Utah senator Orrin Hatch delivered a speech at the Reagan ranch in California today that’s worth a look. He used the occasion to place himself firmly in the camp of those Republicans arguing that the party needs to define itself with a clear agenda — applying conservative principles to contemporary problems. And he offered some valuable reflections on what that would need to involve.
“Our challenge as conservatives,” Hatch said, “is to develop a positive, reform-minded agenda that will both unify our party and present a compelling vision to voters searching for a way out of our current problems.” Key to meeting this challenge is the recovery of a robust “political constitutionalism” that sees our constitutional system not only as a set of laws and judicial precedents, but as a set of principles that act as guides to action and boundaries for prudential judgment. I was especially glad to see that Hatch wisely pointed to this essay by the great Jim Ceaser in describing this approach to our system of government. (He could have pointed to Ramesh’s arguments on this front too, for instance here.)
To lay out what an agenda informed by this understanding might involve, Hatch took up, in general terms, five policy areas: health care, the tax code, regulation, innovation, and economic mobility. These are all crucial pieces of the puzzle, and the frame Hatch gave them makes sense, though all will of course needs to be filled in with far more specific details in time.
Hatch has already been an important player in the effort to formulate a Republican replacement for Obamacare. Together with Tom Coburn and Richard Burr, he has been a sponsor of what is so far the most developed and plausible replacement proposal in Congress. He has also put forward a set of modest but serious Medicare reforms that could serve as a prelude to a transformation of the program’s financing system along the lines proposed by Representative Paul Ryan in recent years and endorsed by House and Senate Republicans. We know where he stands on health care, and it’s a good place to stand.
In the other areas, there is room for more detail, which hopefully will come. Hatch’s views on tax reform are especially important, since he is the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee and may well become the chairman if Republicans take over the Senate. What he said today was very broad and general. Hatch should look to the important work his Utah colleague Mike Lee has been doing on taxes (as he clearly has looked to Lee’s example in framing his case for a conservative reform agenda more generally in this speech), and particularly to the proposal being advanced by Lee and Florida senator Marco Rubio to combine much-needed reforms of the corporate tax code with much-needed relief for parents from the unfair double burden the federal tax and entitlement system now placed on them. As Hatch suggests, tax reform needs to meaningfully improve economic growth and meaningfully relieve unfair tax burdens. Lee and Rubio have shown how that can be done.
In each of the five areas that Hatch takes up, he puts the problems well and suggests a constructive way to think about conservative solutions. He’s not the first to put things this way, of course. Lee, Rubio, Ryan, and other Republicans have been paving this path for some time as have a variety of outside voices (from Heritage Action to the American Enterprise Institute, among many others) each pushing Republicans in its own way to advance a constructive agenda, even if not all agree on every particular of course. But Hatch’s decision to add his voice to that mix is especially interesting, and could be important, both because of his leadership role on the pivotal Senate Finance Committee and because Hatch has sometimes been identified with a less aggressive, more establishment-minded brand of conservatism, and has also sometimes been identified with the party’s commitment to advancing the interests of big business in Washington. That latter question, the question of crony capitalism, didn’t get much attention in this speech. It will need to if Hatch is serious about the rest, so hopefully it will.
“Constitutional conservatism is about much more than lowering taxes or eliminating waste, though reducing the size of government does both those things,” Hatch said today. “It’s about returning government to its rightful role in our society.” Here’s hoping that’s where Republicans are headed.