Heidi Alexander: “in 1976, it was not a particularly good time in the Republican Party. Watergate had decimated the Republican Party in…”

“in 1976, it was not a particularly good time in the Republican Party. Watergate had decimated the Republican Party in 1974, and the hangover still existed in 1976. But one good thing that happened was the election of Orrin Hatch from Utah to the U.S. Senate. He was a boxer as a kid. He grew up the hard way. He joined the labor union, moved to Utah, and won the Senate race that he wasn't supposed to win. I happened to be here in 1977, in January, as an administrative assistant to Howard Baker, who was the newly elected Republican leader of the Senate. There were then only 37 or 38 Republican Senators, but I was impressed with their vigor and enthusiasm. No one impressed me more than the young Senator from Utah. Here is what he was doing by 1978. I want to read a paragraph from the ``American Senate'' by Neil MacNeil and Richard Baker, which I think is the best history of the Senate. In the spring of 1968, Utah's Orrin Hatch and Indiana's Richard Lugar, both freshmen Republicans, undertook a sophisticated filibuster to defeat organized labor's prime legislative goal, a complex bill to revise the nation's labor laws. First, they relied on traditional tactics--much talk, quorum calls, and all the other dilatory maneuvers. They copied the Southerners' old strategy of creating three platoons, each of a half-dozen senators, to spell each other over the next several weeks.…”