My name is Mike Lee.
I'm a US Senator from the state of Utah.
I'm a lawyer by training,
appellate litigation was my specialty.
I'm a lifelong student of the Constitution.
I was elected to the United States Senate in 2010.
I've previously served as a law clerk earlier in my career
at all three levels of the federal judiciary,
clerking at the District Court,
at the Court of Appeals level,
in the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
And later on the US Supreme Court for Justice Sam Alito.
My late father, Rex Lee was the Solicitor General
of the United States under President Ronald Reagan.
He was also a law professor and the dean
of my alma mater, BYU Law School.
And he liked to teach us about the Constitution.
I think I was about 30
before I realized not every family
talks about the Presentment Clause over dinner,
but in my home, we did.
The US Constitution has fostered the development
of the greatest civilization the world has ever known.
And the reason for that
is it unlocks unlimited human potential
by restricting the power of government.
The Constitution is important
because it outlines the boundaries
of what government should be able to do.
It outlines certain thous shalt nots
that no government may ever do in our system.
And in the case of our Constitution,
it also splits up power along two axes
on the vertical axis,
it sets up a system we know as Federalism,
which says that most of the power
is supposed to remain close to the people
to be exercised at the state level,
sometimes at the local level.
Only a few powers that are distinctively unavoidably
and by Constitutional mandate national are exercised
by the federal government.
Along the horizontal axis,
it splits up the power
that does exist within the federal government
between three coordinate branches of government,
the legislative branch, where I work,
Congress which makes the laws,
the executive branch headed by the President
that enforces the laws,
and the judicial branch headed by the Supreme Court
that interprets the laws where people disagree
as to their meaning.
Most of us, I think when we think of the Constitution,
think primarily about the Bill of Rights
about the rights provided under the First Amendment,
free speech, free press, freedom of religion and so forth.
They consist primarily of thou shalt nots to government,
the federal government in particular,
they are very important and I stand behind them
but they are not the whole thing.
In other words,
anyone can have a Bill of Rights
in any system of government,
but unless within that system of government
there's also a series of structural protections
in place to make sure that no one person,
no one group of people can become too powerful.
The Bill of Rights
in that system will quickly become meaningless.
That's something that I think is important for us
to focus on in our society today.
For too long, we have considered the Constitution
as something that is for lawyers and judges,
and especially Supreme Court justices
to worry about,
that the rest of us don't necessarily need to be conversant
in it in our day to day conversations about government,
nothing could be further from the truth.
From the founding, it's always been an unstated assumption
and an essential ingredient in our constitutional system
that as citizens in a free republic,
we ourselves will have debates and discussions
that surround the proper role of government in general,
the proper role of the federal government in particular,
and even the proper role of each branch operating
within that government.
What I hope to accomplish through this series
is to get people talking
and thinking about the Constitution again,
around the dinner table, in their political discussions,
as they interact with candidates for any government office,
especially federal office.
To the extent that we as a people can become more in tune
with the restrictions
that are already imposed on our system of government,
we will become more free and therefore more prosperous.