Posted on 12/19/2009 4:34:45 AM PST by BCrago66
Right now, the Senate is voting on a procedural motion to table debate on the Defense bill - which Republicans are hoping to filibuster, in an effort to stall debate on the upcoming Health bill. Because Lieberman didn't show up today, the Republicans just need to stick together on this to prevail - without defections from Collins or Snowe.
(Excerpt) Read more at c-span.org ...
Pork Buster in Chief
By Stephen Moore
American Spectator
August 23, 2007
TOM COBURN RECALLS a confrontation on Capitol Hill shortly after last November’s GOP bloodbath. 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. “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. To that, Coburn, never the shrinking violet, replied: “No, Ted, you lost us the election.”
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. But Coburn feels about pork spending the way liberal environmentalists do about greenhouse gases. 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. At the start of this crusade he was losing and losing badly. 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 the culture of spending on Capitol Hill may be shifting. 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. 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. “We actually shamed them into ending the pork,” Coburn tells me. 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 co-sponsor Coburn’s anti-earmark missiles.
Coburn refused to exult in the budget victory. “Are you kidding, we still wasted billions of tax dollars in that budget,” he fumes. But others have taken notice of Coburn’s fiscal tactics. “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. Ironically, the man in Congress with the least attraction to the Senate cameras and the one rarely seen in the Washington, D.C. social orbit or a PAC fundraiser was featured flatteringly last February in GQ as “the straight arrow guy who... doesn’t want your vote.”
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. 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. “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. Coburn forces the world’s most deliberative body to deliberate on issues it would much prefer not to. “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.
COBURN ALSO TALKS LIKE — well, no other politician dares to. 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. We waste $200 billion a year here, at least.” 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.” He calls earmarks “the gateway drug to overspending.” As he explains, “If I have a $3 million project for Oklahoma, I have to vote for the multi-billion dollar [spending] bill to get the pork. You end up voting for bills you would never have voted for. And that’s how appropriators buy votes and bloat the budget.”
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. 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 made no bones about the fact that he wouldn’t — and his voter appeal only grew. 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.
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.” That’s highly doubtful. We issued $2 trillion of debt in the 1980s but interest rates shrank, inflation was tamed, and the value of U.S. assets almost tripled. The same is true in the 2000s. He is so exercised about deficit spending that he even says: “I could vote for a tax increase if it was necessary.” Then he quickly adds: “But until the spending is under control, and the waste is gone, I won’t vote for a tax hike.” So don’t expect Coburn to be signing on to a Nancy Pelosi tax plan anytime soon.
His latest fiscal crusade is called “Good Government A to Z, “a plan to rewrite the entire budget act. Why? “Half the federal agencies don’t even report on improper payments. FEMA claims none. They can’t pass a basic audit. Twenty-five percent of government programs don’t even have a goal,” he complains. 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. Yet, Coburn, with virtually the smallest budget of any senator, is arguably the most effective legislator on Capitol Hill. 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 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. “Overspending is a bipartisan disease,” he notes. 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.” So the other thing that is bipartisan on Capitol Hill is animus toward Coburn’s antics.
WHAT’S FRESH AND ATTRACTIVE about Coburn is not that he’s always right — I myself disagree with him on the perils of illegal immigration and government debt-but rather that in an era when Republican positions seem to twist in the political wind, Coburn’s principles are steel girders. He’s the one you’d pick first to derail Hillary Clinton on government-run health care or combat Robert Byrd’s latest ploy to build another courthouse or moving sidewalk in West Virginia. 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.”
“I have one advantage in these fights,” he says. “I don’t care if I get re-elected.” Ninety-eight percent of politicians who say that kind of thing are lying. 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. He much prefers to be called Dr. Coburn than Senator Coburn.
David Keene says that Coburn “is one of the few conservatives who could electrify each faction of the Reagan coalition. He is beloved by social conservatives and economic libertarians. That’s rare to find these days.” True. He’s one of the leading foes of abortion in the Senate and has authored several anti-abortion amendments to bills in ways that have tied liberals into knots. 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.
