Washington (AFP) – Former US senator Orrin Hatch, who retired in 2019 as one of the chamber’s longest-serving lawmakers, has died at 88, prompting President Joe Biden to praise his longtime colleague Sunday as “an American original.” Hatch passed away Saturday evening in Salt Lake City surrounded by his family, the Orrin G. Hatch Foundation wrote on its website. A conservative from the western state of Utah, Hatch was elected to the US Senate in 1977, his first public office and a position he held for 42 years, longer than any other Republican. Through his tenure in the Senate, where seniority…