Lawyer Lee's plea to Utahns: Send me to D.C.

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As an 11-year-old boy, Mike Lee remembers watching from his window as a Greyhound bus pulled up in front of his suburban Virginia home one Saturday morning and dozens of protesters piled out, carrying signs supporting abortion rights and picketing on his front lawn.

Lee's father, Rex, was solicitor general for President Ronald Reagan at the time, and argued for letting states restrict abortion beyond what was allowed in the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.

But he wasn't home that day, so Mike Lee, who says at that young age he was convinced the ruling was an affront to both life and states' rights, went out and found the leader of the protest and made his case.

Making his case is what Lee has been doing ever since, whether it is advocating in the courtroom or, more recently, arguing to Republican delegates that he is the guy who should replace Sen. Bob Bennett in the U.S. Senate.

Lee says his mission would be to roll back the federal government's expansive power that it has amassed with complete disregard for the bounds set by the Constitution.

"Americans in general and Utahns in particular are ready for a new generation of leaders that believe in constitutionally limited government, that believe Congress doesn't have the power to solve all of our problems and when it tries to solve all of our problems without regard to what the Constitution says, bad things happen," Lee said.

Lee was born in Arizona and grew up bouncing between Provo and the suburbs of Washington. In meetings with delegates he tells of how his family debated the "Commerce Clause over cabbage."

Lee earned a law degree from Brigham Young University, clerked for U.S. District Judge Dee Benson and appellate court Judge Samuel Alito -- now on the U.S. Supreme Court -- then entered private practice in Washington, representing Utah in its unsuccessful challenge to the 2000 census.

"This is a business where you win by being smarter than the other guy, and he won a lot," said attorney Jay Jorgensen, who was Lee's student body vice president at BYU, LDS mission companion and best man. "He's widely recognized in the legal community as being a superstar."

Lee joined the U.S. attorney's office in Utah, handling criminal appeals, then was hired in 2005 as Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'s general counsel.

Lee left to clerk again for Alito, this time on the Supreme Court, and then returned to private practice in Utah, representing a series of high-powered businesses and conservative causes. His disclosure shows he made $600,000 last year.

Most notably, Lee has argued that Utah and the Northwest Compact lack the authority to stop Energy- Solutions from disposing of about 1,600 tons of radioactive waste from Italy at its Utah landfill. Lee won in District court and the case has been appealed to the 10th Circuit.

Lee said Utah had its chance to regulate waste when it issued a license to EnergySolutions in the late 1980s, but it can't ban foreign waste; those decisions are made by Congress and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Vanessa Pierce, director of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, said Lee's argument doesn't just open the door to all kinds of waste in the state, "It blows it off the hinges."

"His work with EnergySolutions has done more to single-handedly undermine our state's rights and sovereignty when it comes to nuclear waste disposal than anyone else in the country," she said.

As a senator, Lee said he would support legislation banning the importation of foreign waste, provided it gives companies a few years to plan accordingly.

Recently, he testified before the Utah Legislature that the state could make a constitutional argument that it should be able to seize federal land using its eminent domain authority. While he conceded it might be a long shot, the Legislature passed the bill.

If he is elected, Lee said, his first order of business would be adding a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, an effort that has failed countless times over the decades. This time will be different, he says, because the current spending can't continue.

Balancing the budget, Lee says, would mean dismantling vast segments of the federal bureaucracy, returning the power for programs like Medicare and Medicaid to the states.

"I think the political changes we'll see from the 2010 election cycle," Lee said, "will be different, deeper and more long-lasting than what we saw in 1994."