So what about a presidential run for Coburn? 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. 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.
I ask him if he would consider running. “Steve, you’re not listening. I don’t want to be president.” That’s exactly why he might be a great one.
Stephen Moore is a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. This article appeared in the July/August 2007 issue of The American Spectator.
I hate the MSM ... and I hate their game. But, for now it is what it is. Ya’ gotta beat them at their own game, then reset the goal posts.
The Chinese (and others) are not going to be able or willing to keep subsidizing all the waste Sen. Coburn is talking about.
China: The World Does Not Have Money to Buy More US Treasuries (Drudge Headline)
The lefties are senseless. They would throw the country away over CO2 if that's what it's gonna take.
TOM COBURN FOR PRESIDENT. He's manning up today and he's also a doctor. Dr. President, yeah, I like it!
Posted on Friday, February 06, 2009 11:58:05 PM by jenk
I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee, A place where even squares can have a ball We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse, And white lightnin’s still the biggest thrill of all
We don’t make a party out of lovin’; We like holdin’ hands and pitchin’ woo; We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy, Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.
And I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee, A place where even squares can have a ball. We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse, And white lightnin’s still the biggest thrill of all.
Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear; Beads and Roman sandals won’t be seen. Football’s still the roughest thing on campus, And the kids here still respect the college dean.
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse, In Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA.
Thank you Merle Haggard. You’re the best. And Dear God In Heaven, Allow Tom Coburn a Soft Place To Lay.
Guess it's safe to assume that we haven't heard anything like Patrick Henry's speech from those with "opinions of a character very opposite" to the Dem leadership in this particular debate, huh?
Do you know something we don't?
I may be wrong but I think that the Finance Committee has the OWN health care bill. It’s horrid too. Dirty Harry wants to include the garbage in their plan w/his? That’s my guess.
Dr. President.
Sen. Brownback is on CSP1 now talking about health care reform.
He’s only in his first term, right?
Ah, good. I’m happy to learn he’ll be in the senate for another 6 years! He’s definitely one of my favorite senators. He’s magnificent.
I am eager to hear what Sarah Palin has to say about all this inexcusable madness.
The media is pathetic. There obviously isn’t an ounce of accountability left in DC anymore. A GOP majority would have NEVER EVER gotten away with this kind of midnight-voting-Christmas-Eve sneaking thing. EVER.
In a normal functioning democratic society with a press as “free” as ours, these people should not even be able to ENTERTAIN the IDEAS of some of the things they’ve gotten away with in order to give birth to this monster.
Many of the bribes and details of the wheeling and dealing have been made to known to the public—yet there’s no shame attached to it! No stigma. Mary Landrieu is walkin around as proud as ever after being given 300 MILLION of our dollars. I would not be able to show my face to the public after being at the receiving end of a deal like that—but she’s doing interviews and smiling about it!
All this and more taking place as echoes of Obama’s promises of “bipartisanship” and “open dialogue” and “ushering in a new era” and “transparency” replay in my head.
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK), a practicing physician who has delivered more than 4,000 babies, today released the following statement on the abortion compromise language in Majority Leader Reid’s manager’s amendment to the health care bill.
“This reprehensible and deceptive agreement is a historic and radical shift in policy that will require taxpayers to pay for abortion. The American people will be outraged when they realize this so-called compromise is a farce. I can’t imagine there is a single pro-life taxpayer in Nebraska, or any other state, who would agree to pay to end the lives of the unborn for a never-ending Medicaid earmark or tax breaks for insurance companies. Unfortunately, Senators Reid and Nelson disagree,” Dr. Coburn said.
“The fact that the most ardent pro-choice Senators support this agreement while pro-life groups, such as the National Right to Life Committee, oppose it should send a chilling signal to taxpayers in Nebraska and across America. Majority Leader Reid wants to rush this phony agreement through the Senate precisely because he does not want the American people to have time to understand its implications. Yet, in spite of these efforts to mislead the public, the American people will grasp and understand this decision and they will hold accountable anyone who defends sacrificing the unborn on the altar of political expediency,” Dr. Coburn said.
