Tea Party Response to the State of the Union — Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah)

A hard-hitting address.

At Politico, "Mike Lee tea party response: Barack Obama at fault for inequality":

Sen. Mike Lee tried to challenge the Democrats on their own turf by discussing an “inequality crisis” in his official tea party rebuttal to the State of the Union on Tuesday, while fellow tea party darling Sen. Rand Paul struck more familiar Republican chords in a separate speech.

Lee’s language echoed Democrats who have been actively raising concerns about growing inequality in American society. But the Utah Republican cast the solution in distinctly conservative terms.

“This inequality crisis presents itself in three principal forms,” Lee (R-Utah) said. “Immobility among the poor, who are being trapped in poverty by big-government programs; insecurity in the middle class, where families are struggling just to get ahead, and they can’t seem to get ahead; and cronyist privilege at the top, where political and economic insiders twist the immense power of the federal government to profit at the expense of everyone else.”

Lee highlighted educational and economic inequality, but argued that government is a root cause of growing disparities. He also included issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and National Security Agency surveillance as examples of big-government policies that lead to “real inequality.”

But the worst culprit, Lee argued, is the Democratic health care law.

“Obamacare – all by itself – is an inequality Godzilla that has robbed working families of their insurance, their doctors, their wages and their jobs,” Lee said. “Many Americans are now seeing why some of us fought so hard to stop this train-wreck over the last four years.”

President Barack Obama, Lee added, “has paid lip-service” to addressing inequality “but seems uninterested in truly confronting or correcting” it.

We'll see.

He's got a pretty good laundry list of reforms. It's going to take majority power to actually push these things through the Congress, which is why the stakes are as high as ever in November.

More at Hot Air, "The State of the Union: Six down… and two to go" (via Memeorandum).