Other Senate Republicans used to privately call Mike Lee "Robin" to Ted Cruz's "Batman" — just another freshman rabble-rouser and orchestrator of the GOP strategy that led to the 2013 government shutdown.

But as Cruz built a national reputation of rankling just about everyone in Congress, Lee has quietly remade himself as an unexpected Senate dealmaker. In the process, he's upended what it means to be a freshman backbencher: His three pals in the Senate vying for the GOP nomination may get the attention, but the Utah Republican has amassed arguably more clout inside the Capitol than Cruz, Marco Rubio, or Rand Paul.


In his five years on the job, Lee has agitated his own leadership with stubborn partisanship one moment, teamed up with Democrats on ambitious legislation the next — and became a sought-after endorsement in the GOP presidential primary.

Now he's embarking on his biggest project yet, one that places him directly at odds with Cruz: Reforming the nation’s criminal justice system. Though by some metrics Lee is among the most partisan senators to serve in the Senate in decades, he’s simultaneously pursued party-splitting deals like reforming surveillance laws and scrapping mandatory minimum sentences — crusades that have put him at odds at times with each of the senators running for president.

“When you have members of your own party who don’t like legislation that you’re working on, that does create a need for a tricky balance. But I don't feel conflicted on it ideologically,” the 44-year-old lawmaker said in a recent interview with POLITICO in his office. “The parties are irreconcilably in disagreement on some issues. We’ve got ... kind of an obligation to pursue opportunities where we’re not irreconcilably in conflict.”

Lee has been through legislative and political fire since he arrived in the Senate in 2011. He was courted to join a bipartisan group of senators crafting an immigration overhaul, but declined. He later joined with Cruz on the push to repeal Obamacare through a must-pass budget bill — a ploy that led to a two-week government shutdown that was pinned on the GOP.

Lee's poll numbers took a hit afterward, and questions bubbled about a tough reelection fight for the senator who ousted longtime Republican Bob Bennett in 2010. But Lee recovered, and last year quashed a potential primary threat, giving him lots of running room in the Senate.

Lee is trying to nudge his conference to the right in his role as chairman of the Senate Republican Steering Committee, the conference’s conservative core. But as he pushes his libertarian-infused brand of conservatism, he’s also pressuring a reluctant Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to embrace sentencing reform, which has aligned conservatives like Lee with some of the most liberal Democrats.

“Some of my favorite legislative projects have been those that involved working with Democrats,” Lee said in the interview. “There are plenty of other areas where there’s a lot of room for overlap and where a conservative like me can end up agreeing even with very liberal Democrats.”

Nowhere was that more apparent than his work for the USA Freedom Act, a surveillance reform law backed by most Democrats that has bitterly divided Cruz, a supporter, and Rubio, who opposed the changes.

Yet just as the campaign warfare between Cruz and Rubio ratcheted up, Lee managed to unite the two, if only for a moment, on a separate issue: Making the GOP's Obamacare repeal bill as conservative as possible.

Lee was the first to detect that Republicans were misinterpreting the Senate’s byzantine rules and that the House planned to pass a bill that fell far short of what the GOP had promised.

“It was a surreal moment. I thought it can't possibly be true. But I heard it from so many members,” Lee said. “I was troubled by the idea that we would start watering down our repeal efforts in this fashion unnecessarily.”

Lee served as a conduit between Cruz, Rubio and McConnell on the plan that emerged, which would gut the law’s mandates and its Medicaid expansion. The House passed the updated Obamacare bill this week and sent it to the White House; President Barack Obama vetoed it Friday.

Lee knows the Senate’s procedural handbook well in part because of his chairmanship of the Steering Committee. The group hosts weekly lunches for GOP senators, advocating for conservative policies and floor tactics that rarely succeed but are important votes for the base.

Despite efforts to provide a broad range of perspectives, the committee’s tactics have occasionally angered fellow senators. The Steering Committee advised Rubio and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on a maneuver aimed at forcing votes on amendments to the Iran nuclear deal in the spring that brought the process to a standstill. And in July, an aide to Lee was caught coordinating floor strategy with conservative groups, drawing a rebuke from McConnell.

Those blips aside, senators say Lee has blossomed into a savvy legislator during his stewardship of the Steering Committee, which he took charge of a year ago.

“He’s more to the right than the majority of the conference. But in the steering committee, he’s steered a middle course,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “Once Cruz started running for president, I think that Sen. Lee has carved out his own path.”

"He’s not intimidated," added Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). "He says what he believes in and he’s highly intelligent. And he’s got good values and good principles. I just think that’s healthy.”

A former federal prosecutor, Lee joined the Senate in 2011 as its youngest member, in the same class as Rubio and Paul. He immediately became part of a small but aggressive tea party wing that had to stick together to have any modicum of influence. When Cruz was elected two years later, he and Lee were among the most vocal critics of leadership; Lee was the first senator to vow in writing to defund Obamacare, a cause that he and Cruz pursued to the point of a government shutdown.

Today Lee is in the unusual position of having three of his closest friends in the Senate battling for the presidential nomination. Lee sat down with Paul, Rubio and Cruz individually as the presidential campaign began in earnest and told them, "I'm in an awkward spot because I'm really close to all three of you guys," Lee recalled. The senator added during the POLITICO interview that he prefers any one of them as president over the rest of the field.

"I'm probably closer to each of them individually than any of them are to each other," Lee said. "One of the weirdest things that can happen to a person is to have his three favorite co-workers all running for president of the United States at one time."

Things are likely to get touchier in the coming months: Lee has defended Cruz from Rubio’s attacks on surveillance and immigration reform, but Cruz is a staunch opponent of Lee's criminal justice reform package, which would ease harsh sentencing regimes for nonviolent drug offenders but impose stricter punishments for violent criminals.

Cruz has blasted the measure, arguing it would lead to the early release of “violent criminals” and warning that senators would be “held accountable” for supporting such reforms. Lee, in response, has been meeting with undecided senators individually to go through the bill line-by-line and try to reassure them.

One Republican who recently got on board with the bill was Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, the fifth-ranking GOP senator.

“He’s finding a significant place to get things done that are going to have long-term impact,” Blunt said of Lee.

It's unclear whether Lee will be able to persuade McConnell to hold a vote on the bill. McConnell wants to protect his fragile 54-seat majority and is wary of taking up issues that divide his members.

While Lee has drawn attention for his surprising bouts of bipartisanship — he has also worked with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) on antitrust issues and is working with Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) on email privacy — the deals he's passed on are also telling. After he arrived in the Senate in 2011, Lee began working with Schumer on reforms to the U.S. visa system. Two years later, Schumer came calling to see if Lee would be interested in going bigger: Would he join immigration reformers on the Gang of Eight?

Lee didn’t immediately rule it out. But later, Lee recalled, he had a fateful conversation with Schumer.

“The threshold we are about to cross, if you stay on, you got to agree in advance [that] you are going to support whatever we put out regardless of what is in it,” Schumer said, according to Lee’s account.

A Senate Democratic aide disputed that Lee was ever told he’d have little say in the end product. But the aide said joining the Gang of Eight required a commitment to seeing the bill — including a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants — through to the end.

“I just got kinda freaked out about that,” Lee said.