"most successful tea Partier" & "Senator Junior DeMint"

With all the hoopla surrounding Sharron Angle and Christine Miller and Joe O'Donnell during the exams, it was easy to lose track of some conservative candidates equally, but less extravagant. And it seems safe to say that most successful tea Partier, while attracting national attention under Mike Lee. While running for the Senate, 39 years old, a Utah Republican to dismantle the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He wants to repeal both the federal income tax and the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment that makes children born in the United States citizens automatically. However, he sailed to victory with a margin of near-30 point in a Senate race that was overlooked in large part by national media.

In the future, Lee is likely to attract a little more attention. In fact, it could be the Platonic ideal of the new Constitution-obsessed Republican Party, Tea Party, infusion: a lawyer who knows how to raise constitutional arguments to justify the extreme ideas and a surprisingly cordial, the rational disposition. If in the future, the movement of the Tea Party wants a national leader who does not scream nuts, Mike Lee, is likely to be the guy.



Among its strengths, Lee has inside knowledge of the contents of near garage, Harry Reid, 1982. In the 80's, when Reid and the Lees moved to Washington, Harry Reid, to serve as a representative of Nevada, and Rex Lee, Mike's father, to serve as Attorney General in the Reagan administration, the two families, although far away politically, made friends through the Mormon Church. Harry's son, Josh, relates that his father, a practical joker, once closed preteen Mike Lee in the garage until he cried uncle.

Lee spent most of his childhood hopscotching from Utah, where his father was the founding dean of Brigham Young University Law School and McLean, Virginia. He attended Brigham Young University law school and then just leaving Utah to attend a two-year mission in Texas in 1990. After graduating from law school in 1997, he worked for several judges, including the then Court of Appeals Justice Samuel Alito, and returned to Utah to serve as Assistant U.S. Attorney Salt Lake City. In 2005 he moved to the policy of the legal department of Governor Jon Huntsman, again before clerking for Alito on the Supreme Court. He then spent two years in private practice back in Utah.

In mid-2009 as a tea party protests escalated, Utah Senator Bob Bennett, who had voted in favor of bank bailouts and has shown some willingness to work with Democrats on a bill of health, fell Focus on the right. Lee began to speak in front of small crowds in schools and libraries in cities such as Provo and the Alps. Brandishing a pocket Constitution and suggesting the removal of several federal agencies, Lee could have found as another crackpot, but one key difference: He knew his case.

Lee made few concessions to non-specialist audience. He radically complex arguments and legal, convinced that people are noticing. "In a keynote speech a few, I found the basic story of Wickard v. Filburn for them ... and people do. They got it," Lee said earlier this year. Not only did he, were excited. Lee understands constitutional law, and soon, given the mood-Constitution right mind, meant more than that.

Momentum behind it, but the GOP elders maintained their loyalty to Bennett. It was the extreme right in South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint and the Senate Conservatives Fund effectively anointed Lee. "DeMint let us know what was happening," says Russ Walker, FreedomWorks national political director at the time. Walker and others in FreedomWorks Lee underwent a stress test candidates to interview him and see how it handles compared to councils in Utah. Lee passed with flying colors.

DeMint enthusiasm resulted in about $ 200,000 in independent expenditures in the Senate Conservatives Fund during Lee's campaign. FreedomWorks, meanwhile, provided the ground game, organizing volunteer supporters to go door to door and the hiring of Texas and California to make phone calls. On the eve of the primary, a Lee victory stunned and turned to Brendan Steinhauser, director of federal and state campaigns FreedomWorks, and said: "I looked around and saw all the signs and all I could think of was that God FreedomWorks bless you and God bless America. "After having sailed through the general election, Lee now looks likely to become a loyal foot soldier of the small but growing faction DeMint in the Senate. "Around here," Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz said, "people are already calling the Junior Senator DeMint."



But more than anything else, Lee's legal expert who has excited conservatives. Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society, he predicts, "It will be one of the most ardent and articulate defenders of limited constitutional government in the Senate." And the fluidity Lee on legal issues is undeniable attraction. To listen to a speech to the Federalist Society in November, in which he talked about a number of constitutional issues to a room full of conservative lawyers worship, even I was carried away by his rhetoric, nodding his head as the names listed cases. He was affable and funny, making fun of the president without rash boiling rage that comes to mind when most think of the liberal movement Tea Party. Only when I came to a conclusion a step back and realize that just raised the unconstitutionality of the bill the Democrats back health care, and a number of federal agencies to initiate, through a clever and discussion convincing the Commerce Clause. It seemed, at least at the time, reasonable enough to me.

Of course, Lee can not always hide their extremism in eloquence. But even more dramatic proposals have failed to attract the kind of anger directed toward right-wing candidates whose views were ultimately part of his downfall. In October, when Lee said that the Republican Congress should pass a law that does not strike the defense, non-discretionary federal spending by 40 percent, the camp was quick to walk again, the statements seem to realize the impossibility of such a proposal. "It was just a talking point," said his spokesman, Boyd Matheson. But it would be more cautious in the future? "No, not really, because Mike will be up," said Matheson. "He was sorry he was cast? No, because it created a lot of dialogue. Some people even began to make calculations on it."

Lee, it seems clear, has a disarming ability to suggest to the extreme in terms acceptable to pull the rope to places that might have seemed unthinkable a few years ago. And, as has one of the safest seats in the Senate at the tender age of 39, likely will have the opportunity to do this for long. Harry Reid could find himself wishing they could still block Mike Lee in a garage.