Mike Lee (R-UT) is a freshman Senator who just took office a month ago. He’s a Republican, and one of the few Senators who have signed on to the Tea Party Caucus.

Lee is also a constitutional scholar and a serious thinker about the role and scope of government.

Here is Lee grilling former Clinton solicitor-general Walter Dellinger on the constitutionality of Obamacare. The discussion is a serious one, and an intellectual one of some fairly high quality.

Lee replaced Robert Bennett, so it’s perhaps not a perfect comparison. But just on the question of general tone and quality, we offer an example of the 111th Congress in discussing Obamacare to contrast with Lee.

Maybe this is optimism, but we’re of the opinion that perhaps Washington has bottomed out in terms of the quality of people we’ve sent there, and things are getting better.

Certainly we couldn’t have had a worse set of people there than we had last year.