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« on: March 21, 2007, 07:09:06 am »
It's long. Suck it up and read it. Then you can cry softly in the dark over the fact that we don't have more guys who think like him fiscally. Hillary Clinton voting to save earmarks for the Republicans? Gah.
THESE ARE THE THINGS I AM CONCERNED ABOUT.
I would like to pre-emptively ban certain topics from this thread: Abortion except in analogy; Rush Limbaugh.
HI, I’M SENATOR COBURN, AND I DON’T WANT YOUR VOTE
But I do want you to know that the new Democratic leadership is just as corrupt and irresponsible as the Republicans, and together they’re trying to destroy our country
GQ, February 2007
Tom Coburn doesn’t care about the midterm elections. Sure, he’s a senator. Sure, he’s a Republican. And sure, that means his party lost control of both houses of Congress last fall and will be out of power until at least 2009. But what difference does that make to Coburn?
“I don’t think it matters,” he said on a warm day in December, sitting in his office on the first floor of the Russell Senate building as the annual session came to a close. “It will be my first time in the minority party, but I’ve been in the minority the whole time I’ve been here.”
For Coburn, it’s a minority of one. Since his arrival in Washington, D.C., two years ago, no other senator has paved a more solitary path, butting heads with nearly every member of his own party and most of the opposition. In fact, as the Republican majority has run aground on fiscal issues over the past few years—racking up unprecedented deficits and a soaring national debt while the Democrats mostly kept out of the way—Coburn has often seemed like an opposition party unto himself. In April, for example, he tackled nineteen highly questionable expenses that his colleagues had slipped into the budget at the last minute—money that no branch of government had requested, which would directly benefit Senate campaign supporters. In September, he teamed up with Barack Obama to expose federal waste by putting the national budget on a public Web site—a prospect so alarming to some senators that two of them tried to kill it anonymously. And in December, as his Republican colleagues began cleaning out their offices to make room for the new Democratic leadership, Coburn fired a parting shot: Using legislative procedures, he blocked the GOP from finishing its annual business and pushed many of the most important budgetary decisions for incoming Democrats to make in the New Year.
But Coburn makes no apology for challenging his own party. “The American people want change,” he said with a shrug. “I think they’re wise to want change. The Republicans didn’t do what they said they were going to do. They deserve the wrath of the voters.”
Needless to say, none of this has exactly endeared Coburn to his fellow Republicans. When I asked John McCain, one of Coburn’s few supporters in the Senate, how the GOP has received Coburn, he laughed. “I call him Miss Congeniality,” he said. “A lot of people think he’s a straight-arrow, humorless guy.” Other Republicans were even less charitable. As a senior staffer in the Senate Republican leadership put it, “You know he’s nuts, right?”
But for many of Coburn’s colleagues, what is most surprising is not that he has become a thorn in the party’s side; it’s the issue with which he has made his mark. Back in 2004, when Coburn was first running for Senate, fiscal prudence wasn’t supposed to be his issue. In fact, the last thing anybody expected him to become was a voice of restraint in a body of excess. If anything, Coburn was the one known for his excesses, for making pronouncements so outrageous, so far from the mainstream, that at times he seemed like a cartoon of the fanatical right—declaring his own Senate race “the battle of good versus evil,” calling for “the death penalty for abortionists,” and suggesting that the country was under attack by a secret gay conspiracy that had “infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country.” Back in 2004, Tom Coburn was the last man anybody expected to rise above politics and try to lead us back to common sense.
But he might be the only one left who can.
*****
Coburn’s office in Washington, D.C., has the feel of a boxer’s corner, everyone huddled together in anticipation of a fight. There is a spirit of intense camaraderie inside—every time I stepped through the door, I was met with a sea of smiles and a battery of questions about my day, my weekend, my family, and my overall level of contentedness—while at the same time, there’s also an almost toxic hostility to everyone still outside the door. One afternoon a staffer returning from his first trip to the Senate chamber walked into the office, sat down, and confessed to being somewhat starstruck by the experience, adding quickly, “I mean, I hate all those guys, but it was neat being down there.” Another time, I was sitting with Coburn when his secretary stepped in to announce that a certain Republican congressman had requested a meeting. Coburn became instantly stiff.
