Mike Lee facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Mike Lee
Official portrait, 2017
United States Senator from Utah
Incumbent
Assumed office January 3, 2011 Serving with Mitt Romney
Preceded by	Bob Bennett
Chair of the Joint Economic Committee
In office January 3, 2019 – February 3, 2021
Preceded by	Erik Paulsen
Succeeded by	Don Beyer
Personal details
Born	Michael Shumway Lee (1971-06-04) June 4, 1971 (age 53) Mesa, Arizona, U.S.
Political party	Republican
Spouse	Sharon Burr ​ (m. 1993)​
Relations	Rex E. Lee (father) Thomas Rex Lee (brother)
Children	3
Education	Brigham Young University (BA, JD)

Michael Shumway Lee (born June 4, 1971) is an American lawyer and politician serving as the senior United States senator from Utah, a seat he has held since 2011. A member of the Republican Party, Lee became Utah's senior senator in 2019 and dean of Utah's congressional delegation in 2021.

The son of U.S. solicitor general Rex E. Lee and brother of Utah Supreme Court justice Thomas Rex Lee, Lee began his career as a clerk for the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah before clerking for Samuel Alito, who was then a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. From 2002 to 2005, Lee was an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Utah. He joined the administration of Utah governor Jon Huntsman Jr., serving as the general counsel in the governor's office from 2005 to 2006. Lee again clerked for Alito after he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the 2010 U.S. Senate election in Utah, Lee defeated incumbent senator Bob Bennett for the Republican nomination before defeating Democratic nominee Sam Granato in the general election. During the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, Lee refused to endorse Donald Trump, voting for Evan McMullin in the general election. Lee was reelected senator in 2016.

Lee eventually became a Trump ally, endorsing him in the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections. He coordinated with and supported the Trump administration in its efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, but ultimately voted to certify the election. Lee also chaired the Joint Economic Committee from 2019 to 2021. Lee won reelection again over McMullin in 2022, though Lee's performance was the worst for a Republican in a Utah U.S. Senate election since 1974.

Early life and education

Lee was born in Mesa, Arizona on June 4, 1971, the son of Janet (née Griffin) and Rex E. Lee, who was solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan. Lee's older brother Thomas Rex Lee is a justice of the Utah Supreme Court.

Lee's family moved to Provo, Utah, one year later, when his father became the founding dean of Brigham Young University's J. Reuben Clark Law School. While Lee spent about half of his childhood years in Utah, he spent the other half in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. His father served first as the assistant U.S. attorney general for the civil division of the U.S. Department of Justice from 1975 to 1976, and then as the solicitor general of the United States from 1981 to 1985. Lee is of English, Swiss, and Danish descent.

After graduating from Timpview High School in 1989, Lee attended Brigham Young University. He served as the president of BYUSA, serving together with his father, who was then president of BYU. He graduated in 1994 with a bachelor of arts in political science. Lee then attended BYU's J. Reuben Clark Law School, where he was a member of the BYU Law Review and graduated with a juris doctor in 1997.

Legal career

After law school, Lee clerked for Judge Dee Benson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah from 1997 to 1998, then for Judge (later Supreme Court Justice) Samuel Alito of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from 1998 to 1999. Lee then entered private practice at the Washington, D.C., office of the law firm Sidley Austin, specializing in appellate and Supreme Court litigation. In 2002, Lee left Sidley and returned to Utah to serve as an assistant U.S. attorney in Salt Lake City, preparing briefs and arguing cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He served as general counsel to Utah Governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. from 2005 to 2006. From 2006 to 2007, Lee again clerked for Alito, who had recently been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Afterward, Lee returned to private practice in Utah, joining the Salt Lake City office of the law firm Howrey LLP.

As an attorney, Lee also represented Class A low-level radioactive waste facility provider EnergySolutions Inc. in a highly publicized dispute between the company and the Utah public and public officials that caused controversy during his first Senate election. Utah's government had allowed the company to store radioactive waste in Utah as long as it was low-grade "Class A" material. When the company arranged to store waste from Italy, many objected that the waste was foreign and could be more radioactive than permitted. Lee argued that the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution allowed the company to accept foreign waste and that the waste could be reduced in grade by mixing it with lower-grade materials, while the state government sought to ban the importation of foreign waste using an interstate radioactive waste compact. EnergySolutions eventually abandoned its plans to store Italian radioactive waste in Utah, ending the dispute, with the 10th U.S. Circuit court later ruling that the compact had the power to block foreign radioactive waste from being stored in Utah.

