Sen. Lee's Prediction: With Three Colleagues in 2016 Race, Who Comes Out on Top?

With three of his Senate colleagues in the presidential ring or about to be, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) predicted the victor will be about “policies rather than the specific personalities.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has already announced, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is announcing today, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has a big announcement scheduled for Monday.

Lee, elected in the Tea Party rout of 2010, told Fox “at this point, I think it’s a question of the more the merrier.”

“I work with all three of these gentlemen. They’re three of my closest allies in the Senate. And I have nothing but great things to say about all of them,” Lee said. “…It’s an issue of which one will represent us best in the White House and will help restore constitutionally limited government. And every one of these senators has something different to offer in that quest, and I wish them all well.”

The senator said he thinks there will be some consolidating of the conservative base before August.

“I think the policies that will emerge in this debate will help identify one of these candidates as the front-runner not based on who they are but based on what they do, based on the policies that they embrace,” Lee continued. “And I think the one that embraces constitutionally limited government and the need to restore it most effectively and most energetically will be the one who earns our nomination.”

“I think whoever gets the nomination is likely to be the one who can connect the dots, connect where we are now to where we want to be and help identify how it is that conservative principles, time-honored conservative principles and adhering to them, sticking to them, will help the poor get out of poverty, will help the middle class get ahead because, really, our government, our constitutionally limited government, works because it fosters an environment in which economic mobility is the norm. That’s what helps this be the kind of place where someone can be born into poverty and reasonably expect that they can retire comfortably if they work hard and play by the rules.”

Foreign policy will be a “big deal,” too.

“We face a lot of threats all over the world. And right now, we have a government led by an administration that projects weakness abroad and overbearance at home. I think we need to flip that around. I think we need to be stronger abroad,” he said. “We need to make sure that our enemies fear us. And at home, we need to make sure that our citizens don’t fear us. We want the government fearing the people, not the other way around.”

Like a 2016er, Lee released his new book today: Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America’s Founding Document.

“I’ve got this visual aid in my office that I reference in the book. It shows that there are 80,000 pages added each year to our federal law by executive branch bureaucrats, and only a few hundred added each year by Congress,” the senator said.

“That means measured by volume and measured by economic impact, most of our laws are being made by people not of our own choosing. As well-intentioned, well — educated, hard-working and specialized as those people in the executive branch bureaucracies may be, they don’t work for you. They don’t work for me. We don’t have the opportunity to fire them. It’s one of the reasons I wrote this book.”