“Tell him I’ll be happy to talk to him, but it isn’t changing,” the senator said. “It is a no. It is not going anywhere. It is no.”
“You want me to tell him you’ll call him?” the secretary asked.
“I’d be happy to call him,” Coburn snapped, “but it’s not changing.”
This kind of exchange turned out to be an almost daily occurrence for Coburn—somebody calling to butter him up and back him down from some battle, which only irritated Coburn more. The dynamic had begun almost the day he arrived in the Senate, in January 2005. While fellow newcomers like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama observed the customary “freshman silence,” Coburn’s first major move as a senator was to pick a fight with one of his party’s most venerated leaders, Ted Stevens of Alaska, a forty-year veteran of Congress who also happened to be the Senate’s president pro tempore.
The fight was over pork. As the 2006 transportation budget passed through the Senate process, Coburn noticed something odd: $200 million to pay for a bridge in Stevens’s home state—a bridge almost as long as the Golden Gate and taller than the Brooklyn Bridge, connecting an island of fifty people to the coast. In the Senate, these kinds of giveaways are not unusual; members, and especially those in a position of influence, are frequently given millions of dollars for personal spending projects back home, items that bypass the normal review process and are quietly ushered in by their peers (whose own projects get the same deal). But to Coburn, who hadn’t spent forty years in the Senate and didn’t have any of his own special projects and didn’t particularly care about keeping pacts with his new colleagues, $200 million seemed like a lot to spend on a bridge for fifty people. So he tried to take the earmark out. And that’s when Tom Coburn discovered what his life in the Senate would be like.Almost as soon as Coburn proposed to eliminate the bridge, Ted Stevens came tearing down to the floor of the Senate with his face red and his fists clenched, bellowing that he would not be treated with such disrespect, that the rest of the Senate would have to rise up and protect his project or he, Ted Stevens, would pack up his bags and quit the Senate and never come back. By the end of the day, eighty-two senators had voted with Stevens. Voted to spend $200 million on a bridge to nowhere, while Tom Coburn could find only fourteen members to agree that the money might be better spent somewhere else—like, say, rebuilding New Orleans.
That’s what Tom Coburn wants you to know. Not about the bridge; about the bigger thing. He wants you to know how it works in Washington, how the machine keeps itself running, and the favors get traded, and the deals get struck, and the bridges to nowhere are going up every day. He wants you to know that the United States Congress simply cannot stop itself—that both parties are in on the fix, backing each other and looking the other way, and that in the spirit of bipartisan waste, they manage to blow $500 billion more than they collect in taxes every single year. He wants you to see where that money is going: the 10,000 personal projects and earmarks that senators and congressmen are sneaking into the federal budget every year—like the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative in Michigan. And the Sparta Teapot Museum in North Carolina. And the Appalachian Fruit Laboratory in West Virginia. All paid for with your tax dollars.
That’s what Tom Coburn wants you to know. That the members of the United States Congress will spend your money just because they can. That they’ll do it even when they can’t. That every year, they borrow the extra $500 billion from China, raising their own credit limit each time they reach it and then raising it again the next year, for a total of $9 trillion in debt so far. That’s right, nine trillion dollars, a figure so enormous that even if the fifty richest people on earth—including Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Michael Dell, along with the richest men in Saudi Arabia and Russia and Hong Kong—got together and sold everything they owned, right down to the last buttons on their last embroidered shirts, and then they donated all their money to the U.S. national debt, they still couldn’t afford to pay a single year of interest at 10 percent. That’s how much $9 trillion is, and that’s what Tom Coburn wants you to know: that in Washington, there isn’t really a party in charge, or a principle, or a leader. What’s in charge is the money. Because at the end of the day, when it comes down to a choice between borrowing $200 million from China to build a bridge to nowhere and taking a stand against government waste, four out of five politicians will blow it on the bridge.
