Senator Lee on the path between pragmatism and principle

Utah Senator Mike Lee

This coming week Senator Mike Lee will meet with Utah Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox and County Commissioners from rural Utah.

Senator Mike Lee has in the years since 2010 grown from candidate to politician, but has he learned to walk the line between principle and pragmatism?

During the National Republican Convention in 2012, I had some opportunity to get to know Lee in conversation. He was articulate, wonkish, and, along with his staff and lovely wife, generous and kind.

Fast forward a year and a bit to the 2013 federal government shutdown. Portrayed in the press as cold-hearted and uncaring, Lee was vocal and strident in the events that brought government to a standstill when politicians in D.C. failed to come to an agreement on the debt ceiling. Lee experienced a hit to his poll numbers, even as other Utah politicians were showing healthy margins of support in the public.

Despite his strident tone just a month before during the shutdown, Lee has in the few months since struck a conciliatory tone (which I’ve noted before). His advisers argue that Lee has been compromising and finding middle ground on myriad of issues since before the shutdown, but it wasn’t until after that the press started to notice.

Perhaps in the ire at the shutdown, the press is just looking closer. Perhaps Lee really has become more interested in showing his ability to find compromise.

In any respect, it was only recently that the Salt Lake Tribune’s editorial board noticed:

In several recent speeches (mostly to audiences much smaller than those he regaled from the Senate floor) Lee has been heard to take up a new, more accommodating, theme. Speeches that call for more compromise in search of common goals, less self-immolation in pursuit of ideological purity.

Even as it questions the sincerity of Lee’s move to accommodation, the Tribune had to grant some degree of appreciation, citing his positions on sentencing reform and limits on government snooping, positions that predate the shutdown.

But is talk enough?

KSL’s Ethan Millard clued in on February 4th when Utah’s Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox let Lee know that there’s a difference between talking about compromise and votes.

In a report on KSL News Radio, Millard noted that Cox “had taken taken Senator Lee to task on Twitter” for voting against the Payment In Lieu of Taxes, or PILT, for Utah’s public lands. Originally left out of the Farm Bill, Utah’s delegation was able to get it back into the bill.

Lee, as well as Democrat Jim Matheson, voted against the bill.

Part of the massive Farm Bill that passed last week, the funds are heavily relied upon in Utah’s rural counties. And yet, of a bill worth almost $1 trillion in spending, the PILT funds amounted to only about 1/2 of one-thousandths of the total and was included with what was widely seen as pork laden.

Millard went on to speculate that as Lee’s reelection approaches votes like this one against the Farm Bill, ostensibly on the principle of cutting government excess but with the side effect of cutting funds relied upon by rural Utah, would come back to haunt Utah’s junior senator more and more as reelection loomed.

Some might say that holding PILT hostage in exchange for western Republican votes on the Farm Bill is a case of the tail wagging the dog, but the effect is real. When Cox called out Lee for his solo (among Utah’s Republican delegation) vote against the bill, it was a comment on the importance of the bill to Utah.

Despite Millard’s report, I do think that PILT could end up being less harmful on Lee’s future than might be thought from the outside. Later this week, Lee will meet with both Cox and County Commissioners to discuss PILT. It’s a good sign that while Lee may have strong feelings on pork, he also recognizes the effect his vote could have on Utah and wants to discuss his plans in that regards.

On that note, let’s turn back to the Salt Lake Tribune’s op-ed praising Lee’s bipartisanship:

Nobody expects Mike Lee to abandon his small-government principles. He will still be a safe vote for lower taxes, scant regulatory powers and states rights.

But if he no longer expects people with differing views to abandon their principles, then he has learned something. And we can learn from him.

Where the rubber meets the road, Lee is weaving a path between his principles and pragmatism, but only time will tell if he can dodge the dangerous obstacles that threaten his route to reelection.