Mike Lee's shadow party

At a time when some of his closest allies and other tea-party favorites, such as Rand Paul and Florida senator Marco Rubio, are focused on building their fundraising networks and campaign operations in advance of potential presidential bids in 2016, Lee’s attention is elsewhere.

“I’m encouraging my fellow Republicans, incumbents and candidates alike, to take note of the fact that we do much better when we promote our agenda,” the senator says. “We can’t always just be the party that’s about being against what we don’t like in Washington. We need also to be the party that’s for things we want to have happen in Washington.”

Lee’s work to articulate a vision of conservative governance is reminiscent of the conservative reform movements that arose in the 1970s, when groups such as the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the Republican Study Committee were founded. The policy proposals and ideological fervor that emanated from them helped to sustain the dozen years of Republican governance that followed, first under Ronald Reagan and then under George H. W. Bush. Reagan famously distributed the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, which contained thousands of policy proposals, at the first meeting of his cabinet, and his administration proceeded to implement many of them. “I think there are some important similarities,” Lee says.