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U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson, Utah’s only Democrat in Congress, announced Tuesday that he will not seek re-election, easing the way for Republicans to pick up another House seat in a solidly red state. Matheson was expected to face a tough repeat challenge in 2014 from Saratoga Springs Mayor Mia Love, a Republican he narrowly defeated in 2012. While Utah Democrats admitted Matheson’s decision not to run for an eighth term is a blow, they’re hoping it will set him up to challenge U.S. Sen. Mike Lee or Gov. Gary Herbert, both Republicans who are up for re-election in 2016. …

The day after Chris Christie, the cuddly moderate conservative, won a landslide reelection as the Republican governor of Democratic New Jersey, I took the Internet Express out to Iowa, surveying its various newspapers, blogs and such to see how he might do in the GOP caucuses, won last time by Rick Santorum, neither cuddly nor moderate. Superstorm Sandy put Christie on the map. The winter snows of Iowa could bury him. From a Web site called the Iowa Republican, I learned that part of the problem with John McCain and Mitt Romney, seriatim losers to Barack Obama, “is they were...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on a conference call organized by Karl Rove’s Crossroads organization for large donors and their advisers on Oct. 30 that the Tea Party movement, in his view, is a “nothing but a bunch of bullies” that he plans to “punch … in the nose.” On the call, according to a donor who was on it, McConnell personally named Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) as Tea Party conservatives he views as problematic for him. “The bulk of it was an attack on the Tea Party in general, Cruz in particular,” the source,...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on a conference call organized by Karl Rove’s Crossroads organization for large donors and their advisers on Oct. 30 that the Tea Party movement, in his view, is a “nothing but a bunch of bullies” that he plans to “punch … in the nose.” On the call, according to a donor who was on it, McConnell personally named Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) as Tea Party conservatives he views as problematic for him. “The bulk of it was an attack on the Tea Party in general, Cruz in particular,” the source,...

Former-President Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson has a fine op-ed in today's Washington Post, heaping praise on Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). Gerson writes: For those who expect and fear an irrepressible conflict between the tea party and the Republican establishment, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah is a hopeful anomaly. Should this anomaly become a trend, the GOP’s future would be considerably brighter. Few have done more to burn ideological bridges within the GOP. Yet no one from the tea party side is now doing more to construct them.... Lee has been proselytizing for a “comprehensive anti-poverty, upward-mobility agenda” — making...

If you haven’t read Utah Senator Mike Lee’s remarks [Bring Them In] at the Heritage Foundation’s Anti-Poverty Forum you really owe it to yourself to do so. It is probably the most succinct conservative critique of modern government anti-poverty programs in recent decades. When President Lyndon Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty” in his 1964 State of the Union address it represented, arguably, the high water mark for the acceptance on liberal ideology in America. The essence of the speech was a singleminded devotion to the “the perfectability of man”: the notion that perfection can be achieved on Earth...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Here you go. This is it. The Washington Post story. "Obama's Ratings Tumble After Health Care Flaws. It's by Dan Balz and Peyton M. Craighill. "The flawed rollout of the Affordable Care Act," Obamacare, "has pushed President Obama to the lowest point of his presidency, with dwindling faith in his competence and in many of the personal attributes that have buoyed him in the past, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. "Opposition to the new health care law also hit a record high in the survey, with 57% saying they oppose [Obamacare]. Forty-six percent say...

When conservatives appear on MSM shows, they regularly get raked over the coals. Frustratingly, the conservative guests rarely call their interviewers out for their obvious lefty bias. So it was refreshing to see Republican Congressman Chaffetz of Utah refuse to let Luke Russert's liberal slant slide. In the guise of a question, Russert, subbing for Andrea Mitchell on her MSNBC show today, confronted Chaffetz with a contentious bit of editorializing against the "Ted Cruz, Mike Lee rabbit hole." Chaffetz called Russert on it: "That was a loaded question there, Luke." View the video here.

Just when I complimented my friends at The Salt Lake Tribune for being authentic for owning the cause of anything other than Mormon and Republican in Utah, they have to go and act like their journalistic editorial standards trump their politics – which is, of course, nonsense. When the Media Research Center in Washington, D.C., cited dozens of reports and editorials issued by the Tribune painting Utah Senator Mike Lee negatively throughout the drama over the shutdown of the federal government, the Tribune balked. Story Continues Below Ad ↓ But why take umbrage? The Tribune editorial team has no affection...

