Sen. Mike Lee of Utah needs a little help from his friends.
Lee, a freshman tea-party leader, is pleased that every Senate Republican backs his balanced-budget amendment. But as the federal government approaches its debt limit, he warns that the press-conference bloc is not enough.
In a letter last week, Lee urged colleagues to play hardball on the amendment. “Unless or until that measure passes both houses of Congress,” he wrote, Republicans should “vigorously oppose any attempts to raise the debt ceiling.” Six GOP senators — Jim DeMint (S.C.), Rand Paul (Ky.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Jim Inhofe (Okla.), Jim Risch (Idaho), and Richard Shelby (Ala.) — signed on.
Lee, in an interview with National Review Online, pledges to intensify his efforts. Republicans, he argues, cannot simply posture as fiscal hawks; they must use the debt-limit extension as an opportunity to tie the grabby hands of Congress.
“I would like to see a scenario in which Republicans in both houses draw a line in the sand,” Lee says as we talk in his Capitol Hill office. “If Democrats do not give us the supermajorities we need in both houses to pass the balanced-budget amendment, we are not going to even come to the table. It is a condition precedent.”
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