Speeches

Mr. President, last week the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee voted to advance President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Education, Dr. John King. Tonight the nomination is set to come before the Senate not for a robust debate, but for a hasty vote. And by all accounts, confirmation is expected. I rise today to oppose the nomination of Dr. King, and to urge my colleagues to join me in voting against his confirmation as Secretary of Education.

Mr.President, the opening words of the Preamble to the United States Constitution are familiar to us all – “We the People…” But what exactly do they mean? It was “the People” who established the United States Senate in Article I, Section 1, of the Constitution.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was an extraordinary man whose contributions to this country and its people – whom he faithfully served from the bench – are so prodigious that it will take generations for us to fully comprehend our debt to him.

For me and many of my fellow Utahns one of these clues came nearly 12 years ago when a young man from Utah suddenly went missing in southern China. In August 2004, David Louis Sneddon disappeared while hiking in the Yunnan Province of China.

This is the Article I Project in a nutshell: it’s a new network of House and Senate conservatives working together on a new agenda of government reform and congressional rehabilitation. The premise of the Article I Project is simple: the federal government is broken, and congressional weakness is to blame. The authors of the Constitution made Congress the most powerful of the federal government’s three co-equal branches. Congress was designed both as the most powerful and the most accountable to the people.

“But there’s one story that nearly every Utahn knows: President Bill Clinton’s infamous use of the Antiquities Act in 1996 to designate as a national monument more than 1.5 million acres of land in southern Utah – what would become known as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.”

The bill moving through Congress today and tomorrow – made up of the omnibus spending bill and tax extenders package – and the process that produced it are an affront to the Constitution – to they very idea of constitutionalism – and an insult to the American people.

Later today the Senate will vote on the “Every Student Succeeds Act” – a bill that reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which is the legislation governing federal K-12 education policy.

“I rise in opposition to the highway spending bill before us today – and not just the failed and corrupt substance of the legislation.”

Nearly six years ago this body was on the verge of passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Today, the Senate is poised to repeal that insultingly misnamed law.