Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) rebuked former House speaker John Boehner’s pessimistic predictions for major GOP agenda items, during an interview Tuesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

Speaking Thursday at a conference in Houston, Boehner suggested GOP tax reform efforts are “just a bunch of happy talk” and declared the proposed border adjustment tax “deader than a doornail.” Earlier in the year Boehner said the repeal and replace of Obamacare was “not going to happen.”

“And I don’t appreciate [Boehner] saying that we’re not going to do either one of them because that, to me, suggests — makes me wonder whether he wants that to be the case.”

“I don’t know what [Boehner’s] basing that on,” Lee said. “I don’t know what gives him clairvoyant powers. I couldn’t disagree more if what he’s saying is that we’re not going to do either one of these things.”

Lee noted the only way for Boehner’s predictions to come true would be if Republican lawmakers “all throw our hands up in the air and say it can’t be done.”

“And I don’t appreciate [Boehner] saying that we’re not going to do either one of them because that, to me, suggests — makes me wonder whether he wants that to be the case,” Lee said. “I hope that isn’t true. But we can’t let people start to think that we don’t want to do that. That’s the first step toward not doing it at all. We have to do both of those things. If we don’t, we’re in for a world of hurt.”

When Ingraham asked Lee why Republican members of Congress have had such difficulty moving on the president’s legislative agenda, Lee said it was because the U.S. government “was set up to be inefficient.”

“Sometimes those inefficiencies can be really frustrating,” Lee said. “They can be especially frustrating when there are people who have campaigned for the last seven years by saying, ‘Let’s repeal Obamacare. Elect us. Let us get the majority first in the House, then in the Senate. Then let us take control of the White House.'”

“And all of a sudden we have an opportunity to repeal Obamacare. We’ve got to actually do it,” Lee added. “That’s been one of my biggest frustrations … that there’re some Republicans who haven’t campaigned on this for seven years.”

Urging his colleagues to “do what we actually said we would do,” the Utah senator praised President Donald Trump for being “very consistent in saying that Obamacare is bad for the American people” and pushing for repeal and replace.

“They deserve better. We’ve got to get rid of it. We have to actually do that now,” Lee said, adding that the delay is because “there are some people who can’t quite get over the fact that the federal government was never intended to do all of this. It was never set up in the first place to handle every aspect of human existence. It especially wasn’t set up to manage one-sixth of our nation’s economy, which is our health care system.”

Who do you think would win the Presidency?

By completing the poll, you agree to receive emails from LifeZette, occasional offers from our partners and that you've read and agree to our privacy policy and legal statement.

Lee insisted Republicans can and will pass tax reform with a simple 51-vote majority.

“We can do that through the budget reconciliation process. Conventional wisdom has been that we will do that in sequence. We’ll use the first round of reconciliation this year to pass Obamacare repeal, the second round for tax reform,” Lee said. “But we do intend to get to both of them, and I think we will.”

[lz_related_box id=”802820″]

Lee also criticized his colleague, frequent Trump critic Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), for comments made during the weekend insisting that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s interference in the U.S. presidential election is the “premier and most important threat, more so than ISIS.”

“North Korea scares me to death. ISIS scares me to death for a different set of reasons,” Lee countered. “Look, Russia is always a country that we’re going to keep an eye out for. I don’t think I would ever go as far as to say it’s the single biggest threat we face.”

“So I don’t know whether John McCain meant to say that to the exclusion of these other threats we face, but if that’s what he meant, I couldn’t disagree more,” Lee added.

The Utah Republican pointed to his new book, “Written Out of History: The Forgotten Founders Who Fought Big Government,” in which he promoted the “Founding Era sentiment that we shouldn’t trust big government all that much.” In addition, he said the book reminds readers of “what made our country great in the first place” — an echo of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan.

Lee also cautioned Americans against clamoring for the removal of statues depicting Confederate leaders and Founding Fathers who owned slaves.

“So look, if people at the city level want to remove a statue, I suppose that’s their business. But if you’re going to do that, don’t forget the stories,” Lee said. “You’ve got to take avid steps to remember people who forged history, who have formed it, otherwise we’ll be doomed to repeat the same mistakes that others have experienced.”