Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, accused Democrats Wednesday of pursuing a vision of “rank democracy” at odds with safeguarding personal “liberty” — articulating a philosophy Democrats see as underpinning a conservative push to restrict voting rights and environmental regulations. Mr. Lee, the son of Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general Rex E. Lee and a former clerk to the conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, began a long series of Twitter pronouncements a half-hour into Wednesday’s vice-presidential debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris in his home state’s capital, Salt Lake City. “We’re not a democracy,” wrote Mr. Lee, 49, who is in isolation after testing positive for the coronavirus last week. “The word ‘democracy’ appears nowhere in the Constitution, perhaps because our form of government is not a democracy. It should matter to anyone who worries about the excessive accumulation of power in the hands of the few.”

Source: New York Times October 08, 2020 18:00 UTC