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.

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.

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.

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.