Obamacare is making us sick. Just the very idea of any law being thousands of pages long in the first place is enough to give you a queasy feeling in your head and stomach. I even get a bit nauseous merely buying stuff at the supermarket, when the self-checkout computer thing starts spitting out seemingly endless coupons and a receipt longer than my arm. As a general rule, I don’t trust any document involving more than a single page, especially when lawyers are required to administer it. There comes a point where you know they’ve got something over you, and...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: You know, the... No, no, no. What's interesting about that is like Kay Hagan, Democrat senator from North Carolina. All these Democrat senators now want to be exempted from all the fallout of this. There are 13 of 'em, a baker's dozen. They knew when they voted for this. I don't think they deserve to be let off the hook. The Democrats that now want this all delayed -- they want the individual mandate delayed -- they want things delayed 'til after the 2014 election. They've trooped up to see Obama. Folks, they knew. Everybody knew that...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: You know, the... No, no, no. What's interesting about that is like Kay Hagan, Democrat senator from North Carolina. All these Democrat senators now want to be exempted from all the fallout of this. There are 13 of 'em, a baker's dozen. They knew when they voted for this. I don't think they deserve to be let off the hook. The Democrats that now want this all delayed -- they want the individual mandate delayed -- they want things delayed 'til after the 2014 election. They've trooped up to see Obama. Folks, they knew. Everybody knew that...

"Learn a little bit more about how business has been done in the Congress of the United States.” Those were the words of advice given by senior Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to junior Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) during last May’s debt ceiling debate. It’s a provocative suggestion, considering that traditional congressional business practices have led us into almost $17 trillion in debt, unfunded liabilities several times that amount and a congressional approval rating that hovers around 9 percent. Business as usual in Washington has failed the American people, and it’s time to clean house. In the corporate world, a “takeover”...

I didn't know what a libertarian was when I started reporting. I was just another liberal. I knew the Republicans were icky, and Democrats were more like me -- except they didn't care about debt. I had no idea there was an actual movement of thinking people who want to honor the principles of the Founders -- liberty and limited government. It took me a long time to wake up. Now more Americans have woken up, say Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie, editors of Reason magazine. "Poll after poll show you that Americans are much more fiscally conservative than...

Arguably, one of the biggest accomplishments of supply-side economist Art Laffer in the late 1970s and early 1980s was to get mainstream economists to take marginal tax rates seriously. We all knew that the deadweight loss from a tax is proportional to the square of the tax rate so that, say, doubling the tax rate quadruples the deadweight loss. But, for some reason, economists talked very little about this. And this was during an era when the top federal marginal tax rate on income in the United States was a whopping 70 percent and the top federal marginal tax rate...

There’s a new public enemy No. 1 in Senate GOP circles, and it’s not Ted Cruz. It’s the Senate Conservatives Fund, an organization that used to prop up underdog conservative candidates but now is training its fire mainly on Republican incumbents — rather than Democrats. The group has ginned up anger on the far-right towards Republican senators for refusing to use a government shutdown threat as leverage to defund Obamacare — a campaign that has been good for its bottom line. Since it started engaging in the defund Obamacare campaign, the group brought in the vast majority of the $3.5...

Mike Lee, the senator from Utah, gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation last week that demands attention. The takeaway: Candidates need policy ideas that address the concerns of ordinary voters—and they have to campaign, and win, on those ideas. Lee noted that conservative scholars have a number of imaginative proposals that try to address the breakdown of the family, the rising cost of health insurance and higher education, the lengthening suburban commute, and out-of-control entitlement spending. Read an issue of National Affairs (or The Weekly Standard!) if you doubt him. But Republican officeholders haven’t picked up the torch. The...

Senate Republicans, led by South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, are pushing for a federal ban on abortions after the end of the 20th week of pregnancy. … The planned legislation, though, will face many challenges, not only from the Democratic-controlled Senate, but from some Republicans like Sen. Mike Lee, Utah, who has concerns about Congress’ authority to regulate commerce as the law’s basis. …

It’s time for the GOP to apply conservative principles to solve modern problems, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told an audience at the Heritage Foundation Tuesday. “Progressives have become the party of Wall Street, K Street and Pennsylvania Avenue,” he said. “We must become the party of Main Street, everywhere.” Via RCP, jump ahead to the 53:30 mark to hear Lee’s vision for the future of the conservative movement: Full transcript after the jump… SEN. MIKE LEE (R-UTAH): Thank you very much. It’s wonderful to be back at the Heritage Foundation. It has been quite a month in Washington. It began...

Iowa Republicans hold their annual dinner Friday commemorating the life and career of Ronald Reagan, with Texas Senator Ted Cruz as the featured speaker. Cruz is widely viewed as a presidential contender in 2016. AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: As we just heard, Republican Party approval ratings are lower than ever, but that's not stopping Texas Senator Ted Cruz from taking a post-shutdown victory lap in Iowa tonight. Cruz is headlining the state Republican Party's annual Reagan dinner and he's often talked about as a potential presidential candidate. Iowa, of course, holds the first presidential caucus. NPR's Tamara Keith is in Des...