WASHINGTON – Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, called President Obama’s plan for returning the U.S. to space thoroughly misguided, saying it will waste years of time, billions of dollars and cost thousands of jobs in Utah and elsewhere across the nation.

“This is getting silly. The President’s plan wastes billions of dollars and years of valuable time,” said Hatch. “I would say the administration’s plan is laughable, but I can’t find much humor in it when the consequences to space exploration and American workers during tough economic times are so dire.”

Speaking yesterday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the president outlined his revised plan, which, despite speculation to the contrary, will effectively scrap Project Constellation and the Ares rocket program. The Administration’s plan calls for doling out huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to commercial businesses, many inexperienced in human space flight, to build craft to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.

“First, they want to throw away our nation’s $10 billion investment in Project Constellation and the successfully-tested Ares rocket. Then they want to give away billions more to build something less capable than what we already have. President John F. Kennedy would be rolling over in his grave. This decision reeks of politics, not common sense,” Hatch said. “Former astronauts Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, and James Lovell and Eugene Cernan were right in saying that if we follow the president’s plan, ‘we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what will be discarded.”

Project Constellation would return American astronauts to the Moon and lay the foundation for the exploration of Mars. The Ares 1 rocket can carry astronauts to the International Space Station and send them beyond low-Earth orbit, while its heavy-lift relative, Ares V, is designed to carry the equipment for future space exploration missions.

Ares is equipped to perform a variety of missions, including sending astronauts to the Space Station and it can go beyond low-Earth orbit so it can be used as the foundation for any space exploration program the nation decides to take on. Recent NASA studies have shown the Ares rocket is ten times as safe as the Space Shuttle and twice as safe as the systems being developed by private industry.

Hatch also takes issue with the president’s assertion that his plan, which calls for taking five years to study heavy-lift rocket technology before picking which rocket to develop, will return America to space quicker than Project Constellation.

“It strains credulity to the breaking point to assume the major work on a rocket using technology that doesn’t even exist yet will be built sooner and at a comparable cost than what we already have,” Hatch concluded.

###

SALT LAKE CITY – U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) hailed today’s unanimous Appeals Court decision that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had stepped beyond its authority by regulating the Internet with so-called “net neutrality” rules. Hatch serves as Chairman of the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force.

“Today’s court decision is critical to those who’ve been fighting to keep the ever-expanding hand of government off the Internet.  It’s clear that the FCC overstepped its authority with an aggressive agenda of more and more regulation at the expense of the American people.  This is also good news for the future prosperity of the Internet, because there is now an actual incentive to expand capacity, which benefits consumers and our economy alike.”

In October 2009, Hatch and Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) slammed the FCC in an opinion piece that ran in the Wall Street Journal.  The Senators wrote:

“Yet despite an overwhelming record of innovation, and customer satisfaction, Washington wants to replace the judgment of consumers with that of politicians and bureaucrats. Net neutrality may sound like fairness but it is actually the opposite. Bandwidth is finite—like the finite number of lanes on a highway—and network providers must innovate in order to accommodate the burgeoning traffic. As they invest billions of private dollars in new and improved networks, they should rightly expect to set prices and manage those networks as they see fit. If the FCC takes control of the Internet, we’ll have the inevitable result of all poorly designed regulations: business decisions prejudiced by politicians and political decisions prejudiced by corporations. Keep in mind, we’re talking about the most competitive, efficient and consumer-driven industry in the global economy.”

To read the Wall Street Journal opinion piece in its entirety, clink here.

###

TO: Reporters and Editors

FROM: Antonia Ferrier for Senator Hatch

DATE: Wednesday, March 24, 2010

RE: Orchestrated White House Attacks Against State AG Challenges to Unconstitutional Individual Mandate

The White House and its Washington allies are orchestrating a series of attacks against those Attorneys General across the country who are taking action against the unconstitutional “individual mandate” in the highly-unpopular health care bill. They have also started attacking Sen. Hatch’s opposition to the unconstitutional individual mandate by looking back at legislation that was introduced back in the 1990s as an alternative to HillaryCare.

First off, Senator Hatch applauds the efforts of those Attorneys General across the country to fight the unconstitutional individual mandate.  He has been responsible by examining the constitutionality of a key component of this highly-unpopular and deeply-flawed health care bill.  The question is why hasn’t the Administration? It’s a little hard to believe the Administration on this, when they’ve hardly been consistent.  In fact, if memory serves, then-candidate Obama was against the individual mandate – even chastising then-Senator Clinton for her support of it.