U.S. Senate

Elections

2010

Lee ran for the U.S. Senate in 2010. When campaigning, he focused on the size of the federal government. He said the U.S. Constitution needed to be amended to create a flat-tax system and impose term limits on members of Congress. Senators would be allowed up to two terms and representatives up to six terms under the proposal.

At the Republican State Convention, he received 982 votes (28.75%) on the first ballot, to Tim Bridgewater's 26.84% and incumbent U.S. Senator Bob Bennett's 25.91%. Bridgewater won the second and third ballots to win the party endorsement. Both Bridgewater and Lee received enough support to have their names placed on the primary ballot.

In the June 22 primary election, Lee won the Republican nomination with 51% of the vote to Bridgewater's 49%.

Lee won the November 2 general election with 62% of the vote to Democratic nominee Sam Granato's 33% and Constitution Party nominee Scott Bradley's 6%.

2016

Mike Lee speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland on February 26, 2015.

Lee was reelected in 2016. He was endorsed by the Club for Growth, the Senate Conservatives Fund, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

2022

Lee defeated Becky Edwards and Ally Isom in the Republican primary election. Isom criticized Lee for seeking a third term after he had supported legislation to limit senators to two terms.

In the general election, Lee was challenged by independent Evan McMullin, for whom Lee voted for president in 2016. The Utah Democratic Party backed McMullin instead of nominating a candidate. Polling in September showed Lee with 36% support and McMullin with 34%, with the rest undecided or choosing another candidate. According to Jason Perry, the director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah, Utah had "not seen a Senate race this competitive in decades". Lee won the election with 53% of the vote.

Tenure

Scorecards and rankings

In 2011, Club for Growth gave Lee a 100% score. He also received a 100% Conservative voting record for 2011 from the American Conservative Union. The Heritage Foundation gave him a 99% score, tied for first with Jim DeMint. He received a Liberal Action score of 38%.

2016 presidential election

In March 2016, Lee endorsed Ted Cruz over Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary. He was the first senator to do so. At the time, he said, "I expect I'll be the first of many Republican senators who will endorse Ted Cruz. I'm confident more are on the way, and I welcome others to join." By June, after Trump had become the presumptive nominee, Lee had still not endorsed him, saying he needed "assurances" that Trump would not act as an "authoritarian" or "autocrat" and expressing frustration that Trump had "accused my best friend's father of conspiring to kill JFK". Lee voted for independent Evan McMullin.

2017 Alabama special election

On October 16, 2017, Lee endorsed Roy Moore in the 2017 Alabama special election runoff to fill the seat of U.S. Attorney General and former senator Jeff Sessions. Moore had been removed as the Alabama Supreme Court's chief justice in 2003 for defying a federal order to remove an illegal Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama Judicial Building. He was reelected chief justice in 2012. In May 2016, Moore was once again removed from the bench by the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission (JIC), permanently via suspension for the rest of his term, making him ineligible for reelection, for ordering state probate judges to ignore a U.S. Supreme Court decision. In a 50-page opinion, the Court of the Judiciary denied Moore's appeal of the JIC's decision, and said his removal was necessary "to preserve the integrity, independence, impartiality of Alabama's judiciary". Nevertheless, Lee praised Moore for his "reputation of integrity" and said he was essential to getting conservative legislation through the Senate.

2020 presidential election

On October 28, 2020, Lee compared President Trump to Captain Moroni, a heroic figure in the Book of Mormon, telling rallygoers in Arizona: "To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni." He said that Trump "seeks not the praise of the world" and wants only "the well-being and peace of the American people". His comparison was met with backlash. The overwhelming majority of responses on Lee's Facebook account characterized his efforts as "shameful" or "blasphemous". In a follow-up Facebook post, Lee wrote that he had praised Trump for his willingness to "threaten the established political order", but that the comparison was "perhaps awkward" and that his "impromptu comments may not have been the best forum for drawing a novel analogy from scripture".

Text messages gathered by the January 6 Committee reveal Lee's close coordination with Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the aftermath of Trump's defeat in the 2020 election. In the weeks after the election, Lee pursued a series of strategies to overturn the election results, claiming to have been working "14 hours a day" on this effort. The strategies included attempts to persuade state legislatures in states Biden won to put forward alternative slates of electors and promoting the efforts of attorneys Sidney Powell and John Eastman. Ultimately, Lee became concerned by what he considered Powell's missteps, the lack of evidence given by her and others of election fraud, state legislatures' failure to convene alternate slates of electors, and what Lee considered the unconstitutional efforts of Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to challenge the election certification in Congress on January 6.

