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The Tea Party Express has announced that Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, will deliver the official tea party response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address following the Republican response. The Tea Party Express, a political action committee, has hosted a response since 2011 when Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., gave the response. Former presidential candidate Herman Cain gave the response in 2012 and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., gave the response in 2013.

Senator Mike Lee to deliver Tea Party response to President Obama's State of the Union We have some great news to share with you!  Tea Party Express, the nation's largest Tea Party political action committee, will host the official Tea Party response to President Obama's State of the Union Address directly following the Republican response. Senator Mike Lee will deliver the Tea Party response at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. and will focus on issues that are important and unique to you and me. Senator Mike Lee to deliver the official Tea Party response to the State...

Congress passed a historically low number of laws in 2013, but the executive branch bureaucrats who write the nation's federal regulations remained as busy as ever, as Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, demonstrated with a single picture. "Behold my display of the 2013 Federal Register," Lee wrote in a caption for a photo posted to his Facebook page on Friday. "It contains over 80,000 pages of new rules, regulations, and notices all written and passed by unelected bureaucrats. The small stack of papers on top of the display are the laws passed by elected members of Congress and signed into law...

Six months before the Mississippi GOP primary, Sen. W. Thad Cochran is in a dead heat with attorney and former radio host state Sen. Christopher McDaniel, according to a Dec. 13 Human Events/Gravis poll of 691 voters, who voted in a Republican primary in 2010 and or 2012, with both men polling 40 percent with 20 percent undecided. “Overall, the results indicate that Senator Cochran is in a tight spot,” said Doug Kaplan, president of Gravis Marketing, a Florida-based polling and call center company. The poll also asked about other issues and carries a margin of error of plus or...

Eighty-five of 100 U.S. senators voted to renew the president’s power to indefinitely detain Americans, denying them of their fundamental right to due process.On December 19, by a vote of 84-15 (Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, did not vote), the Senate sent the Fiscal Year 2014 version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to President Obama’s desk. Although an overwhelming majority of Republicans and Democrats signed off on the evisceration of the Bill of Rights, a small coalition of Independents, Republicans, and Democrats refused to accede to such a devastation deprivation of rights. A list of the lawmakers...

Sen. Mike Lee says a bill he introduced would prevent the Internal Revenue Service from denying tax-exempt status to any person or group that refuses to perform gay marriages. "What we're talking about here is the freedom of religious belief, the freedom of a church, for example, to adhere to its own religious doctrine so that it cannot be discriminated against by the government," the Utah Republican said in an interview with Newsmax. Lee said the federal government's failure to protect religious liberty — citing Obamacare mandates for contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs — was a key motivation for him to...

In an address to the Heritage Foundation entitled “What’s Next for Conservatives”, Senator Mike Lee said, “The conservative vision for America is not an Ayn Rand novel. It’s a Norman Rockwell painting, or a Frank Capra movie: a nation ‘of plain, ordinary kindness, and a little looking out for the other fellow, too.’” The comment, which received little attention when it was made back in October, harkens back to a traditional conservatism that stressed the importance of local institutions and relationships as a source of strength. As innocuous as that might seem to most conservatives, the mildly unfavorable comparison of...

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”...