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If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

If all you have is Sen. Mike Lee, everything looks like federal government overreach.

There are times when it is a nail, and you are glad to have that hammer. And when the federal government is abusing its power, Utah's junior senator can be handy to have around.

Lee's opposition to any kind of federal action to move the people of the United States into the league of First World nations, with near-universal access to health care, has no rhyme, reason or soul to it. It is knee-jerk opposition to the suggestion that care for the sick should be subsidized — through insurance premiums, taxes or both — from the rich.

He and Texas' Sen. Ted Cruz define "freedom," at least in this context, as the ability to be both cruel and stupid.

The Utahn was willing to shut down the federal government over that point a few years ago. And, just to show that his motivation was not strictly partisan, it also moved him to be one of a handful of senators to kill this month's efforts to destroy Obamacare because, well, it didn't destroy it enough.

But about those nails.

Lee went out of his way the other day to call out Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former Senate colleague and a member of his own party, over a plan to have the Justice Department reverse yet another of the Obama administration's policies and step up the practice called civil forfeiture.

That's where the cops — federal, state or local — determine for themselves that that stack of cash in your trunk, or that really fancy car you were driving, can't possibly be yours. Unless you got it by doing something illegal. Probably selling drugs.

So they take it away from you. Serves you right, you dirty drug dealer. You shouldn't profit from your illegal activities, and everyone else should see that they won't either.

You don't have to be convicted of a crime. You don't even have to be formally accused of one. Oh, you can hire a lawyer and go to court to petition to get your stuff back. Sometimes that will work. But the burden of proof in these civil actions is tilted way too far toward the government and the legal fees involved can easily be more than the stuff you were trying to get back.

Utah does it, too. A report from the Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice records some 400 cases filed in 2016. Nearly all of them were allegedly attached to a drug investigation and state law enforcement agencies and drug courts walked away with some $1.2 million.

The practice is promoted as being a useful tool in law enforcement's kit. Which it no doubt is. Giving the police the unfettered ability to search, seize, eavesdrop, harass and shoot you in the butt would cut down on crime, too.

But we supposedly have limits on what the cops can do to put away bad guys, especially when they have not been found in any court to really be bad guys, rather than people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong look on their face or the wrong color of their skin.

Lee, perhaps wanting to be somewhat deferential to the administration of his own party, described the practice as "constitutionally suspect." Constitutionally abhorrent would be more like it.

Other federal activities and laws have also drawn criticism from Lee, including bits of the Patriot Act and other things that purport to give the federal government more power to rummage about in your lives and personal effects. When it's a Republican, someone from the Law and Order Party, who raises these concerns, it seems proper to give that person credit for acting on principle rather than politics.

Of course, you know about principle. I am principled. You are predictable. He is possessed by the hobgoblin of small minds.

It's not unlike how all us old Lefty Louies (Bob Dole's personal pet name for me) are suddenly swooning in admiration for a couple of old, white straight arrows from the FBI — former director Jamey Comey and new special prosecutor Robert Mueller — in the hope that they might bring down the Trump administration. Or, at least, so hobble it with subpoenas and indictments and plea bargains that its ability to do long-term damage will be seriously curtailed.

The same tactics that former Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz tried to throw at the Obama administration? And at the Hillary Clinton campaign? The same FBI that tried to get Martin Luther King to kill himself and did everything it could, legal and not, to bring down the anti-war movement in the Vietnam years? Why, yes, it is, come to mention it. What of it?

Got any other nails need driving?

George Pyle, the Tribune's editorial page editor, is more partial to a good pair of Vice Grips. gpyle@sltrib.com