So now there’s all this hullabaloo about the Democrats taking over—Tom Coburn is supposed to care? He’s supposed to get excited now that the peanut butter is on top and the jelly is on the bottom instead of the other way around? This is a revolution? It’s a revolution that Ted Stevens has been pushed aside as chairman of the defense-appropriations subcommittee and that in his place the Democrats have installed…Daniel Inouye of Hawaii? A man who inserted $900 million of his own personal projects into the budget last year—and who happens to be one of Ted Stevens’s best friends in the Senate? It’s a revolution that the Democrats have cleaned out the subcommittee behind the Bridge to Nowhere and replaced the chairman with…Patty Murray of Washington? A woman who personally led a campaign for the bridge and who threatened revenge against any Democrat who opposed it? It’s a revolution that Thad Cochran has been deposed as the most powerful budgetary overlord in the Senate and is being replaced with…Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia? A man who has single-handedly converted his state into a federally funded monument to himself, with no less than thirty projects named in his own honor, including the Robert C. Byrd Expressway and the Robert C. Byrd National Technology Transfer and the two Robert C. Byrd federal buildings and the Robert C. Byrd Center for Hospitality and Tourism—not to mention the actual statue of Robert C. Byrd that stands in the rotunda of the state capitol?
Robert C. Byrd is going to clean up the government? This is a revolution?Coburn smiled at the suggestion. “We’ll see how the Democrats vote on the first big earmark boondoggle that comes up,” he said. “I’m gonna try to reserve judgment.”
*****
When the Senate is in session, Coburn lives in a dorm-style apartment with eight other members of Congress, including Democratic representatives Mike Doyle and Bart Stupak. Every Tuesday evening, they gather to hold prayer night, talking about the temptations and pressures of public life, but otherwise they mostly work late and socialize rarely, bumping into one another occasionally in the TV room to watch a game. This is as much of Washington’s social orbit as the 58-year-old Coburn cares to indulge, and every Thursday, as soon as he can break away from his work on Capitol Hill, he jumps in a cab to the airport, flies to Tulsa, and drives an hour south to the small town of Muskogee, where he joins his wife, Carolyn, for a few hours of sleep before waking at 5 a.m. to go to work at his medical practice.
A family-practice doctor for twenty-three years, Coburn continues to see about fifteen patients a week, and on any given Saturday, while his Senate colleagues are teeing off or jockeying for position on the weekend talk shows, Coburn can be found knee-deep in paperwork at his office or patrolling the maternity ward at his local hospital, delivering babies. For his labor, he is paid exactly nothing. Senate rules allow members to maintain almost any business they choose back home—a hardware store, an investment firm, in a few cases even recording contracts—but prohibit doctors and lawyers from continuing to practice. This has posed the single greatest challenge of Coburn’s political life, and not only for economic reasons. As a firm believer in the ideal of the citizen legislator—a member who goes to Washington for a fixed number of years and keeps his full-time job at home—Coburn has tried and failed to convince the ethics committee (some of whom, perhaps coincidentally, have clashed with him over fiscal issues) that his medical practice should be allowed. Having lost that battle, Coburn keeps his office open anyway and simply doesn’t charge his patients. By his own estimate, he loses about $40,000 a year practicing medicine for free.
To say that Coburn could live without the pressure of juggling two high-stakes jobs in two distant cities would be an understatement. He hates it, and it doesn’t take long to get the sense from him that if voters had not elected him to the Senate in 2004, he would have been a happier man. But to Coburn, that’s exactly what makes the job worth doing. “In any election,” he is fond of saying, “you should vote for the person who will give up the most if they win.”
