Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) expressed doubt about the work of the congressional “supercommittee” established by the Budget Control Act at a breakfast hosted by The American Spectator and Americans for Tax Reform this morning.  

“I have a bleak outlook for what the supercommittee has been assigned to do,” Lee told reporters, noting that the 12 members of the committee wouldn’t be able to bind future Congresses. “It doesn’t work to pick three Republicans and three Democrats from the House, and three and three from the Senate, and put them in a room and say, ‘now: agree.’ I don’t understand why that’s likely to bear fruit and bring about success.”

Lee does, however, have high hopes for the Tea Party. He discounted polls that have shown rising disapproval of the Tea Party, explaining that the Tea Party may be hard to define, but its policies keep gaining currency among the public. “You can tarnish [the name of the Tea Party] all you want, it’s not going to change the fact that the people understand that the government is too big and too expensive,” Lee said, citing CNN polls that show high levels of support for balanced budgets and spending cuts.

The freshman senator then went on to predict success for the Tea Party in the 2012 elections, saying that the movement’s success was “going to make what happened in 2010 look like a Sunday picnic.”