“Senators Reid, Nelson and others are using Enron-style accounting gimmicks to justify this radical shift in policy. Their claim that federal dollars will be separated from private dollars paid by premiums is a farce and they know it. In reality, the dollars will be fungible and mixed just as Social Security ‘trust fund’ dollars are used to finance other areas of government,” Dr. Coburn said. “The fact is this agreement, which was allegedly reached after weeks of gut-wrenching negotiations, is an elaborate charade. This new language is identical to, or worse than, the underlying abortion language in the Reid bill. Senators Reid, Nelson and others will have great difficulty convincing taxpayers that they were working to accomplish something other than carving out special favors for particular states.”
Dr. Coburn released the following fact sheet on the agreement:
Sen. Reid’s Manager’s Amendment Solidifies Requirements that Federal Funds Pay for Abortions
• The Manager’s Amendment introduced by Sen. Reid does not in any way resolve the concerns previously articulated by Sen. Nelson, Rep. Stupak, and pro-life Americans have raised regarding the federal funding of abortions. In fact, the “compromise” language included in the manager’s amendment would be even worse than the so-called “compromise” put forward by Sen. Casey earlier this week. This abortion language ensures that—for the first time—federal funds will be used to pay for elective abortions.
• The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, National Right to Life Committee, Americans United for Life, Family Research Council, and a myriad of other pro-life groups are opposed to this language, and with its inclusion they will officially oppose the passage of this health care legislation.
• The manager’s amendment is nothing more than elaborate structure to circumvent and violate the clear intent of the Hyde, Stupak, Weldon and Nelson amendments: that no federal funds will support health plans that include elective abortions.
There is no prohibition on abortion coverage in federally-subsidized health care exchanges
• Unlike the language in the original Nelson/Hatch amendment, or the Stupak amendment in the House, the manager’s amendment does not prevent federal funds from paying for abortion in the federally-subsidized health care exchanges.
The state “opt-out” still requires each state’s tax dollars to pay for elective abortions
• A state may prohibit abortion coverage in its exchange, but the underlying bill already allowed a state to do so. This provision does nothing to prevent one state’s tax dollars from paying for abortions in other states. States can opt-out of providing insurance coverage of abortions, but cannot opt-out of paying for abortions. The manager’s amendment ensures that Nebraska taxpayers will be paying for abortions in California.
The new “public option” managed by the Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) will cover abortions
• Each state through OPM can provide two multi-state plans and only one of them will exclude abortions. OPM’s current health care program—the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) does not include any plans that cover elective abortion. For the first time, a federally funded and managed health care plan will cover elective abortions.
The manager’s amendment includes the reauthorization of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, without Hyde Amendment language to prevent federal funding of abortions
• Last Congress, the Senate passed a reauthorization of Indian Health Service (IHS) and included pro-life protections—supported by Sen. Nelson—to ensure that no federal IHS funds can be used to pay for abortions. This amendment fails to codify restrictions to prevent federal funding of abortions within Indian health.
The manager’s amendment rejects other “compromise” proposals on abortion
• Other “compromise” proposals put forward would have codified the House-approved “Weldon Amendment” which prohibits government bodies from discriminating against health care providers. These compromises also included an “individual” opt-out from abortion coverage, which the manager’s amendment does not. The manager’s amendment rejects even the most broadly accepted agreements on this issue.
“We are all very lucky they didn’t do more damage than they did when they were in the WH.”
God brought us evidence at badly needed times, and the FR was there to jump on it. Most was so hot, even Rush didn’t want to touch it.
Thank you for the update, Flori-Doll. =]
And a Merry Christmas!
“Nebraska exempt? That’s taxation without representation for the rest of us.”
It’s Animal Farm. Some of us are more equal than others, especially if we have a sleazoid sell-out congress-critter who violates his oath of office.
For the democrats that is.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.