The Non-Candidate

And Lee was among the speakers at the Iowa Freedom Summit in late January, the unofficial kickoff for the 2016 GOP presidential primary season. Speaking as well were such White House wannabes as Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, and Ted Cruz. Des Moines would have been the perfect place for Lee to launch a dark-horse candidacy. But the 43-year-old Republican cleared things up from the get-go. “My name is Mike Lee. I’m from Utah. And I’m not running for president,” he said, by way of introduction. “I’m probably the only person up here today who can say that.”

He certainly had 2016 on his mind, though. “It seems to me conservatives should be looking for a candidate who is three things: principled, positive, and proven,” he said. “If someone can offer the nation a positive, innovative, and unapologetically conservative agenda that re-expresses our timeless convictions to fit the challenges of our times, then that’s a candidate who can earn our trust and support.”

That candidate might very well be one of Lee’s colleagues. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we’ve got a few senators running,” he grins during an interview in his office. “It seems I may be the only Republican not running for president.”

Lee knows he isn’t the presidential candidate conservatives are looking for, but he’s got his eyes on that “positive, innovative, and unapologetically conservative agenda.” He’s not shy about the role he’d like to play. “I do want to influence that debate,” Lee says. His slate of policy proposals isn’t light fare. Since 2013, Lee has introduced bills to make the tax code more family friendly, take on cronyism in Washington, reform the college accreditation system, and change the way the federal government funds transportation infrastructure. But what Lee really wants is to change the way conservatives think about domestic policy, reorienting the Republican party toward a family-focused, constitutional populism to help the GOP win back the White House. If Lee succeeds, it will make him one of the most consequential conservatives of his generation.

Lee’s touchstone is Ronald Reagan, but not in the rote way you might think. “It’s important for us to remember that by the time 2016 rolls around, we will be about as far away from Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 as Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 was from D-Day, and it’s important for us to update our agenda to make sure that it fits the times,” says Lee. “We need to stop simply talking about Reagan and start acting like him.” That doesn’t mean slashing the marginal tax rate or getting rid of the Department of Education. Lee says acting like Reagan means applying principles of limited government, constitutionalism, and a healthy civil society to the issues of the day—namely, the rising cost of living and economic insecurity of the American middle class.

If the Republican party needs another Reagan, Lee wants to fill the role of Jack Kemp, who as a junior congressman took the lead in formulating the tax cuts that were central to Reagan’s agenda once he took office. Like Kemp, Lee has made tax reform his signature issue, despite not having a seat on the tax-writing Finance Committee. The target of Lee’s tax proposal is what he calls the “parent tax penalty.” Parents, like everyone else, pay some combination of income and payroll taxes. The “penalty,” Lee says, is that parents also bear the costs of raising children who will grow up to become taxpayers themselves. The current child tax credit isn’t enough to offset these additional costs. Lee’s plan looks a lot like other Republican tax reform ideas—simplifying the brackets, lowering rates, removing costly deductions—while adding an extra $2,500-per-child tax credit that can apply to any parent’s combined tax liability. It’s money that could pay for child-care costs or cover expensive dental work or even help one parent stay home to raise the kids.

“Some might worry that increasing the child credit would take more people off the income tax rolls altogether,” Lee said when introducing the plan at the American Enterprise Institute in 2013. “And it would.” This isn’t a bad thing, he says, if it gives flexibility to middle-class parents raising the next generation of taxpayers (the credit applies to both married and single parents). It’s what leads the senator to call parents, in a clever appropriation of pro-business language, America’s “most important entrepreneurs.” The plan got the attention of at least one presidential hopeful, Florida senator Marco Rubio, who cosponsored Lee’s bill and wrote an op-ed with him for the Wall Street Journal.

Lee’s focus on the family infiltrates every policy proposal he touches. His transportation reform plan promises to lower the federal gas tax and give more flexibility to the states for financing infrastructure projects. Local- and state-level investment in roads is more efficient, he says, which means parents can spend less time commuting to and from work on outdated highways and more time at their kids’ soccer games. On higher education, Lee wants to open up alternative accreditation systems that might allow students pursuing nontraditional education through specialization courses, apprenticeships, and certification programs to receive federal student aid. The idea is to make it easier for, say, a mother to further her education while staying home with her kids. 

“I think we’ve failed as Republicans to fully appreciate the fact that the family’s not only a social unit with economic implications, it’s an economic unit with social implications,” he says. The problem with government, he adds, isn’t only that it’s too large, but that it doesn’t work, at least not for middle-class families. For Lee, government doesn’t need to drown in a bathtub. It just needs to take a shower every once in a while.

“It’s not enough to simply cut big government. We have to fix broken government,” he tells me. “If you cut something that’s big and bad down to size, you still need to attack bad policies that are causing problems.”

