Orrin Hatch is the coolest guy in the Senate, or so his uber hip press shop would like you to think. The octogenarian senator from Utah — who announced he will not be seeking re-election — lit up Twitter after reaching up to take off glasses that he wasn’t actually wearing.
The instantly iconic movement served as as a moment of levity during a contentious Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. The senator, totally unfazed, blew by it and began his questioning on worker visas.
Though Hatch kept going, the moment is frozen and immortalized on the Internet. The official Twitter account for Hatch’s staff responded to a viral tweet of the moment from The Wrap’s Jon Levine.
“WATCH: Sen. Orrin Hatch removes a pair of glasses he’s not wearing,” Levine tweeted along with a three-second clip of the moment — a clip that now has more than 2 million views.
“Oh you mean his invisible glasses from Warby Parker? They’re new, you’ve probably never heard of them,” Hatch’s apparently hipster staffers responded, all in good fun.
The response included a fake Warby Parker listing for invisible glasses, adding one more item to the list of reasons a government shutdown this weekend would be devastating. People with senses of humor should not be furloughed, Congress!
According to a later tweet, “The Senator forgot his glasses this morning.”
For good measure, the account later retweeted a GIF sent out by “The Daily Show” that superimposed the meme-famous Deal with It glasses on Hatch’s face.
Moments like this happen to all of us. We “can’t find” the phone we are talking into (the same one that you think is vibrating when it is not). The keys (that are in your hand) are nowhere to be found. Thinking it’s Friday, when it’s only Tuesday (surprise!).
Life comes at you fast. It’s just not usually broadcast on C-SPAN.
