THE SENATORIAL SPECTATOR:Pork Buster in Chief
Moore, Stephen
Pork Buster in Chief T H E S E N A T O R I A L S P E C T A T O R In Tom Coburn, the Republicans, to their dismay, have a rising star in the Senate. by Stephen Moore...
...5 2 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 S T E P H E N M O O R E By the same token, Coburn’s gloomy outlook makes him sound at times a lot more like Lou Dobbs than Ronald Reagan...
...He warns that if we don’t change our course on federal debt and spending that the consequences will be “hyper-inflation and higher interest rates.…We’re headed for a 1930s-style economic revelation if we don’t get this government and deficit under control and the $70 trillion of unfunded liabilities...
...I don’t care if I get re-elected...
...The story speaks volumes about the sad state of affairs inside the Republican Party and the Gulf of Mexico-sized disconnect between the party powerbrokers in Washington and a thoroughly disgusted conservative base...
...The party regulars still blame the November defeat on the fiscal whistleblowers like Coburn, not the fake Republicans who grew a $1.9 trillion budget by an additional trillion dollars in five years...
...Overspending is a bipartisan disease,” he notes...
...Coburn refused to exult in the budget victory...
...Half the federal agencies don’t even report on improper payments...
...He calls earmarks “the gateway drug to overspending...
...True...
...As he explains, “If I have a $3 million project for Oklahoma, I have to vote for the multibillion dollar [spending] bill to get the pork...
...FEMA claims none...
...We issued $2 trillion of debt in the 1980s but interest rates shrank, inflation was tamed, and the value of U.S...
...Yet, Coburn, with virtually the smallest budget of any senator, is arguably the most effective legislator on Capitol Hill...
...So the other thing that is bipartisan on Capitol Hill is animus toward Coburn’s antics...
...I don’t want to be president...
...The same is true in the 2000s...
...That’s rare to find these days...
...He strolled up to me and said: ‘Well, Tom, I hope you’re satisfied for helping us lose the election.’” Stevens was evidently still infuriated by Coburn’s nationally publicized crusade against runaway pork-barrel spending over the past two years...
...When I asked him recently about his reputation as “a renegade,” he stormed from his seat and boomed: “Congress is a renegade to the American ideal of limited government...
...Why...
...Ninety-eight percent of politicians who say that kind of thing are lying...
...I ask him if he would consider running...
...Wwith him on the perils of illegal immigration s exactly why he might be a great one...
...A Senate Democrat fumes that “Coburn has made himself a royal pain in the ass around here, and we’re all getting sick of his holier than thou attitude...
...In his self-appointed role as pork buster in chief, Coburn has about as sunny a disposition as Eeyore the Donkey—which is probably what people like about Coburn...
...He much prefers to be called Dr...
...He is so exercised about deficit spending that he even says: “I could vote for a tax increase if it was necessary...
...social orbit or a PAC fundraiser was J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 5 1 T H E S E N A T O R I A L S P E C T A T O R featured flatteringly last February in GQ as “the straight arrow guy who… doesn’t want your vote...
...Further evidence that the politics of pork may be turning is that leading presidential contenders, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, are often first in line to cosponsor Coburn’s anti-earmark missiles...
...Stephen Mooreis a member of the Wall Street Jour- and government debt—but rather that in an era when Republican positions seem to twist in the political ploy to build another courthouse or moving sidewalk in West Virginia...
...Steve, nal editorial board...
...Coburn is also flinging flaming arrows now at the Democratic leadership for stuffing larger slabs of pork in this year’s spending bills than occurred even under the Republican Congress...
...David Keene says that Coburn “is one of the few conservatives who could electrify each faction of the Reagan coalition...
...But others have taken notice of Coburn’s fiscal tactics...
...Twenty-five percent of government programs don’t even have a goal,” he complains...
...He’s the one you’d pick first to derail Hillary Clinton on governmentrun health care or combat Robert Byrd’s latest J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 5 3...
...by Stephen Moore OMCOBURNRECALLSACONFRONTATIONon Capitol Hill shortly after last November’s GOP bloodbath...
...You end up voting for bills you would never have voted for...
...When he tried to cease the funding for Stevens’s infamous bridge, 80 of his colleagues voted against him in the then-Republican controlled Senate...
...But Coburn feels about pork spending the way liberal environmentalists do about greenhouse gases...
...He ran into his fellow Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the then powerful chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and chief Senate sponsor of the Alaska Bridge to Nowhere...
...I have one advantage in these fights,” he says...
...Then he calms down and adds: “Someone has to call Congress on the carpet and shame this institution into doing the right thing for the future generations...
...Jeff Flake, who is Coburn’s anti-spending pit bull in the House, says that he and the small band of small government conservatives in the House often say: “Thank God for Tom, he makes our life at least tolerable over here in the House, where earmarking is an even bigger problem...
