The Esteemed Senator From Oklahoma

Oklahoma's Tom Coburn is fast becoming one of my favorite U.S. Senators ever. Since I consider most of the people in that august body to be pompous blowhards, this is a true compliment. Check out George Will's column about Coburn...

Coburn is the most dangerous creature that can come to the Senate, someone simply uninterested in being popular. When House Speaker Dennis Hastert defends earmarks -- spending dictated by individual legislators for specific projects -- by saying that a member of Congress knows best where a stoplight ought to be placed, Coburn, in an act of lese-majeste, responds: Members of Congress are the least qualified to make such judgments.

...Coburn came to the nation's attention last October when he proposed taking the $223 million earmarked for Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere" and using it to repair a New Orleans bridge destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Because this threat to Alaska also threatened Congress's code of comity -- mutual respect for everyone's parochial interests -- his proposal lost by 67 votes. But rather than do the decent thing -- apologize, tug his forelock and slink away chastened -- he refused to stop talking about it, made it an embarrassment to the Senate and catalyzed revulsion against spending that is both promiscuous and parochial.

..."Quite time-consuming" was Coburn and John McCain's laconic description, in a letter to colleagues, of their threat to bring the Senate to a virtual standstill with challenges to earmarks. In 1999, while in the House, Coburn offered 115 anti-pork amendments to an agriculture bill -- in effect a filibuster in a chamber that does not allow filibusters. Collaborating with Coburn makes McCain, the Senate's dropout from anger management school, look saccharine.

When Coburn disparaged an earmark for Seattle -- $500,000 for a sculpture garden -- Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) was scandalized: "We are not going to watch the senator pick out one project and make it into a whipping boy." She invoked the code of comity: "I hope we do not go down the road deciding we know better than home state senators about the merits of the projects they bring to us." And she warned of Armageddon: "I tell my colleagues, if we start cutting funding for individual projects, your project may be next." But Coburn, who does not do earmarks, thinks Armageddon sounds like fun.

He was among the 73 Republican freshmen elected to the House in 1994. A fervent believer in term limits, he said he would leave after three terms, and did. He says he will serve at most one more Senate term. Of the 535 House and Senate seats, he says, "There's 200,000 -- 300,000 -- people can do these jobs." How many? "Millions," he revises.

"I'm not liked very well," he says serenely, "but I'm like the gopher that's going to keep on digging until someone spears me or traps me. I'm going to keep on digging the tunnel under spending." Because, he says, large deficits reverse the American tradition of making sacrifices for the benefit of rising generations: "I'm an American long before I'm a Republican, and I'm a granddad before I'm either one of them."

Anyone who's this committed to cutting spending and the size of government will become a serious threat to the Washington establishment, which is another reason to like the Senator. Even better, you have to appreciate a guy who thinks that being a Congressman or Senator isn't a particularly difficult job. Coburn's short editorial in the Wall Street Journal this week also demonstrated that he's willing to deliver the message against higher spending all by his lonesome, and do it with an economy of language rare for a politican...

I am convinced that forcing hundreds or, if necessary, thousands of votes to strike individual earmarks is the only way to produce meaningful results for American taxpayers. Bringing the Senate to a standstill for as long as it takes would be a small price to pay for shutting down what Jack Abramoff described as Congress's "earmark favor factory." The battle against pork is crucial. Pork is the root cause of the unholy relationship between some members of Congress, lobbyists and donors. Inside Congress, the pork process is effectively a black market economy: Thousands of instances exist where appropriations are leveraged for fundraising dollars or political capital. It is delusional to claim Congress can redeem its relationship with K Street without eliminating earmarks. The problem is not lobbyists. The problem is us.

Those who argue that fighting pork distracts members from the more costly challenge of entitlement reform don't understand human nature. Earmarks are a gateway drug on the road to the spending addiction. One day an otherwise frugal member votes for pork, the next day he or she votes for a bloated spending bill or entitlement expansion: A "no" vote might cut off their access to earmarks.

Keep up the good work, Senator.