WASHINGTON, Oct 8 (Reuters) — Republican U.S. Senator Mike Lee got here underneath fireplace from Democrats on Thursday for tweeting “democracy isn’t the target” after the talk between Vice President Mike Pence and Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Distinguished Democrats referred to as his Twitter publish an indication of creeping authoritarian tendencies in U.S. President Donald Trump’s occasion. It was not instantly clear what prompted the tweet.
Lee, a conservative who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee and has examined optimistic for COVID-19, tweeted a number of instances in the course of the vice presidential debate on the College of Utah after welcoming Pence and Harris to his residence state.
“We’re not a democracy,” Lee tweeted at one level. Then, within the early hours of Thursday, got here an extended message that drew essentially the most criticism: “Democracy isn’t the target; liberty, peace, and prospefity (sic) are. We wish the human situation to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”
Democrats shortly tied Lee’s remarks to the November election, during which Republicans are in peril of shedding their U.S. Senate majority in addition to the White Home.
“Expensive @SenMikeLee: I notice that you simply have been elected by the folks of your state. America is a consultant democracy. Meaning we’re additionally a democracy,” Democratic Consultant Ted Lieu replied on Twitter.
“However I positive hope you will get the @GOP to undertake your view as a marketing campaign slogan. It’s an actual winner,” he added.
Neera Tanden, a former Obama administration official who suggested Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential marketing campaign, tweeted: “Mike Lee popping out in opposition to democracy. If this isn’t a warning about authoritarianism, I don’t know what’s.”
A Lee spokesman defended the senator by quoting President James Madison, one of many leaders of the American revolution in opposition to the British monarchy, who went on to function the nation’s fourth president.
Madison, who wrote extensively about authorities as one of many authors of “The Federalist Papers” defending the then-new U.S. Structure, at one level wrote “democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and rivalry; have ever been discovered incompatible with private safety or the rights of property.”
Swept into the Senate by the conservative Tea Get together wave of 2010, Lee rankled Republicans 4 years in the past by calling on Trump, then the Republican presidential candidate, to step apart over his lewd dialog caught on the Entry Hollywood tape.
Lee has since turn out to be a Trump supporter and strongly backs the president’s Supreme Court docket nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, anticipated to face scrutiny within the Senate Judiciary Committee beginning on Monday.
Lee’s spokesman stated the COVID-19-stricken lawmaker “is feeling higher day-after-day … and plans to take part” in Barrett’s affirmation hearings.
(Reporting by David Morgan; Modifying by Howard Goller)
