“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”
Although Abraham Lincoln spoke these words over 160 years ago, his charge to us to remove officials when they do not honor the Constitution remains in force.
If we Utahns are to follow Lincoln’s admonition, then we must remove U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, whose recently revealed text messages with then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows lay bare Lee’s attempts to undermine the Constitution.
Last time Utah voted for Lee, he was a Constitution-loving, principled conservative who opposed Donald Trump. Over the past six years he has undergone a stunning metamorphosis, now willing to use illegal means to overturn a presidential election. The plan was simple, as Lee described it on Dec. 8, 2020: “If a very small handful of states were to have their legislatures appoint alternative slates of delegates, there could be a path.”
In this plan, states with GOP-dominated legislatures were to simply nullify Joe Biden’s victory in their states and send to the Electoral College different delegates who would vote for Trump. There was no legal or constitutional justification for this plan. Trump loyalists had pointed to a small handful of supposed irregularities in a few states, but these instances, even had they been real, never amounted to anything sufficient to change the outcome.
But Lee was excited enough about this plan to overturn the election that he brought up the same idea three more times on Jan. 3. In the clearest sign of what he was hoping Trump would do, Lee sent Meadows a news story in which Trump expressly asked state legislatures to overrule the public and appoint alternate electors who would reseat Trump. In response to this story, did Lee express shock or dismay? Did he defend the right of the people to have their votes counted? No. He asked: “Should I take this as a good sign that he gets it?”
That statement should go down as one of the most treacherous statements ever uttered by a person elected by the people of Utah. Lee saw Trump asking legislatures to overturn the will of the people, and thought, “Yes! He finally gets it.”
And lest anyone think Lee was a mere armchair quarterback, texting with Meadows from the cheap seats, we now know he was willing to put some skin in the game himself. Our senator told Meadows that he was “spending 14 hours a day for the last week trying to unravel this for him.”
Utahns should ask: Unravel what, and for whom? The answers: The results of a free and fair election, and for Donald Trump. These are not the actions of a person committed to a republican form of constitutional government, nor to representing Utah’s values.
Lee has since compounded his wrongdoing by misleading the public regarding his advocacy to overturn an election to save the defeated Trump presidency. Back in January 2021, as the nation was still reeling from the horrifying attack on the Capitol, the senator told a town hall audience that “as we got closer and closer to Jan. 6, I became concerned because I wasn’t seeing any of these developments occur, but I was continuing to hear this narrative.”
We now know he wasn’t “concerned” at all. On Jan. 3, Lee was celebrating that Trump was calling for legislators to disregard the results of the election.
Perhaps the most alarming deception was Lee’s speech on the floor of the Senate on the night of Jan. 6, after the Capitol had been cleared of invaders. Lee noted that the only way the Senate could do anything but simply count votes was if “multiple slates of electors can be submitted by the same state.” And then he seemed to speak from the heart: “That did not happen here. Thank heavens. And let’s hope that it never does.”
Just three days before, Lee had told the president’s chief of staff that this was exactly what he thought should happen. How alarming to now see his true hopes for overturning the election, and how deceitful of Lee to change his tune only after our Capitol was sacked a couple of days later.
To send Lee back to Washington for six more years, knowing he is willing to meddle with election results he doesn’t like, would be a stain on Utah’s history and a disservice to our broader republic. Utahns must vote to remove him.
Ryan Bell
Davis Bell
Ryan Bell and Davis Bell are brothers. Ryan is a Salt Lake City trial attorney and a Republican. Davis works for a Utah-based tech company and is a Democrat.
