Do we like them?

Do we like Mike Lee?

Our score: 2 out of 10. A run of his own votes and bills aimed at LGBTQ+ and trans people, a fossil-fuel push, and a misleading post, with only a little real good to set against it.

Lee is Utah's Republican senator and these days a power in the Senate's energy fight, having won the energy committee gavel. This run of searches turned up a lot about what he does in the chamber and online, and less about the person behind it, so the backstory here is thin.

The Minnesota posts are the story to know. In June 2025, after the shootings of Minnesota lawmakers, Lee put up posts that drew heavy criticism, and he deleted them. PolitiFact rated his claim that the suspect was motivated by Marxist ideology Pants on Fire. It's the pattern the harm test looks for: fast, loud and wrong, and then a quiet delete.

On LGBTQ+ people, the record is his own votes and bills. In November 2022 he voted against the motion to proceed on the Respect for Marriage Act, saying its religious liberty protections were too weak. In 2023 he introduced a bill to bar federal money for research on minors' gender transitions, and a bill of the same name was sponsored again in July 2026. He frames it as protecting kids and religious freedom. Where you land depends on whether you read it as that, or as targeting trans people, which is how we read it here.

On the planet, he called the heavy reliance on wind and solar “very disturbing” and has written that any Republican with a climate-change agenda shouldn't hold office. He backs selling some public land for housing and opening up more mining and oil and gas leasing. In 2026 he sponsored the License to Drill Act and the End EPA Abuse Act, per Congress.gov.

The recent one is the Talarico post. Lee answered a Democratic Party post promoting the Texas Senate nominee with a Moloch reference and an animated image of a child being sacrificed to an ancient deity. Critics including Mehdi Hasan mocked it, and another critic called it “certifiable lunacy”. Lee's online persona is a big part of why this card lands where it does.

The good stuff is thin in what we found, and we're not going to pad it. Congress.gov lists him as sponsor of a 2026 bill on citizenship for international adoptees. No court judgments against him turned up in these searches, though that is a gap in the research rather than proof of a clean record.