Senator Suggests Heritage Foundation Has Grown Too Extreme

The Heritage Foundation, and its political action wing, helped orchestrate the move by House Republicans to force a government shutdown, believing that this confrontational strategy might block the startup of the Obama administration’s health care law. As Speaker John A. Boehner pointed out Wednesday, they lost that fight.

Now the backlash is coming â€" from prominent Republicans, as well as from liberals in Washington, who are arguing that the 40-year-old institution, which has long had a reputation as a Republican-dominated voice in Washington, has become too extreme.

“Heritage used to be the conservative organization helping Republicans,” Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, himself a longtime conservative leader in Washington, said Thursday in an interview on MSNBC. “There’s a real question on the minds of many Republicans now â€" and I’m not just thinking for myself, for a lot of people â€" is Heritage going to go so political that it really doesn’t amount to anything anymore? I hope not.”

The comments by Mr. Hatch reflect grumblings that have emerged in recent weeks among many Republican Party insiders â€" leaders who also are upset with the rise of the Tea Party faction in Congress, and the harm they believe it is causing the party overall.

These more mainstream Republicans are now pointing to the arrival of Jim DeMint, the former Republican senator of South Carolina, at the Heritage Foundation in April as its new president, as a moment when it began to lose its way.

The most aggressive piece of the Heritage organization is the so-called Heritage Action for America, a related nonprofit group set up by the foundation in 2010, even before Mr. DeMint arrived. The Heritage Foundation is still focused mostly on publishing conservative-oriented academic studies, while Heritage Action is a lobbying group.

Dan Holler, a spokesman for Heritage Action, said Thursday that Mr. Hatch’s criticism is unfounded and in fact, he answered his own question about the organization’s relevance.

“The idea that a senator would go on national television and say someone does not have influence is a sure sign that they do have influence,” Mr. Holler said.

Mr. Hatch, in the interview Thursday, said he is so worried about Heritage he might attempt to intervene to try to bring the organization back from the extreme.

“I’m going to try to help it to survive and do well,” Mr. Hatch said. “But right now I think it’s in danger of losing its clout and its power around Washington, D.C.”