When people from outside Utah ask me if Mike Lee is going to be OK in his race, it’s actually a loaded question — especially coming from those in the business community. I say loaded because they aren’t asking out of idle curiosity, nor are they just counting seats to get to a Republican majority. They are worried about what a Senate without Lee’s leadership would mean for a number of key economic policy issues.
These are issues you won’t read much about in mainstream media, in part because they are complex enough that it is hard to talk about them in sound bites, but also, frankly, because they can come across as, well, dry. Negative commerce clause anyone? In the Senate, Lee’s name is almost synonymous with that constitutional law doctrine that underpins interstate business. And there’s a lot more of that “boring” but critically important stuff. Right now, Lee and his team are weighing in on proposed data privacy rules, the powers of the federal trade commission, antitrust policy and trade policy, to name a few.
I know. These are wet towels over your head in a dark room, painful to think about, but stay with me, because these dense policy questions matter a lot. And yes they are hard issues to be good at. Just imagine the spade work. Who wants to read 100 years of antitrust case law that must be understood in order to create workable solutions that don’t repeat mistakes of the past? I’m a lawyer, and I don’t want to. Very few elected officials do. But Lee does. He actually does. And he surrounds himself with a team that does.
We are familiar with Lee’s limited government approach when it comes to questions about the role of the federal government in local and private matters. He has a comparable philosophy with respect to the economy, fighting against excessive federal intervention and control. And he’s good at it. His knowledge and leadership in those areas have led to his appointments on the important Senate Commerce Committee, Judiciary Committee, Energy and Natural Resources, and, significantly, an appointment as ranking member on the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights — that formerly sleepy ivory tower operation that is now addressing generationally important questions about the future shape of our economy. Yes, our Lee.
These hard-earned positions of influence are good for Utah. For one, they give Utah businesses a special seat at the table. Take Lee’s supply chain initiatives from earlier this year that were adopted into the Ocean Shipping Reform Act. These sensible and innovative ideas were inspired and shaped by roundtables held in Utah where companies shared specific concerns and ideas. Lee’s team then drafted up a series of legislative initiatives that were shared with that coalition of Utah businesses, who provided feedback into what became the law of the land.
Another example is the ongoing debate over the appropriate scope of the Federal Trade Commission’s enforcement powers. Lee’s legislative proposal, the Consumer Protection and Due Process Act, was crafted after dialogue with Utah’s consumer-facing companies, and provides a balanced approach to hard and complicated matters. It was produced just in time to provide needed clarity to what otherwise seemed a runaway set of proposals that would have undermined due process for small and medium-sized businesses. His bill has become the publicly endorsed position of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
He’s been fighting these fights for a long time. In fact, the senator was one of the few to get the big economic questions right during the pandemic.
An area we’ve been tracking closely since 2020 is the impact of the federal pandemic spending. As I commented then, there have always been two parts to the question. The first was whether we were applying the right medicine, i.e., the right programs. The second part concerned the dosage, the appropriate amount of medicine. Too little won’t save the patient. But too much can backfire and even create dependencies. As it turns out, we went too far in both respects. In its $5 trillion spending spree, Congress created some innovative and helpful programs, but in hindsight, others have been monumentally wasteful and have sent money where it wasn’t needed. The consequences of dropping trillions of dollars of stimulus on consumers should have been foreseeable. Now we are grappling with 40-year high inflation figures.
Lee supported the need for pandemic policy responses and even provided specific proposals that helped shape the major CARES Act legislation. But he wisely pushed back on the amount of stimulus and was one of the few who voted against add-on packages that doubled-down on stimulus spending. I can’t help but wonder how things might be different if more had followed his approach.
Lee is a special legislator at a pivotal time for our nation’s economy. His leadership on economic issues may not be appreciated in the mainstream, but it is clear, now more than ever, how much we need him.
Troy Keller is an attorney based in Salt Lake City.