Orrin Hatch Tries to Look Even More Far-Right

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Lauren Weinstein catches Sen. Orin Hatch trying to airbrush his legislative record to make it more Teaparty-compatible:

Hatch wants to keep his job — and the birthers present a serious problem for him. You see, back only eight years ago, when Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger (for all his faults, still a quite moderate, non-wacko guy) was in his ascendancy with the GOP, Hatch proposed a constitutional amendment — the “Equal Opportunity to Govern Amendment” [“Presidential Eligibility Amendment”] — to allow persons born abroad (like Schwarzenegger) to become president!

This bit of history has become rather inconvenient for Hatch, when he needs to appeal to Tea Party and birther zealots.

…

Apparently until a couple of days ago, the details of Hatch’s proposed amendment were still available in the direct archives of his Web site, listed along with his other legislative efforts over the years. But there’s a gap in that list of pages now, seemingly where mention of the amendment used to be present.

via Lauren Weinstein’s Blog: Google Exposes Senator (Sloppily) Trying to Delete History for Birthers.

Of course, looking like you wanted to do Schwarzenegger a favor isn’t going to win you friends with anyone these days.

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5 Responses to Orrin Hatch Tries to Look Even More Far-Right

  1. wtfci says:
    April 29, 2011 at 5:22 pm

    The site looks new. Is she ripping a Senator for redesigning their website?

    The site only has bills he sponsored through 2008. You can still view every single bill he sponsored at the Library of Congress.

    Will somebody buy her a drink.

  2. Michael Froomkin says:
    April 30, 2011 at 3:30 pm

    FWIW, there’s a followup, which begins like this:

    Earlier today I noted the sudden disappearance of (and associated back-end server error pages relating to) archival material on Senator Orrin Hatch’s site, the day after a Salon author called attention to the Senator’s past support for allowing persons not born in the U.S. (such as Arnold Schwarzenegger) to become U.S. president.

    The Salon article noted the conflict of this position, supported by many in the GOP at the time, vs. the currently still very much alive “birther” movement and other efforts to even more tightly restrict presidential candidacies. A Salon follow-up article today also mentioned that Hatch’s office didn’t respond to their original query yesterday on this topic, but added that the Senator’s office since then has now claimed that the missing material is simply a coincidence, resulting from a site redesign issue that just happened to take place between Salon’s queries about the amendment yesterday, and my noticing the missing pages and visible database errors this morning.

    There’s more, so read the whole thing.

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