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Babies on the Senate floor: Utah’s Orrin Hatch takes a walloping over a joke

Washington • Sen. Orrin Hatch said this week he was fine allowing babies on the Senate floor, but then he asked a follow-up question of his own.

That quote, nabbed by an Associated Press reporter just off the Senate floor, triggered the kind of storm that could fill a lot of diapers.

Hatch, 84, was responding to a proposal he supported to allow Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat who is the first senator to give birth while in office, to bring children under the age of 1 onto the Senate floor during votes and even breastfeed there.