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Washington • Sen. Mike Lee on Monday withdrew from his plan to force a vote on Obamacare after he said he cut a deal with Senate leaders to use a budget tactic later this year to try to kill the health-care law.
Behind the scenes, though, Lee's efforts fueled anger from his fellow GOP senators after an email surfaced from his office to conservative groups suggesting they score — or publicly rank members on — his planned procedural vote instead of one Sunday that would have dumped Obamacare. That anger spilled over during a late Monday meeting when Republicans said Lee was trying to undermine them.
A string of GOP senators took out their frustrations on Lee during the closed-door meeting, arguing that he was simply trying to gin up support for himself and hurt other senators' re-election campaigns. The criticisms — some irate, some more tepid — came from establishment Republicans and tea party-aligned senators alike, and Lee offered his apologies for the email, according to two senior Republican aides briefed on the meeting but who requested anonymity.
A Lee staffer on Friday had emailed a GOP consultant, a Cato Institute staffer and a conservative Google group outlining Lee's plans to try and use a highway funding bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The Utah Republican was planning to amend the bill with language gutting Obamacare and when the amendment was ruled out of order, he was going to appeal the ruling with a simple majority vote.
"That's the real vote that should be scored," a Lee staffer wrote, according to the email obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune.
Several special interests keep scorecards on key votes that are often cited in campaign ads, and elected officials zealously guard their scores. FreedomWorks, in an email Friday, noted that it would double weight Lee's planned vote on its scorecard.
Lee's office says the senator didn't find out about the email until Monday and he then met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and apologized. Lee spokesman Conn Carroll said the senator wouldn't comment on the private conversations of other members when asked about the Monday night meeting.
Lee told fellow senators Monday night that he had reprimanded the staffer who sent the email but she was still working in his office, according to the two senior GOP aides.
Carroll said the office won't "comment on internal staff matters but Senator Lee recognizes the email was out of bounds, he takes this matter very seriously, and is acting accordingly."
Meanwhile, the continued politicking has helped delay extending a long-term highway funding bill — and has created heartburn for the Utah Department of Transportation. If Congress doesn't extend the current highway bill by Friday, states would lose money for highway and transit projects in the middle of the summer construction season.
"This year, we've delayed about one third of our preservation projects due to the uncertainty of the federal budget," said UDOT spokesman John Gleason.
"Overall, that's about 20-25 projects with a cost around $55 million. Most of these projects will likely be pushed into the next construction season because we don't want to advertise projects unless we are sure the funding is available," he said.
Gleason added that since 2008, Congress has passed 33 short-term funding extensions. "So this is not unfamiliar territory."
Utah has reduced its dependence on federal transportation funds in recent years, he said, so that they now account for only 20 percent of UDOT's budget. But it still relies heavily on that money for preservation and rehabilitation projects.
Lee Davidson contributed to this report.