Lee ultimately voted to certify the election, saying that the effort to block the certification "could all backfire badly".

After Biden won the 2020 presidential election, Trump refused to concede, and a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, Lee said Trump should be given a "mulligan" for his inflammatory January 6 speech immediately before the storming of the Capitol. Lee later defended his remarks, saying, "my reference to taking a 'mulligan' was not referring to Trump, but to Democratic politicians whose inflammatory comments had just been played for me on the air [on Fox News]. I used the term...to avoid needlessly inflaming partisan passions." On May 28, 2021, Lee voted against creating an independent commission to investigate the riot. By April 2022, the January 6th Committee had discovered and released over 100 emails between Lee, Congressman Chip Roy, and Meadows discussing their plans to overturn the election results.

Committee assignments

Committee on the Judiciary

• Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts
• Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights (Chair)
• Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights

Committee on Energy and Natural Resources

• Subcommittee on Energy
• Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests
• Subcommittee on Water and Power

Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation

• Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard
• Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety, and Security
• Subcommittee on Communications Technology, Innovation, and the Internet
• Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance and Data Security
• Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness

Special Committee on Aging (2021–present)

Joint Economic Committee

Previous committee assignments

• Committee on Foreign Relations (2011–2013)
• Committee on Armed Services (2013–2017)

Political positions

Lee is a conservative Republican. The New York Times used the NOMINATE system to rank Senate members by ideology; Lee ranked as the Senate's most conservative member. GovTrack's 2017 analysis placed Lee on the right end of the spectrum, to the right of most Republicans, but to the left of a handful of Republican senators. FiveThirtyEight, which tracks Congressional votes, found that Lee voted with Trump's positions on legislation 81.3% of the time as of July 2018. A study by Brigham Young University political science professor Michael Barber found Lee to be the "most ideologically extreme senator in the 113th Congress".

9/11 Responders Compensation Fund

On July 17, 2019, Jon Stewart and disabled construction worker John Feal criticized Lee and Rand Paul on Fox News for blocking a bill that provided Victims Compensation Fund support for disabled 9/11 responders. The fund was near exhaustion. On the Senate floor, Paul objected to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand's request for the bill to be approved by unanimous consent; per Senate rules, such a request is rejected if any senator objects. Lee had placed such a hold on the measure, despite its 73 Senate co-sponsors.

Stewart and Feal, as well as leaders of the Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Firefighters, tried to get both senators to withdraw their objections. "The people from the state of Kentucky and the people from the state of Utah deserve better", Feal said. Stewart said, "We have to stand up for the people who have always stood up for us, and maybe cannot stand up for themselves due to their illnesses and their injuries. ... There [are] some things that they have no trouble putting on the credit card, but somehow when it comes to the 9/11 first responder community, the cops, the firefighters, the construction workers, the volunteers, the survivors, all of a sudden ... we gotta go through this." On July 23, 2019, Lee was one of two senators to vote against the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund.

Personal life

Lee married Sharon Burr in 1993. They live in Alpine, Utah, and have three children. Lee is a second cousin to former Democratic U.S. senators Mark Udall of Colorado and Tom Udall of New Mexico, as well as former Republican senator Gordon H. Smith of Oregon.

As a young adult, Lee served a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Lee has served on the BYU alumni board, the BYU Law School alumni board, and as a longtime member of the J. Reuben Clark Law Society and the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. He earned the Eagle Scout award from Boy Scouts of America in 1989 and was selected to receive the National Eagle Scout Association Outstanding Eagle Scout Award (NOESA) in 2011.

Electoral history

2010

2016

2022

Books

Since his election to the Senate in 2010, Lee has published four books:

• The Freedom Agenda: Why a Balanced Budget Amendment is Necessary to Restore Constitutional Government (July 2011, Regnery Publishing)
• Why John Roberts Was Wrong About Healthcare: A Conservative Critique of The Supreme Court's Obamacare Ruling (June 2013, Threshold Editions e-book)
• Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America's Founding Document (April 2015, Sentinel)
• Written Out of History: The Forgotten Founders Who Fought Big Government (May 2017, Sentinel)

See also

In Spanish: Mike Lee para niños

In Spanish: Mike Lee para niños

• Lee–Hamblin family
• List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 8)
• List of politicians affiliated with the Tea Party movement
• Utah Transfer of Public Lands Act