In the era of Jack Abramoff and the K Street Project, when members of Congress are routinely flown around the globe on luxury vacations at the expense of corporate lobbyists, mugging for the cameras at every stop and then rushing to see themselves on the airplane TVs, it can be difficult to keep a straight face when the talk turns to “sacrifice” and “public service.” Yet to spend time with Coburn as he comes alive in Oklahoma, tending to his patients and his forty-acre orchard, and then to travel back to Washington with him, to see the look of defeat as he leaves his family, his medical practice, and the old Yanmar tractor that he maintains himself, it is impossible to mistake Coburn for an eager politician.
One Monday morning last fall, as he made the drive to the Tulsa airport with his suit jacket crumpled on the backseat and his briefcase overstuffed with research papers and faxes, he reflected on the privilege of being a United States senator. “Every Monday I wish I didn’t have to go back,” he said. “But you know, I have a job to do, and I’m going to do it. My dad was born in a mud hut on the plains of eastern Colorado, and he always encouraged us to work. When I was a little boy, he bought the rights to an invention that held a piece of glass onto a metal block so you could cut and grind the piece of glass into a lens for eyeglasses. When I was 5 or 6, he would have us out in the garage, putting the little centers with three points on the back of the block, pounding them in, while he would be making the blocks on the lathe. We’d build about twenty of these machines, and then Dad would go on the road and not come home until they were sold.”
Coburn reached for a bottle of Dasani water and took a sip.
“My first paying job was sorting bolts and nuts for my dad,” he continued. “He’d buy old machines, and we’d salvage the nuts and bolts off them. We’d have to sort them by size. If we could sort through a whole five-gallon bucket, we got a quarter. For a whole five-gallon bucket. After that, I learned how to turn a lathe in a mill. By the time I was 14 or 15, I could do a lot of stuff on a lathe. Then in high school, I sold clothes. Sold shoes. I’ve always worked. I saved my money and bought an old ’28 Chevy…”
Coburn trailed off, looking out the window at the plains where he’d grown up. The midday glare made the landscape white.
“I never gave any thought to politics until I was grown. None. I had my practice, I had my family, my career, and I read the paper, but my only political thoughts were that I had gotten disgusted with the Democrat who was my representative. He wanted to nationalize health care. His positions had nothing in common with our district. And I just said to Carolyn, ‘I’m going to get into this race.’ She said, ‘You’re nuts.’ I said, ‘Well, somebody’s got to try.’ And that’s how I ended up as a Republican. I’m not sure I’m as much of a Republican as I am independent-minded, but if I’ve got to pick between two parties, I’m a Republican.”
As Coburn launched his campaign for the House in 1994, nearly everyone around him watched in silence. They knew him well enough to realize that he couldn’t be talked out of something once he’d made up his mind, but to most of them—even his kids—it seemed like a fool’s errand. The incumbent, Mike Synar, was a sixteen-year veteran of the House of Representatives, well-placed in the Democratic majority, and all but certain to win reelection by a landslide. No Republican from the district had been elected since 1921, and only one had been elected to a second term.
Then there was Coburn: He had no experience at any level of government, no background in political theory or government affairs or anything remotely related to government, and as some of his closer friends pointed out, he was possessed of what you might generously call a stubborn streak, which is not exactly the material from which political success is usually hewn. To run, he would have to put his medical practice, his life, and to some extent, his family on hold for…what? Certain defeat?
But as he hit the campaign trail, something surprising began to happen—not only to Coburn but also to the district he wanted to represent.
In retrospect, the 1994 Republican Revolution can sometimes seem like a foregone conclusion, but at the time it was far from ordained: a grassroots movement that didn’t so much reach into small towns like Coburn’s as it emerged from them. Running as a Regular Guy with No Experience, Coburn tapped into a pervasive frustration with Congress, which had been plagued by a series of Democratic scandals. Painting Synar as a career politician with no roots in Oklahoma, promising to keep his own medical practice open after his election and return home every weekend for work, and making no secret of his deeply held conservative social values, Coburn changed the terms of the debate. By the time voters went to the polls in 1994, Coburn had been so successful in his campaign against Mike Synar that Synar wasn’t even on the ballot. Democrats had chosen a more conservative candidate in the Democratic primary, whom Coburn still defeated.
