Former Republican federal senator from the state of Utah Orrin Hatch He passed away this afternoon at the age of 88, the foundation that bears his name announced in a statement.
Hatch was a United States Senator from 1977 to 2019. In announcing his death, the foundation did not disclose his cause of death.
The executive director of the Hatch Foundation, Matt Sandgren, maintained in written statements that the congressman “personified the American dream”.
Meanwhile, the president of the Foundation, A. Scott Anderson, stressed: “A man of wisdom, kindness, character, and compassion, Orrin Hatch was everything a United States Senator should be”.
Hatch closely followed the fiscal and public debt crisis in Puerto Rico, as chairman of the Finance and Legal Committees of the US Senate.
As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Hatch – along with his colleagues Charles Grassley (Iowa) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) – proposed in 2015, before the PROMESA law, to create the Financial Accountability and Management Assistance Authority and grant $3,000 million to combat the liquidity problem that the Island was facing.
The new Authority would have had the final power to determine the budget of the central Government of Puerto Rico, the public corporations, and to appoint the “chief financial officer” of the governor. But, it would not have allowed to restructure the debt.
The initiative would also have made it possible to reduce for five years from 6.2% to 3.1% the payroll payment to Social Security for residents of Puerto Rico. As chairman of the Congressional Task Force on Economic Development in Puerto Rico, created by law Promesa, Hatch also headed a committee of the two chambers of Congress that recommended, among other things, the full extension of the federal credit for dependent children (CTC), address the fiscal abyss in Medicaid allocations in the health system of the Island that created the depletion of the funds provided by the Obamacare law and make the increase in the federal excise tax on imported rum permanent.
But, Hatch later opposed including the extension of the CTC and the increase in the refund for the tax on rum in the federal tax reform.
In 2016, Hatch also told El Nuevo Día that he doubted that the statehood proposal “was acceptable under the economic situation” in which the Island was.
Journalist Janelyn M. Vega Medina contributed to this story.