Mike Lee hears the chorus of critics, with blame from the establishment wing of the GOP cascading on the Utah senator for being the Republican that stopped Obamacare repeal. And he's ready to respond.

In an interview in his Capitol Hill office Thursday, Lee said he was willing to be the lone senator to bring down his party’s health care bill because it did not do much to stop Obamacare in its tracks.


“I’m not being an absolutist,” he said, adding that he didn’t need 100 percent of the law to be repealed. “I’m a little frustrated by some who are eager and willing to call me out for saying this doesn’t go far enough in doing what we promised to do for seven years.”

A second-term conservative senator from the party’s libertarian-leaning wing, Lee has always been somewhat of an outlier in the conference. But he's not going to keep quiet as the criticism flies his way.

A cohort of Republicans from the center-right are bearing down on Lee as the main cause of the GOP’s recent dysfunction — even though Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) jumped with Lee on Monday in coming out against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s plan to repeal and replace the health law.

Talk show host Hugh Hewitt said Lee and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) “saved Obamacare” from Republicans’ repeal efforts. Lee maneuvered to “preserve every word of Obamacare,” wrote Republican healthcare policy strategist Avik Roy. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page labeled him one of the “Obamacare Republicans" in an editorial Republicans widely circulated on Capitol Hill.

A number of Lee’s Republican colleagues are privately griping that he never made clear how he would get to yes on the health care plan. And some are even willing to go there publicly.

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“I don’t see him looking for a path to yes. It seems like he’s against everything right now,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). “That’s the way it looks to me.”

Lee grew animated when asked about Hatch’s remarks.

“I am stunned by that suggestion,” Lee said. “I am surprised that he would purport to know what my thoughts and intents were, what I was thinking or intending. He could not be more wrong.”

For Lee, the story of Obamacare’s passage, its implementation and attempts to repeal it have been central to his political career. He was elected after incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) was ousted after flirting with Democrats on health care. Lee started the effort to defund Obamacare that thrust Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) into prominence and led to a government shutdown in 2013.

This year Lee has been dutifully attending repeal meetings for more than two months alongside party leaders, committee chairmen and more moderate Republicans. Consistently, he says, he’s been pushing for a more conservative vision that guts as much of the Obamacare regulations as possible.

So has Cruz, his longtime ally. But as the repeal and replace effort barreled forward this month, Lee and Cruz suffered a rare split. When McConnell presented a bill that included a version of the Consumer Freedom Act pushed by Cruz and Lee, the Utah senator was barely a party to it.

He said there was a “legitimate difference of opinion” on the policy of the amendment, which allows consumers to buy cheap insurance plans outside of Obamacare’s regulatory regime. Lee wanted to do more to lower premiums, while Cruz was willing to accept a compromise.

“Mike Lee is a dear friend and deeply principled senator,” Cruz said. Asked if Lee played a role in stopping Obamacare repeal, Cruz answered: “Each senator has to make his or her own judgment.”

Still, when Lee was presented the latest draft of the bill a week ago, he did not reject it out of hand. He spent the weekend studying it and grew increasingly concerned and reached out to other senators. By Monday he was ready to leap — by himself if he had to.

“Angry phone calls are coming no matter what. It’s not like there’s a solution without angry phone calls,” Lee said. “Sure there’s reluctance. But I was going to do it either way.”

But before he did, he mentioned to Moran that he was ready to oppose McConnell's bill. So was the Kansas senator. They didn’t entirely agree on the reasons for their opposition, but there was mutual benefit to going together. Each would avoid the dreaded label as the lone senator that killed the effort.

“If there had been others who were willing to say no at the time, I think we would have been happy to have them join us,” said Moran, who wants the Senate to start over and go through the regular committee process to revamp the health system.

But unlike critics of McConnell’s closed process of circumventing committees and negotiating the bill behind closed doors, Lee believes it was mostly appropriate given the unique circumstances of a party-line repeal vote. And GOP leaders went out of their way to court Lee, walking his staff and the senator through the parliamentary process and explaining how much of Obamacare could repealed and replaced under Senate rules, leadership confidantes said.

But when the final compromise attempt bill landed in his lap last week, Lee says it was almost as if he’d been talking to himself after “making clear for months” he wanted to do more to lower premiums. Much of the party argued he should just get on board or face the heat for being an obstacle in the way of the party’s primary political goal.

“Their ears heard it but I’m not sure it made it any further than that,” Lee said. “It was just: ‘Here. And if you don’t like it, too darned bad. And you’re going to look really silly if you oppose this.’”

At the Republican lunch on Thursday as the party’s hopes of repealing Obamacare this summer sank even deeper, senators agreed to stop the circular firing squad that’s occurred since Moran and Lee came out in opposition. Several declined to criticize Lee on the record, believing it not productive to bash a colleague with the GOP’s 52-member majority so fragile.

But those senators also firmly maintained that when the Cruz amendment was inserted in the bill, it should have been enough to get Lee’s vote.

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“When you have an ask and you get close to it, you should get to yes,” said one Republican senator.

“I don’t know what he wants,” said a second senator.

Yet despite previous opposition to Trump’s campaign, on health care Lee may have made some inroads with the Trump administration, which supported his Consumer Freedom amendment. Two people close to Trump defended Lee. A White House official said that Lee “has consistently looked for a path forward while holding to his principles.”

“Sen. Lee has been working hard to make the Senate repeal and replace Obamacare bill great for all Americans,” said David Bossie, Trump’s former deputy campaign manager who met with Lee on health care this week. “And wants to get to yes.”

Lee isn’t the only one in the firing line.

In a conference call this week, conservative outside groups dinged “traitor Republicans” like the more moderate Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, Lisa Murkowski and Rob Portman for not supporting Obamacare repeal without a replacement, the latest GOP plan, one that Lee supports.

Indeed in Lee’s view, his Senate colleagues have been too focused on him. A sometime-loner in the GOP caucus, he’s always been willing to go his own way. But to the Utah senator, the failure of repeal has many fathers. And just because the bulk of the caucus was willing to go along with McConnell’s bill isn’t a reason to pin the broader GOP failure on one senator, Lee said.

“If Republicans want to criticize someone for having problems with this bill, why are they not equally critical of anyone who wouldn't stand behind full repeal?” Lee asked. “It is not nothing to ask someone holding an election certificate in the United States Senate to provide his or her vote. I’m not going to provide it simply because others in my party are providing theirs.”