...Coburn forces the world’s most deliberative body to deliberate on issues it would much prefer not to...
...And so for the past two and a half years that he’s been in the Senate, Coburn has led the lonely fight against this spending avalanche...
...wind, Coburn’s principles are steel girders...
...assets almost tripled...
...He is beloved by social conservatives and economic libertarians...
...He is so miserly when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars that last year he returned $200,000 of unspent money from his personal Senate office expense account to the government...
...To that, Coburn, never the shrinking violet, replied: “No, Ted, you lost us the election...
...So what about a presidential run for Coburn...
...Tom may not be well liked among his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill, but he is beloved by our members and in fact the entire Reagan coalition voter base,” says Mallory Factor, president of the Free Enterprise Fund...
...Coburn almost certainly isn’t—as evidenced by the fact that once the last role vote is taken in the Senate afternoon, Coburn is like Secretariat racing to the airport to get home so he can practice medicine (this year he will deliver 20 babies—all for free) back in his hometown, Muskogee...
...Are you kidding, we still wasted billions of tax dollars in that budget,” he fumes...
...At the start of this crusade he was losing and losing badly...
...When he ran for the Senate in 2004 after three terms in the House, his opponents in the Republican primary and the general election spent $24 million warning Oklahomans that Coburn wouldn’t lure tax dollars back to the state for courthouses, museums, and the like...
...Coburn is also flinging flaming arrows now at the Democratic leadership for stuffing larger slabs of pork in this year’s spending bills than occurred even under the Republican Congress...
...Coburn than Senator Coburn...
...When I asked him what he thought about being called “Coburn the Barbarian” by a Wall Street Journal editorial, he quipped, “The difference is that I don’t have a food tester...
...With these unorthodox views, Coburn has never lost an election and that undefeated record puts the lie to the claim that bringing home the bacon is the formula for winning elections...
...Then he quickly adds: “But until the spending is under control, and the waste is gone, I won’t vote for a tax hike...
...He’s one of the leading foes of abortion in the Senate and has authored several antiabortion amendments to bills in ways that have tied liberals into knots...
...That’s highly doubtful...
...We waste $200 billion a year here, at least...
...It’s amazing how much you can accomplish in the Senate, if you don’t mind being a pain in the rear end with your Senate brethren,” says one of Coburn’s GOP Senate colleagues...
...If the great challenge for the Republicans is to stitch the Reagan coalition back together again, Coburn has the bona fides to make that happen...
...That’ s always right—I m not HAT’ that he’ S FRESH AND ATTRACTIVE about Coburn is yself disagree you’re not listening...
...But the culture of spending on Capitol Hill may be shifting...
...Coburn made no bones about the fact that he wouldn’t—and his voter appeal only grew...
...The latest hot rumor is that big money conservatives are willing to put as much as $10 million to jumpstart a Coburn for President campaign...
...Pork Buster in Chief T H E S E N A T O R I A L S P E C T A T O R In Tom Coburn, the Republicans, to their dismay, have a rising star in the Senate...
...Conservative activists who aren’t particularly enthralled with any of the GOP’s candidates are wondering whether Coburn might be the conservative dark-horse candidate they’ve been searching for...
...He’s like a young Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican who managed to single-handedly tie the Senate into knots with irksome amendments on issues, like excessive welfare spending, UN dues, and the Panama Canal Treaty,” says David Keene of the American Conservative Union...
...And that’s how appropriators buy votes and bloat the budget...
...His latest fiscal crusade is called “Good Government A to Z,” a plan to rewrite the entire budget act...
...We actually shamed them into ending the pork,” Coburn tells me...
...OBURN ALSO TALKS LIKE—well, no other politician dares to...
...Coburn and his constant but lower-profile senatorial sidekick, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, teamed up to save the nation about $15 to $20 billion...
...They can’t pass a basic audit...
...In January, Coburn strong-armed the new Democratic majority into passing the leanest federal budget in five years, and, more remarkably, one that withholds funding for thousands of Teapot museums and Wild Turkey Federations...
...Ironically, the man in Congress with the least attraction to the Senate cameras and the one rarely seen in the Washington, D.C...
...So don’t expect Coburn to be signing on to a Nancy Pelosi tax plan anytime soon...
...Every time he throws a tirade against government waste, or picks a fight with a Ted Stevens or Robert C. Byrd, or sponsors an amendment to defund honey bee research, his legend expands and he galvanizes more of the voting forces of the Republican field troops behind him...
...In the history of modern American politics, you could probably count on one hand the number of successful politicians who have pandered to voters less than Tom Coburn has...
Vol. 40 • July 2007 • No. 6
