This was Sen. Mike Lee’s vision for Vernal, Utah, announced during a town hall meeting I attended in St. George shortly after he took office. More oil and gas extraction in Utah seemed to be his chosen theme of the evening. Probably not the best choice since roaming through the audience holding a microphone for people to ask questions was his chief of staff at the time, Spencer Stokes, an energy lobbyist. There was no mention of alternative energy sources, climate change or extraction’s effects on Uintah County residents’ health.

Three years ago, Lee did address climate change, suggesting on the Senate floor that the “problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws, but by more humans. More people mean bigger markets for innovation. More babies mean more forward-looking adults — the sort we need to tackle long-term, large-scale problems.” He added, “The solution to so many of our problems, at all times and in all places: fall in love, get married and have some kids.” This prompted Colby Itkowitz to write in the Washington Post, “according to Lee, rather than worry about plastic straws and carbon emissions, Americans should just go out and find themselves a mate.”

At the town hall meeting, I asked the senator which elements of the Affordable Care Act he objected to, such as prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ health care plan until age 26, and making free preventive services such as mammograms and colonoscopies. “These might be good ideas,” he said, “but let the states decide.” Does this strike anyone else as dereliction? A mobile society like the U.S. needs a national plan, so a person doesn’t have to worry about losing access to care if her company transfers her to another state.

Since President Biden has been in office, Lee has voted against a bipartisan infrastructure finance bill, another to support the domestic semiconductor industry and one to address gun violence following the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting. Each had the support of Sen. Romney (unlike Lee) and benefits all of us. About the spending bills, Lee justified his votes by claiming we can’t afford them. We can, apparently, afford to cut taxes as demonstrated in Lee’s vote for President Trump’s tax cuts, which ballooned the deficit and primarily benefited the wealthy.

Shortly after the presidential election in 2020, Lee worked to overturn the results. He wrote to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that he was putting in “14 hour days” to help Trump.

On the site Above the Law, Joe Patrice wrote, “While most of the (news) coverage focuses on the disturbing extent of Lee’s efforts to subvert the democratic process by haranguing gerrymandered Republican state legislatures to toss the popular vote counts in their own states — but only for the presidential election, not their own! — the buried lead here really is Mike Lee’s absolutely atrocious legal advice.” For example, Lee recommended the lawyer Sidney Powell to Trump, calling her a “straight shooter.” This is the same Sidney Powell who said about the election, “What I think really has to be discovered is that there is a secret server that all the votes go to where they manipulate the heck out of it.” She added that voting machine makers Dominion and Smartmatic installed “new software that erases everything that shows what they did.” There is no evidence for these claims. Dominion and Smartmatic are suing Powell for defamation.

Lee later endorsed to Trump’s advisors the lawyer John Eastman, the same guy who wrote that Vice President Mike Pence could singlehandedly change the election outcome.

Perhaps the senator’s championing of the former president is not a surprise since Lee has asked people to think of Trump as “Captain Moroni.” OK, raise of hands: Who remembers Moroni, one of the heroes of the Book of Mormon, as a narcissistic, sexist, lying, thieving, xenophobic, demagogic, philandering, authoritarian-loving nonreader? I’m going to have to read the book again.

As consequential midterm elections are just days away, I hope all Americans will be able to vote and vote for representatives with good judgment.

A native Utahn, Braden Lindstrom teaches at The Shanghai International Studies University in China.