Mike Lee’s Capitol Hill office is a window into the man and his quirks. On the front desk, there’s a stack of invitations to stop by every Wednesday afternoon for “Jell-O With the Senator.” Most senators hold a regular, open house coffee hour for constituents visiting the nation’s capital. But in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which Lee (and 60 percent of Utahns) is a member, coffee is forbidden. So the fruity treat fills the void. Next to the invitations is something a bit heavier: a collection of four of the senator’s speeches, bound in a professional-looking, 70-page booklet. The speeches suggest a manifesto: “What Conservatives Are For”; “What’s Next For Conservatives”; “Bring Them In”; “Opportunity, Cronyism, and Conservative Reform.” So does the title of the collection: An Agenda for Our Time.

Down the hall in Lee’s office suite, there’s a conference room named for his father, Rex Lee, who was President Ronald Reagan’s first solicitor general. The elder Lee was also the founding dean of Brigham Young University’s law school and, in his final years, served as the university’s president while Mike attended as an undergraduate. The Lees are part of a prominent Mormon political family. Rex’s cousin Mo Udall was a longtime Democratic congressman, as was Mo’s brother Stewart, who also served in the Kennedy administration. Three of Mike Lee’s second cousins have served as U.S. senators, including Tom Udall of New Mexico, Mark Udall of Colorado, and Gordon Smith of Oregon.

Growing up in Northern Virginia while his father worked for Reagan, Lee was exposed to plenty of politics. His best friend in the sixth grade was Josh Reid, the son of a newly elected Democratic congressman from Nevada named Harry Reid. The future Senate majority leader was also the Lees’ home teacher, a sort of spiritual guide within a Mormon congregation. “They were some of the first real Democrats that I ever knew,” Lee says. “I learned going to their house as a little kid that if I wanted to talk about how much I loved Ronald Reagan, the president at the time, I had to be prepared for a fight.”

Despite the sparring with his future Senate colleague, Lee appeared to be preparing himself for a career in law, perhaps one similar to his father’s. He graduated from BYU in 1994 with a degree in political science and remained in Provo for law school. He had a clerkship with a federal judge in Utah, followed by another with Samuel Alito, who was then a judge on the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Jersey. Lee moved to Washington to join Sidley Austin, the law firm where Rex had been employed, before heading back to Utah to become an assistant U.S. attorney. In 2005, Republican governor Jon Huntsman Jr. tapped Lee to be his general counsel.

Lee worked for Huntsman for a year and a half before an old boss came calling. Sam Alito was confirmed in early 2006 for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, and the justice asked his former law clerk to come back for another year of service. One former colleague said Lee is “loyal to a fault,” so at age 35, he accepted the offer. He was older than the average just-out-of-law-school clerk, but his maturity and experience were valuable, even when it came to nonlegal issues.

During Lee’s clerkship, several offices in the Supreme Court building were under renovation, forcing Alito’s clerks to set up shop in an office suite usually reserved for retired justices. One morning, some of the clerks decided to warm up the office with the suite’s fireplace. These bright young legal minds had neglected to open the flue, and when Lee entered, the suite was rapidly filling up with smoke. Calmly and without skipping a beat, he opened a window, doused the flame with a pitcher of water, and reached into the hot fireplace to open the flue. He had saved the room from smoke damage, and his colleagues from having to fess up to Justice Alito.

Returning to Utah in 2007, Lee practiced law and remained active in conservative legal circles. He started speaking to small, informal Tea Party groups about the proper role and function of the federal government and, around 2009, began to consider challenging Bob Bennett, the sitting Republican senator, in the primary. Encouraged by Tea Party activist Connie Smith and Republican congressman Jason Chaffetz, Lee jumped into the race, along with businessman Tim Bridgewater. Bennett didn’t see it coming. At the Utah Republican convention in 2010, the three-term senator came in third place behind Bridgewater and Lee, shutting Bennett out of the Republican primary. On Meet the Press David Brooks called Bennett’s ouster a “damn outrage,” but the Tea Party was counting it its first coup. Lee edged out Bridgewater in the GOP primary and won the general election easily.

All that makes Lee a rock star to the conservative grassroots. After joining the Senate in 2011, he became a frequent (and frequently lonely) constitutionalist voice in the Republican conference, and he’s got the voting record to prove it. He received 100 percent ratings from the Club for Growth, the American Conservative Union, and the Family Research Council (FRC Action), along with a 98 percent lifetime rating from Heritage Action for America, the best for any member in either house. Not as well-known as Ted Cruz or Rand Paul, Lee is nonetheless a fundraising draw for fly-by-night conservative PACs looking to capitalize on his name and reputation. “Mike Lee Is Fighting For Conservative Principles In The U.S. Senate! Help Keep Him There!” read one recent email from the obscure Patriots for Economic Freedom. 

Perhaps unique for antiestablishment Tea Party types in Congress, though, Lee also has a loyal following among the conservative intellectual class. He’s a favorite at the two most influential think tanks on the right, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. Lee has spoken at Heritage seven times since 2013. “Mike Lee embodies that which is right about public service,” said Heritage Action’s Mike Needham. “There’s no one better positioned to lay out the outlines of a real opportunity agenda that doesn’t pick favorites.”

