I never thought I would type these words, but I miss Mike Lee.
You remember. The senior senator from the state of Utah. Defender of the Constitution of the United States. Founder of the Article I Project, an effort to get Congress to take back at least some of the power it has let slip to the president, bureaucracy and courts over the decades.
Somehow, ol’ Mikey has vanished, like Luke Skywalker in the opening crawl of “The Force Awakens.”
Has Lee been kidnapped? Replaced by a replicant, an android or a stunt double? Had his body snatched by an intelligent parasite? Does Vladimir Putin have some dirt on him?
Oh, Lee still pops up on social media a lot, saying really dumb but powerless stuff. That could really be him, or the intern who has his X password. What’s left is nothing but a wannabe online influencer. He’s nothing like a U.S. senator, as he and the founders once envisioned the job.
The once and again president of the United States is stomping up and down on the Constitution, the separation of powers, the authority of the legislative and judicial branches, denying access to information that belongs to the public, defunding programs and firing federal workers, all on his own authority.
Congress? What’s that? The courts? Trump farts in their general direction.
Congress is absolutely missing in action. That is true of most Republicans and all members of the Utah delegation. But Lee creates the most notable void because he used to be the one to care about this stuff.
Imagine just how apoplectic Lee would be — calling real press conferences, introducing real legislation and having real congressional hearings — if a Democrat were taking this many liberties with the Constitution.
Just look up the stuff Lee wrote when he launched the Article I Project in 2016. Viz:
“The authors of the Constitution intended Congress to be the first among the federal government’s three co-equal branches. Endowed with the power to legislate, tax, spend, and oversee the weaker Executive and Judicial branches — while simultaneously being held to tighter public accountability — Congress was meant to be the driving force behind federal policy making.
“Today, the vast majority of federal ‘laws’—upwards of 95 percent—are not passed by the House and Senate and signed by the president as the Constitution directs; they are imposed unilaterally by unelected Executive Branch bureaucrats.
“The premise of the Article I Project is simple: the federal government is broken, and congressional weakness is to blame…”
It was called the Article I Project because Congress is listed first in the American charter — ahead of the presidency in Article II and the courts in Article III. And that sequence, Lee reasonably concluded, means something.
As Lee used to suggest, Congress — at least the House of Representatives — is the closest to the people, with members elected directly by the voters every two years. The president is elected indirectly, by the Electoral College, and judges are appointed, for life if they can hang on that long.
When it comes to checks and balances, Congress has the greatest ability to checkmate the other branches. The president can veto a law, but Congress can override that veto. The Senate has to approve executive branch appointments, judges and treaties.
Congress can impeach presidents, cabinet members and judges. No president or judge can fire a member of Congress — though the House and Senate can remove any of their own colleagues, for just about any reason two-thirds of them can agree on.
But this congressional supremacy is meaningless if members of Congress don’t wield the power the founders gave them. And they clearly are not.
I asked Google about the Article I Project and couldn’t find anything more recent than June of 2023. It’s a post about a bill Lee introduced to enhance congressional power. The bill went nowhere and the link to that bill, like the rest of the project, is dead.
Lee’s complaint about “unelected Executive Branch bureaucrats” is now downright quaint, what with Elon Musk and his IT bros — none of them on the federal payroll, much less confirmed by the Senate — rummaging through federal databases, spying on your Social Security number and planting who knows what computer bugs and viruses.
If Lee and other Republicans in Congress agree that it would be a good idea to, for example, slash Medicare, destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development, or FEMA, or the Consumer Finance Protection Board, fire thousands of federal workers, allow unvetted computer hackers into our most sensitive and personal records, scrub federal websites of data that was collected on the taxpayers’ dime, then they should introduce legislation, have hearings, vote and count on the president to sign it.
If they suck up to him enough.
George Pyle, reading The New York Times at The Rose Establishment.
George Pyle, opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, has some Constitution-trampling ideas for the next Democratic president — if that’s the way we’re going to play this game. Reach him at gpyle@sltrib.com, and read more of his writing at georgepyle.substack.com.
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