President Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race, and what he sees as the increasing hostility toward Christianity and organized religion were just a few of the topics Sen. Mike Lee discussed during his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show.
The episode, released Tuesday, shows the two men sitting across from one another inside Carlson’s warmly-lit Maine studio for a sprawling two-hour interview about politics and faith.
Carlson led off the conversation by referencing an article from journalist Seymour “Sy” Hersh about Biden’s final days in the presidential race — particularly about how Democratic leaders influenced Biden’s decision to drop out. Both Carlson and Lee, a Republican from Utah, were critical of the top-down effort from politicians and donors to convince Biden to leave the ticket.
“It denigrates their own party faithful — the voters who showed up in what was essentially an uncontested primary election,” said Lee.
Lee said journalists have not applied the same scrutiny to what went on with Biden as they would if the candidate was a Republican, as he asked, “Can you imagine the kind of absolute venom that would be released against Republicans if we pulled a stunt like that?”
What Sen. Lee saw in Biden
Lee could not pinpoint the exact date he remembered noticing Biden’s decline, but he said he saw it during the president’s first year in office.
The senior senator from Utah has served with two other presidents: Barack Obama and Donald Trump. He said he remembers a time when Obama bumped into him and the two had a great chat.
“He would call from time to time just to check in on things that we agreed on, projects that we were working on,” Lee said about Obama. Members of Congress would also be able to get on the phone quickly with Trump, too. But that has not been the case with Biden, said Lee.
“They shielded him from us,” said Lee.
Both Carlson and Lee said they had seen Biden excel at connecting with people in the past and this was a skill he had. But Lee said he had seen snippets of Biden no longer being able to do that.
Lee said one time Biden called him to talk about the expansion of two national monuments in Utah. He said the conversation happened either in 2021 or 2022.
“A short time into the phone conversation, I could tell he was reading from a script and not only reading from a script, but his voice would start to trail off at the end of each sentence,” Lee told Carlson.
Acknowledging sometimes politicians will use partial scripts or talking points for phone calls, Lee said when speaking to colleagues, it is not common to read directly from a script.
Lee: Republicans shouldn’t discount Kamala Harris
Vice President Kamala Harris could win the election, said Lee. “And Republicans would make a huge mistake by discounting her.”
While Lee said he disagrees with almost everything Harris said, he said she is a compelling speaker and due to the media rallying behind her, she is a threat. “I think we should be very worried about it,” said Lee. “We’ve already seen the media sponsored apotheosis of Kamala Harris.”
Lee said the media has worked to erase Harris’ role as border czar and to disregard that she was one of the most progressive members of the Senate.
“They’re scrubbing things she has said in the past,” said Lee. “Crazy statements she has made, from defunding the police to aggressive, radical climate change policies, Green New Deal Stuff.”
Calling Harris funny and saying she has a playful side and can be emotionally compelling, Lee said she was one of the most progressive members of the committee they were both on. He was critical of the way she approached Trump appointees and also, the Constitution.
“To channel the inner Isaiah, (she) draw(ed) near to the Constitution with her lips, while her heart may have been far from it,” said Lee, adding he thought she does not acknowledge the separation of powers.
“She’s a progressive’s progressive,” he said. Lee said Harris never missed an opportunity to expand the size and cost of the federal government, and she was always in favor of legislation to expand access to reproductive rights.
When speaking about Harris’ enthusiasm for abortion rights, Lee said he thinks part of this is due to her upbringing and her time in law school.
“American law schools with very few exceptions tend to indoctrinate, for whatever reason, Roe versus Wade, into things,” said Lee. “It’s more fundamental than Magna Carta. It’s more fundamental than the Bill of Rights.”
Lee said proponents of abortion have gone from talking about it as safe, legal and rare to encouraging women to share their stories.
When Lee was 10-years-old and his father was appointed by President Ronald Reagan as Solicitor General, Lee said he asked his dad about Roe v. Wade. After his dad explained it to him, Lee said he told his dad he saw it as a legislative decision rather than a judicial one. It is a position Lee still holds: states should have power over abortion legislation.
“I don’t think I’d ever seen my dad more happy to know that one of his children had listened to his discussions about federalism and separation of powers,” said Lee.
Increased hostility in D.C. toward religion
While much of the conversation focused on political issues, Carlson also asked Lee about seeing hostility toward Christianity in D.C., especially since Lee is a religious minority in the country and an advocate for religious liberty.
Lee, an active Latter-day Saint, said he has seen increased hostility toward organization religion.
In the Senate, Lee said there is a healthy respect of people’s background. Both Republicans and Democrats gather weekly for a prayer breakfast of all political and religious stripes, said Lee. But he said he has seen things that have concerned him.
When he heard the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, say “The dogma lives loudly within you” to Amy Coney Barrett, he was unsettled. He said during a committee meeting, he urged caution about the way they were talking about religious beliefs.
Quoting a line from the apostle Elder Neal A. Maxwell, Lee said, “if India is the world’s most religious nation and Sweden is the world’s least religious nation, then America can be adequately described as a nation of Indians governed by Swedes.”
Lee: The federal government is too big
April 12, 1937 was the day when Washington D.C. got “immensely more powerful,” said Lee. It was the day the Supreme Court changed a previously held position on the Commerce Clause — under the threat of court packing, said Lee.
It gave Congress power over interstate commerce in a way it did not have before.
“All of a sudden, Congress went from a limited, narrow purpose legislative body to an open-ended one, rendering the 10th Amendment almost a nullity,” said Lee. If Congress could connect it to interstate commerce, they had more power now over lands, agriculture, labor and other issues.
Congress then wrote vague laws that unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats under the executive branch were tasked with enforcing, said Lee. “Permanent Washington.”
“For those of us who love liberty, this is a nightmare,” Lee said.
In his office, Lee said he keeps a monument to the constitutional problems America faces: two stacks of papers. One stack is a few inches tall and it is all the laws passed by Congress in the last year. The other is the Federal Register: a list of announcements of federal regulations.
“Those are a hundred thousand pages, more or less, that get issued every year,” said Lee. These are not laws passed by Congress, they are decided by agencies and have enforcement mechanisms.
One time Lee said he and others on the Judiciary Committee submitted a request to the Congressional Research Service to figure out how many activities are federal crimes.
“The answer took a while and when it came back, it was stunning,” said Lee. “The answer is unknown and unknowable.” A lot of this had to do with the “Byzantine labyrinth of federal regulations” created by federal employees who are not elected officials and not judges, said Lee.
Maintaining the Supreme Court’s independence
If there is an effort to pack the Supreme Court, it would politicize the court, said Lee. On the off-chance the Democratic Party wins the House, the Senate and the Presidency and increases the amount of justices from 9 to 13, it would set off a chain of events, he said.
If Republicans then took back those powers, Lee said there would be a lot of political pressure on them to increase the number of justices, too. “And before long, it would start to look like the intergalatic Senate on the Star Wars movie.”
The conversation shifted to voting laws and Lee voiced concern about the prospect of state laws around legislative redistricting being subject to federal appointees.
“They also want to essentially divest the power to draw legislative boundaries from the state legislatures and give them to non-partisan independent commissions, thus further taking away the power from elected lawmakers and putting it in the hands of unelected and unaccountable experts,” said Lee.