Lee has street cred elsewhere in the right-leaning intellectual world, too. The conservative legal community considers Lee one of their own, and they revere his father. Yuval Levin, the brainy editor of National Affairs and the unofficial leader of reform-minded conservatives in Washington, calls Lee the “indispensable senator.”

“I don’t think of any senator as being more productive than Mike Lee,” Levin said. “He’s very constructive. He wants to move things.”

National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, another reform conservative, praises Lee’s “openness to a kind of rethinking” of conservative assumptions. “Instead of just talking about how we need new ideas, as so many Republicans do, Lee goes out and advocates specific new ideas,” Ponnuru said. “On a lot of issues, he’s been the first guy to stick his head up.”

The praise for Lee isn’t universal, and critics come chiefly from two camps. The first is the GOP establishment in Utah, which hasn’t entirely gotten over his defeat of Bennett. Senior Utah senator Orrin Hatch maintains cordial relations with Lee publicly, but the two aren’t particularly close. One rumor in Utah is that Lee was advocating behind the scenes to find a primary challenger to Hatch in 2012, but a credible opponent never arose. Other Utah Republicans are seeking a primary challenger to Lee when he’s up for reelection in 2016. A December article in Politico quoted Jon Huntsman Sr., the father of the former governor and a GOP power player in Utah, calling Lee an “extremist” with “extremely radical” positions.

“All I can say is Mike Lee is an embarrassment to the state of Utah,” Huntsman Sr. told Politico. “He’s been a tremendous embarrassment to our family, to our state, to our country to have him as a U.S. senator.”

To his fellow Republican senators, Lee is seen as more of a pest, particularly since the arrival in 2013 of Texas senator Ted Cruz. Cruz and Lee have been allied on some of the biggest tests of conservative principle, all of which seem to end up being big tactical mistakes and even bigger headaches for Mitch McConnell, now the majority leader. The 2013 government shutdown over defunding Obamacare was hatched by Cruz and Lee. In a Senate Conservatives Fund TV ad that aired frequently in the run-up to the shutdown, Lee said, “Republicans in Congress can stop Obamacare if they simply refuse to fund it.” They couldn’t, and they didn’t.

The same went for a recent Senate floor dust-up over immigration funding in the big, year-end spending bill. Cruz and Lee attempted to use a procedural move to delay the Senate’s vote on the bill. Outgoing Democratic majority leader Harry Reid outmaneuvered them, however. He used the delay to keep the Senate in session over the weekend and approve a number of Obama judicial appointees—while passing the spending bill anyway a few days later. One minor consequence of the ploy was that New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte was forced to stay in Washington and miss seeing a ballet with her daughter. Ayotte and her GOP colleagues lit into Lee and Cruz for ruining their weekend plans. Lee was reportedly shaken by that.

Those who know him say Lee’s commitment to principle can cut against him in the Senate. As one associate put it, “He doesn’t have a tactical bone in his body.” Senate Republican aides characterize a “guileless” Lee as being easily led astray in these fits of ideological righteousness by Cruz. Lee is sensitive about this perception. When I ask him about the 2013 shutdown, he adjusts himself in his chair and leans forward, hands clasped together as if he’s praying.

“Look, the shutdown was horrible,” he says. “The shutdown was an unfortunate thing. When a shutdown happens, a number of things have gone terribly, terribly wrong.” The blame goes to the president and congressional leaders for not heading off a spending showdown until it was too late. To Lee, it was a last-ditch effort to do the right thing.

“There are some times when the president overreaches, and when I have responded in a matter that I feel was warranted under the circumstances,” he says, judiciously. “That doesn’t make it easy. That doesn’t mean everyone is going to agree with you. Sometimes you have to do difficult things when you feel you have an obligation to stand up.”

Still, Lee hasn’t been completely shut out by his colleagues for his past transgressions. He chairs the GOP Senate steering committee, and McConnell brought in the Utah senator as his counsel on GOP leadership meetings—a gesture of goodwill, perhaps, or McConnell’s attempt to keep Lee on a short leash. The benefit for Lee is that he’s now in the room where the real decisions are made. Senate Republicans seem to recognize Lee as more thoughtful and less self-interested than Cruz. “What I’ve seen is two Mike Lees,” said one GOP aide. “The guy who’s frequently allied himself with Cruz on some of the more idiotic tactical plays. But you’ve also got this guy who is, without question, doing authentically important stuff on the policy side.”

Yuval Levin is convinced the real Lee is the latter one. “I don’t think the way to understand Mike Lee is through Ted Cruz,” he said.

How best to understand Lee? I ask about his ability to convince his party on his “opportunity agenda,” given his reputation among his colleagues in the Senate.

“This isn’t about me. I’m not that powerful. I’m just a junior senator from a state in the Rocky Mountains, and I’m one of the younger senators,” he says. “I’m not that powerful, but these ideas are, and it’s the ideas that will carry the day.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated Mike Lee apologized to his Senate Republican colleagues in December 2014. According to spokesman Brian Phillips, Lee did not apologize.

Michael Warren is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.