• June 2010

  Ousting an incumbent

  The growing tea party movement scored its first major victory when Lee and Tim Bridgewater defeated Sen. Bob Bennett in Utah's unique convention system.

  The fight included an unusually underhanded move in which a secret group of Bennett supporters produced a mailer that made it look like Lee was using his shared Mormon faith as a weapon against Bennett. The infamous "Temple Mailer" rattled Lee but didn't defeat him. He came in second to Bridgewater at convention, but beat him in the primary en route to an easy November win.

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• Jan. 31, 2011

  Balanced budget amendment

  The first major move Lee made as a senator was to draft a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to balance the budget annually, stepping on the longtime domain of Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. The party eventually merged the two into the Hatch-Lee balanced budget amendment, which Congress rejected.

  It was the first, but not only, time Lee took a different tack on an issue championed by Hatch. Lee recently introduced a tax plan, even though Hatch is the lead Senate Republican on a broader tax-reform effort.

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• Feb. 11, 2011

  The senior senator

  Lee declined to endorse Hatch in the state GOP primary, saying it would be wrong since he was a challenger who unseated an incumbent just two years earlier. His move bucked Senate tradition and irritated the Hatch camp, which was eager to head off a tea party challenge.

  FreedomWorks, an outside group closely aligned with Lee, was a force in the effort to defeat Hatch. Utah's senior senator kept his job with help from a $10 million fundraising campaign and a major push to get more people to the state caucus. It helped that the LDS Church took the unusual step of encouraging people to attend those meetings.

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• June 30, 2011

  Mitt Romney

  To bulk up his tea party credentials for his presidential bid, Romney made several attempts to woo the conservative flank of Congress, including Lee. While Romney had group meetings with other senators, he made a personal visit to Lee's office in 2011 to seek his endorsement.

  After an hour meeting, Romney emerged without the Utah Republican's backing. Lee refused to grant it until March 2012, after it became clear Romney would win the GOP nomination. Even then, it wasn't a ringing endorsement. "We would be well-advised as Republicans," Lee said, "to start getting behind our eventual nominee."

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• January 2012

  Recess appointments

  After President Barack Obama used his recess-appointment power while the Senate was not technically in recess, Lee vowed to vote against all of Obama's judicial nominations. That included two Utahns — David Nuffer and Robert Shelby.

  The only senator to join Lee's protest was then-Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. Other Republican senators, including Hatch, considered Lee's move a strategic mistake, allowing Democrats to paint Republicans as obstructionists, as Obama did in a radio/Internet address. Lee gave up his protest when Democrats agreed to postpone future judicial confirmations until after the 2012 election. The larger Republican caucus wanted to fight Obama's recess appointments through the courts, not through a congressional protest. That strategy proved effective. A federal court agreed the president's appointments were unconstitutional. The administration has appealed.

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• May 2012

  Short sale

  Not two years into office, Lee had to sell his "dream home" in Alpine in a short sale — with J.P. Morgan Chase taking a serious loss and Lee giving up his down payment — after he couldn't afford the mortgage payments on a senator's $174,000 salary. Critics charged Lee was hypocritical in saying the government should live within its means when he personally hadn't.

  Lee said he knew he'd have to sell his home upon being elected, but the housing slump pushed it underwater before he could jettison the debt.

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• January 2013

  Immigration

  At the invitation of Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Lee joined what was dubbed the "Gang of Eight," a group of senators that would craft a grand immigration compromise. He lasted one meeting. He dropped out when it became apparent any deal would include a path to citizenship.

  Lee then became a leading foe of the effort, which passed the Senate with Hatch's support. Lee prefers an incremental approach to reforming border security and the visa program, but opposes anything that grants legal status to immigrants here illegally.

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• March 2013

  Guns

  Lee and GOP Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky joined in a letter during the congressional debate on gun reform, saying they would filibuster anything that stepped on the Second Amendment right to own guns. That bothered Senate Republicans, who felt they were winning the gun-rights battle before Lee and Cruz made them look like obstructionists.

  "I don't know if there's an issue that has generated more heat internally in the Republican conference," Cruz said, according to Politico. "We've had five or six lunches with a bunch of Republican senators standing up and looking at Rand and Mike and me and yelling at us at the top of their lungs — I mean really upset."

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• Spring 2013

  NSA/privacy

  In one of his bipartisan outreaches, Lee joined with Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Ron Wyden of Oregon to sponsor privacy legislation, an issue that resonates beyond partisan labels. Lee and Leahy pushed a bill requiring a government search warrant to obtain the content of Americans' emails and other electronic communications. With Wyden, Lee co-sponsored legislation to declassify records from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret court that gives the National Security Agency the authority to spy domestically.

  "It's good," Lee said, "that we've got people on both sides of the aisle who are concerned about privacy."

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Photos: The Salt Lake Tribune and The Associated Press