Mike Lee for Senate

National Review Online

Thursday, October 27, 2022

 

in what appears to be a surprisingly competitive reelection race against Evan McMullin, the gadfly who ran for president as an independent in 2016 and is running as an independent for Senate in Utah. 

 

This shouldn’t be a close choice. 

 

Mike Lee’s voting record has been exemplary, on almost everything from life to the Second Amendment to spending to federalism. 

 

A top-notch legal mind who would be comfortable on the Supreme Court, Lee puts the Constitution foremost in his work as a legislator. The first question he asks about every piece of legislation is if it passes constitutional muster, and he is a strong advocate for Congress’s reclaiming powers granted it by the Constitution that it has relinquished to the executive branch. His tenure on the Senate Judiciary Committee has showcased his keen lawyer’s mind, and in confirmation fights, he has been the best friend of constitutionalists. 

 

At a time of groupthink, he works things through himself, and has made valuable contributions to conservative thought on policy and procedural issues. At a time of partisanship, he’s willing to work with anyone. At a time when senators sometimes seem to mistake themselves for pundits, he actually legislates. At a time of bombast and insults, his deportment has been invariably civil and courtly.

 

If Mike Lee didn’t exist, the conservative movement would have to invent him, and would be hard-pressed to do so.  

 

By contrast, Lee’s opponent, Evan McMullin, was a public cipher when he was plucked from obscurity to run a protest presidential campaign against Donald Trump. At the time, McMullin cast himself as a conservative. He ran to Trump’s right on abortion, pledging with his running mate that “pro-life isn’t a campaign slogan — it’s a solemn promise” and he “would pursue court appointments that would overturn Roe v. Wade.” Now, however, McMullin is reshaping himself to gather Democratic votes and donations, so he has reinvented himself as a critic of Dobbs who favors federal laws protecting abortion from state restrictions.

 

This is characteristic of McMullin’s protean campaign. He now supports “filibuster reform” — including “lowering the vote threshold” to pass legislation — and has backed the recently passed federal gun bill. He’s for “investing in renewable energy” and says he’d cut federal spending, as a news report put it, “by ‘avoiding unnecessary wars’ and helping Medicare to lower health care costs by enabling it to negotiate prescription prices and other health care reforms.” He scorns the pushback against CRT in schools and has said he probably would have supported Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

 

Democrats have not run a candidate of their own in the race, which offers some sense of how they would greet a McMullin victory. McMullin claims that he would not caucus with either party, but Utah voters should not be fooled: If control of the Senate is at stake, a loss for Lee would be a setback for removing Chuck Schumer from the majority, and, in practice, McMullin would have to pick a side if he intends to serve on any committees. Even if that takes the form of abstaining from a vote where a Republican vote would be decisive, the effect of the choice would be the same. How likely is it that McMullin, having changed his positions to cater to his liberal donors and voters, would help their bête noire, Mitch McConnell, take control of the Senate floor?

 

McMullin’s campaign against Lee is based almost entirely on the series of text messages Lee sent to the Trump White House (mainly Chief of Staff Mark Meadows) following the 2020 election that were made public by the January 6 Committee. McMullin and his supporters argue that Lee conspired to overturn the election. But they overstate their case. Lee showed poor judgment at several points during the process, but he was insistent that Trump must have the law and the facts on his side in order to go forward. Things would have gone very differently if Trump had listened.

 

When the time came for a decision on January 6, Lee did the right thing. He voted to count all of Joe Biden’s electors, saying “hell no” to the Trump-led plot and telling the Senate that, in the absence of competing slates of electors submitted by state governments, Congress had “no . . . authority” to object: “None, whatsoever. It doesn’t exist. Our job is to convene, to open the ballots, and to count them. That’s it.”

 

We do not think Lee covered himself in glory in the extraordinary circumstances of this episode, but neither does he deserve to be lumped in with Trump or ejected from office in exchange for a man of no apparent principles. Given his otherwise excellent record, Utah voters ought to return him for another term in the Senate.