Michael Shumway Lee (born June 4, 1971) is an American lawyer and politician serving as the senior United States senator from Utah, a seat he has held since 2011.

Lee's family moved to Provo, Utah, one year later, when his father became the founding dean of Brigham Young University's J. Reuben Clark Law School.

Lee then entered private practice at the Washington, D.C., office of the law firm Sidley Austin, specializing in appellate and Supreme Court litigation.

In 2002, Lee left Sidley and returned to Utah to serve as an assistant U.S. attorney in Salt Lake City, preparing briefs and arguing cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

[5] Afterward, Lee returned to private practice in Utah, joining the Salt Lake City office of the law firm Howrey LLP.

[15] On October 16, 2017, Lee endorsed Roy Moore in the 2017 Alabama special election runoff to fill the seat of U.S. Attorney General and former senator Jeff Sessions.

In May 2016, Moore was once again removed from the bench by the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission (JIC), permanently via suspension for the rest of his term, making him ineligible for reelection,[27] for ordering state probate judges to ignore a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

[35] In a follow-up Facebook post, Lee wrote that he had praised Trump for his willingness to "threaten the established political order",[36] but that the comparison was "perhaps awkward" and that his "impromptu comments may not have been the best forum for drawing a novel analogy from scripture".

[35] Text messages gathered by the January 6 Committee reveal Lee's close coordination with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the aftermath of Trump's defeat in the 2020 election.

[37][38][39] Lee ultimately voted to certify the election, saying that the effort to block the certification "could all backfire badly",[37][40] but he continued to promulgate disinformation, claiming the FBI was involved in the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

[44] By April 2022, the January 6th Committee had discovered and released over 100 emails between Lee, Congressman Chip Roy, and Meadows discussing their plans to overturn the election results.

[57] In September 2020, during a Senate hearing, Lee took out and waved a pocket-size Constitution published by an anti-government Mormon group founded by conspiracy theorist W. Cleon Skousen.

[66][67] The act attempts to expand voting rights, change campaign finance laws to reduce the influence of money in politics, limit partisan gerrymandering, and create new ethics rules for federal officeholders.

When Lee took the floor, he called the plan absurd, comparing it to an image of Ronald Reagan riding a velociraptor, and argued that having more babies was the real solution.

[86] As part of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 2018, Lee, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Murphy co-sponsored a resolution "that would end U.S. military support for the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen's civil war".

"[87] The Senate voted 60–39 to "formally begin debate on the resolution", which would require the President to "withdraw troops in or 'affecting' Yemen within 30 days unless they are fighting al Qaeda".

[89] He criticized Trump for ordering the 2018 missile strikes against Syria in response to the Douma chemical attack, stating that he lacked the constitutional authority to do so without Congress' permission because the U.S. was not in imminent danger.

He said that the Obama administration had not made clear American objectives in Syria surrounding Assad's future, and that he believed Trump's claim that the Islamic State had been defeated.

[95] In April 2019, after the House passed the resolution withdrawing American support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, Lee was one of nine lawmakers to sign a letter to Trump requesting a meeting with him and urging him to sign "Senate Joint Resolution 7, which invokes the War Powers Act of 1973 to end unauthorized US military participation in the Saudi-led coalition's armed conflict against Yemen's Houthi forces, initiated in 2015 by the Obama administration."

In February 2023, Lee issued a 24-hour deadline on Twitter to Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to hand Alkonis over and threatened to cut off military aid to Japan over the incident.

[104][105][106][107] In January 2024, Lee voted against a resolution proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders that would have applied the human rights provisions of the Foreign Assistance Act to U.S. military aid to Israel.

[112] In February 2019, Lee was one of 16 senators to vote against legislation preventing a partial government shutdown and containing $1.375 billion in funding for barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border that included 55 miles of fencing.

[114] In March 2019, Lee was one of 12 Republican senators to vote to block Trump's national emergency declaration that would have granted him access to $3.6 billion in military construction funding to build border barriers.

[116] In 2018, Lee condemned the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which is part of the Organization of American States (OAS), for recommending that Costa Rica legalize same-sex marriage.

[120][121] In February 2011, Lee was one of two Republicans to vote against extending the three provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act that deal with roving wiretaps, "lone wolf" terrorism suspects, and the government's ability to seize "any tangible items" in the course of surveillance.

[123] In 2017, Lee voted in favor of a joint resolution providing for congressional disapproval (per chapter 8 of title 5, United States Code) of the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission relating to "Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services.

[125][126] In December 2020, Lee was the sole vote in the Senate against the ALS Disability Insurance Access Act of 2019, which eliminated the five-month waiting period for those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to receive Social Security benefits.

[127] In September 2018, Lee was among six senators, including Jeff Flake, Pat Toomey, Rand Paul, David Perdue, Ben Sasse, and Bernie Sanders, to vote against a $854 billion spending bill that would avert another government shutdown.

In September 2020, less than two months before that year's presidential election, Lee supported an immediate Senate vote to confirm Trump's nominee, Amy Coney Barrett.

[130] In January 2018, Lee was one of 36 Republican senators to sign a letter to Trump requesting that he preserve the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by modernizing it for the economy of the 21st century.