as ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, assured him that a Ginsburg confirmation would go smoothly.
  With regards to the Senate filibuster being used to stall President Barack Obama's judicial appointments, Hatch voted against the November 2013 reforms, which eliminated the use of the filibuster on executive branch nominees and judicial nominees other than to the Supreme Court. In September 2014, Hatch argued that the filibuster should be restored, saying: "We should get it back to where it was. You can see the destruction that has happened around here." However, in November 2014, after the Republicans retook control of the Senate following the 2014 elections, Hatch wrote in The Wall Street Journal that "if Republicans re-establish the judicial-nomination filibuster, it would remain in place only until the moment that a new Democratic majority decided that discarding the rule again would be useful" and called for "the next Republican president to counteract President Obama's aggressive efforts to stack the federal courts in favor of his party's ideological agenda" by nominating conservative judges.
  As an opponent of the confirmation of Merrick Garland, Hatch submitted to the Deseret News an opinion piece stating that, after meeting with Garland, his opinion on blocking Garland had not changed; the piece was published prior to Hatch's meeting with Garland. On March 13, 2016, regarding the nomination of Supreme court candidates by Obama, Hatch stated "a number of factors have led me to conclude that under current circumstances the Senate should defer the confirmation process until the next president is sworn in".
caption: Hatch with Samuel Alito in 2005
exif: {}