The Minority Leader

Is Sen. Tom Coburn an extreme social conservative, a libertarian hero, or both?

David Weigel from the July 2007 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

"What you have to understand," says Keith Gaddie, a political scientist at the University of Oklahomaand a radio host in Norman, Oklahoma, "is that Coburn actually believes this stuff. He's atypical for a politician. He's like a really sophisticated version of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."

That's a compliment, but an incomplete one. Stewart's accidental senator became a hero with a throat-shredding filibuster to win a federal loan for a boys' camp. Coburn has risen to his status by scraping such projects off of appropriations bills and tossing them in the wastebasket. He has put holds on hundreds of individual projects and pushed through legislation establishing a public earmark database that will be accessible in about a year. People like Club for Growth co-founder Stephen Moore, whose group helped bankroll Coburn's campaign for the Senate, enthuse that he is single-handedly changing the culture of Washington.

"I would say that the two most important victories we had in my time at the Club were the election of Tom Coburn in the Senate and election of Jeff Flake in the House," Moore says. "For all the money that was spent in all the races, every year, it would have been worth it just to elect those two.

Because what they prove is that one man can make a difference in Congress. One man and the truth can have a lot of influence vs. a lot of political hacks. Coburn gives a lot of people hope."

As Coburn himself acknowledges, the last few years have seen libertarians lose faith in the Republican Party. The congressional GOP played a role by spending more and more money and increasing the size and scope of government in the belief that this was what voters would reward.

Social conservatives also played a role by pushing for federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, attacking not just federal funding for embryonic stem cell research but the very idea of biomedical freedom, and talking up constitutional amendments that would ban gay marriage and flag burning, among other perceived threats to traditional America. Coburn has fought hard against the first trend-and equally hard in favor of the second. The question for libertarians is whether Coburn's vision of a lean, clean, fiscally sound government is enough to offset his views on civil liberties and social issues.

‘You Saw Us Become Them'
Tom Coburn was born in Wyoming in 1948. Twenty years later, he married his wife Carolyn. Fifteen years after that he earned an M.D. and opened a medical practice in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where he also served as a deacon in the Southern Baptist Church. He wasn't a Republican activist. He swears today that he didn't plan on entering politics. But in 1994, recovering strong from a bout with lymphatic cancer, he was growing increasingly frustrated with the bureaucratic tap dancing he needed to do to maintain his practice.

"I could not escape the reach of big government," Coburn wrote in his 2003 memoir Breach of Trust.

"I had to hire extra assistants simply to comply with the torrent of paperwork generated by government agencies and insurance companies."

As he tells it, Coburn decided to run for the House of Representatives after reading about 18-year incumbent Democrat Mike Synar's support for a national health care system. Coburn entered the race in April, blasting Synar top to bottom for his absentee relationship with the state and his alliance with Bill Clinton. He fought him so hard that Synar, in trouble from the get-go, lost his own primary to a retired schoolteacher. In November, Coburn narrowly beat his fellow neophyte and became the first member of the GOP to represent northeastern Oklahoma in Congress since 1920.

"The tough thing will be six months from now, when you have to make the tough decisions based on what you said," Coburn told the Muskogee Phoenix after the election. "That's when we're going to see the people who want to be professional politicians vs. the people who want to be representatives."

When the new Congress opened, Coburn was part of a majority that cut spending on committees and proposed budget cuts unheard of since before the New Deal. The 104th Congress passed a budget with less pork than the 103rd. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, says Coburn, "really did make us feel like soldiers in a revolutionary army."

It didn't last. At the end of the year, the Clinton White House and the Republican Congress came to blows over the size of the federal budget. Republicans wanted to freeze spending, and the president wanted to leave no program underfed. The congressional majority stopped funding government operations, the federal government shut down, and both sides started digging trenches for a protracted battle. And then Congress caved, in part because Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) wanted to leave the city to campaign in New Hampshire's presidential primary. (He ended up losing to Pat Buchanan.)

Coburn has always condemned this as a sellout. "After the shutdown," he wrote in 2003, Gingrich "was like a whipped dog who still barked, yet cowered, in Clinton's presence."
He stands by that judgment today. "It was a turning point," he told me in December. "Afterwards you saw the growth of government accelerate. You saw the abandonment of the principles that we came in on in 1994. And you saw us become them."

In his second and third terms (he had limited himself to three in a campaign promise), Coburn found himself clashing more frequently with Gingrich and the empowered class of committee chairmen who were acclimating disturbingly well to the clout that comes with being in the majority. He closed ranks with a small number of legislators who opposed the party's drift. In 1997 they tried to stage a coup against Gingrich, intending to replace him with Majority Leader Dick Armey, only to watch press leaks and Armey's skittishness ruin the attempt.