Furthermore, Senator Hatch supported this alternative to President Clinton’s massive federal takeover of the American health care system, because his number one priority was the defeat of yet another big government assault on health care that the people of Utah overwhelmingly opposed.  In the intervening years, he went back and carefully examined, in close consultation with constitutional experts, the legal problems with many of the bills being supported at the time.  This needed to be done, because of the hasty nature of the debate at the time. It is simply a fact that Congress has never imposed this kind of mandate before.  Senator Hatch concluded, as would any intelligent scholar of the Constitution, that this federal mandate requiring Americans to either purchase health insurance or face a punitive tax exceeds the authority the Constitution has given to Congress.

It’s regrettable that instead of examining the legality of their health care monstrosity, the Administration and its allies are simply going on a smear campaign.  Here’s a piece of advice: don’t think you are right 100 percent of the time with everything you do. Arrogance and power are a terrible mix, and one the American people will not support.

###

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff announced today that Utah will join other states in challenging the constitutionality of the health care bill adopted by the House on Sunday and by the Senate in December. Hatch said a challenge on constitutional grounds is in order.

“Congress has overstepped its legal authority by telling Utahns and other Americans that they must buy health insurance or else,” Hatch said. “The Constitution empowers Congress to regulate interstate commerce, but not to tell Americans what they can buy. And this is just one of the constitutionally suspect provisions in the legislation. So I commend Mark Shurtleff’s and other state attorney generals’ plan to challenge this unconstitutional Washington mandate that encroaches on states’ rights and Utahns’ personal liberty, and I will do all I can to assist them in their efforts.”

###

FoxNews.com

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/03/17/senator-orrin-hatch-health-care-federal-funding-abortion/

For almost 35 years, the law of the land has been an explicit prohibition against federal taxpayer dollars being used to pay for elective abortions, known as the Hyde amendment, after the late great Illinois congressman. This is a policy supported by the majority of the American people.

In fact, this hard-fought explicit ban was included in the health care bill that passed the House last year. Regrettably, the Senate did not follow suit and instead passed a bill that would allow hard-earned taxpayer dollars to pay for elective abortion. That is a simple fact. Unfortunately, in a mad rush to secure enough votes, leading House Democrats now intend to take up the Senate-passed bill, arguing that the Senate language prohibits federal funding of abortion. Besides the fact that this simply is not true, it also demonstrates the lengths the president and his allies will take to pass this bill against the will of the American people.

Just this week, Cardinal Francis George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a statement saying, “Notwithstanding the denials and explanations of its supporters, and unlike the bill approved by the House of Representatives in November, the Senate bill deliberately excludes the language of the Hyde amendment. It expands federal funding and the role of the federal government in the provision of abortion procedures.”

First, the Senate bill allows elective abortions to be offered through the newly-created individual state health insurance exchanges and multi-state health plans administered by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and through federally-subsidized plans in already-existing community health centers.

Second, there is nothing in this legislation that requires any of these programs to live up to both the spirit and letter of the Hyde amendment that Congress has included each year in spending bills that fund the government. This not only prevents federal funding of elective abortions, but also erects an iron-clad firewall against any private money for abortion being mixed with any federal or state health program receiving federal dollars. This applies, for example, to Medicaid, a health program for the economically disadvantaged that is funded by both federal and state governments. If any resources are used for elective abortions that money must be kept completely separate from Medicaid. This is sound policy that must be maintained.

Regrettably, the Senate-passed bill doesn’t include this firewall. Anyone who doesn’t earn enough money would qualify for a federal subsidy to help pay for their health plan in the state exchanges, including plans offering elective abortion coverage. Some argue that under the Senate-passed bill, federal funding would be “segregated” so no federal money would pay for abortions. But this is a violation of the Hyde amendment, which also prevents the federal funding of insurance that covers elective abortion.

Furthermore, it is entirely possible that there would only be one health plan in any given state that does not include elective abortion. And even if you are opposed, you may well be railroaded into choosing a plan that covers it, because you might be looking for the best plan to treat a sick child or your own health condition.

What’s more, passing a new state law is the only way an individual state could truly ensure that elective abortions are not included in the plans offered through a state insurance exchange. That would be easier in some states than in others, but that’s unfair to those who are morally opposed to federal funding of abortion and happen to live in states where passing such a law would be extremely difficult.

Lastly, under this proposal, community health centers would receive a dedicated stream of money outside the annual congressional process to fund the government which is where the Hyde prohibition is maintained. So that means that for the first time federal money could be used to fund abortion at a community health center.

Those are the facts, and anyone who thinks the Senate abortion language is strong enough should think again. That is because, regardless of one’s position on this controversial issue, it is entirely reasonable to expect that a person who is fundamentally and morally opposed to abortion should not have to sanction its use with their hard-earned tax payer dollars.

Orrin Hatch represents Utah in the United States Senate.