Mike Lee is the senior United States Senator from Utah, having served in the Senate since 2011. A member of the Republican Party, he was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1971, and is a graduate of Brigham Young University and BYU's J. Reuben Clark Law School. The son of Rex Lee, who served as Solicitor General under President Reagan, Lee clerked for Samuel Alito when he was a federal circuit judge and later for Justice Alito on the Supreme Court. He built his career as a constitutional attorney before his election in 2010 as part of the Tea Party wave, which made him one of the founding figures of that movement.
Lee sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate Commerce Committee, and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. He has focused throughout his career on constitutional limits on federal power, civil liberties, regulatory reform, and libertarian-leaning conservatism. He has been one of the Senate's most intellectually distinctive conservatives, consistently applying originalist constitutional principles to legislative debates and often breaking with party leadership on issues he views as constitutionally questionable.