Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) appeared furious after Democrats refused to show up to the meeting he scheduled on Steven Mnuchin and Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), Trump’s selections to lead the Treasury and Health and Human Services departments, respectively.

“I think they ought to stop posturing and acting like idiots,” grumbled Hatch, the Senate’s president pro tempore and normally one of the chamber’s most decorous members. “I’m very disappointed in this kind of crap,” he said. “Some of this is because they just don’t like the president.”





And one way you can tell Orrin Hatch cares a great deal about “decorum” is his use of words like “idiots” and “crap” when describing developments in the World’s Most Deliberative Body.



What’s more, all of this is the result of Hatch’s desperation to advance two Donald Trump cabinet nominees who, by any fair measure, are at the center of multiple unresolved controversies, including proving false information to the committee Hatch leads.



Salon’s Simon Maloy made The Utah Republican later added , in reference to Democrats, “They are idiots. [Their tactics are] just complete breach of decorum.”And one way you can tell Orrin Hatch cares a great deal about “decorum” is his use of words like “idiots” and “crap” when describing developments in the World’s Most Deliberative Body.What’s more, all of this is the result of Hatch’s desperation to advance two Donald Trump cabinet nominees who, by any fair measure, are at the center of multiple unresolved controversies, including proving false information to the committee Hatch leads.Salon’s Simon Maloy made a compelling case yesterday that the longtime GOP senator “can no longer appeal to the norms he worked so hard to obliterate when he objects to the tactics of his opponents.” Simon’s referring, of course, to Hatch leading the way to block Judge Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination.





At one point, Hatch wrote that he felt justified in blocking Garland’s nomination because



What Hatch and his colleagues did went far beyond some dilatory posturing by finance committee Democrats, and they had no justification for doing it beyond the cynical pursuit of power at all costs. To get around the (correct) accusation that they were mounting an unprecedented blockade of a Supreme Court nomination, Hatch and his colleagues cited a precedent that didn’t actually exist . They invented a “tradition” of presidents’ allowing their (undetermined) successors to make Supreme Court nominations. Hatch perplexingly insisted that Supreme Court nominations had to be “fair to both sides” and that such “fairness” could not be achieved in an election year. […]At one point, Hatch wrote that he felt justified in blocking Garland’s nomination because protesters had disrupted his lunch meeting . To cap it all off, Hatch even admitted that he would have been willing to consider Garland’s nomination during the lame-duck session , assuming a Democratic victory in the presidential election. This completely undermined every citation of principle and precedent he had made up to that point to justify his obstruction.What Hatch and his colleagues did went far beyond some dilatory posturing by finance committee Democrats, and they had no justification for doing it beyond the cynical pursuit of power at all costs.