Sen. Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican who is resigning his seat on Jan. 3 — two years before his term expires — took to the Senate floor on a Friday afternoon to tie it up one last time.
Coburn, an obstetrician who arrived in Congress 20 years ago, had one day earlier given a tearful farewell address in which he criticized the way the Senate is run and urged his colleagues to think less about what they could bring back to their states and more about how they can serve their country.
That Friday, Dec. 12, Coburn kept up his resistance in his last days, criticizing his colleagues’ decision to slip unrelated federal lands provisions into a must-pass defense bill. Coburn, whose passion over the years has been government thrift, complained that the bill will create new expenses for a National Park Service already incapable of handling the lands it controls. After he spoke, other senators came to the floor to defend the land transfers, swaps and acquisitions in their own states.
Coburn then tried to pass a bipartisan bill on another of his top priorities — government transparency. His unanimous consent request was denied because of an objection from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. He then inveighed against one of Reid’s most important abuses of power during his time as leader — not the so-called “nuclear option,” which Coburn also criticized, but rather Reid’s habit of “filling the tree” to prevent senators from amending bills under consideration. Coburn then tried to file an amendment anyway and lost the ensuing procedural vote along party lines.
This loss was a fitting finale for Coburn, whose passion was to highlight government waste and increase government accountability. For over two decades in Washington, his passion put him on everyone’s bad side at some point — Democrats, Republicans, and even the new crop of disruptive conservative senators attempting to follow in his footsteps.
As a House member in late 1999, Coburn irritated both the Republican leadership and the Democratic opposition by filing 115 amendments to an agriculture appropriations bill and tying up the floor for days. He did it to draw attention to spending that he believed did little or nothing to help farmers. Frustrated senior House members from both parties rushed to the floor to defend their line items — they did not appreciate having to do this — and complained bitterly that Coburn was “hijacking” the process.
Coburn quit Congress in 2001 but returned to Washington in 2005 as a senator, having crushed his state party establishment’s favored candidate in a 2004 primary. For a time, his office published a weekly catalog of pork projects in addition to his annual book of government waste. Coburn was never afraid to embarrass his colleagues by proposing amendments to strip their earmarks out of bills. He made Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” famous when he forced a vote on whether to defund it and send the savings to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.
In a body where lawmakers enjoy proposing new laws and enjoy taking credit for them even more, Coburn called on his colleagues to pay more attention to Congress’ thankless and unsexy role as overseer of executive branch agencies. He also loved to place holds on their bills, usually to demand that any new spending be offset by cuts elsewhere. In 2008, Reid brought what was widely dubbed the “Tomnibus” to the Senate floor — a package of dozens of bills that Tom Coburn had been blocking. (It didn’t pass.)
Coburn often placed holds on bills without any regard for their popularity. Just this month he placed a hold on a bipartisan bill that purported to help prevent veterans from committing suicide, arguing that it doesn’t do anything the Veterans Administration can’t do under current law. He won that fight, for now — the bill did not pass.
For all of his legislative disruption, Coburn believed there were prudent limits. His aim was to win by losing again and again, not to take the Senate to the brink of disaster. In 2013, when other conservatives in the Senate launched a quixotic bid to “defund” Obamacare without any clear goals or a workable strategy, Coburn’s reasoned opposition earned him the wrath of some conservative activists. But it also made a lot of conservatives think twice about the government shutdown it caused.
Coburn lost most of the battles he engaged in the Senate, especially after Republicans fell into the minority in 2007. But with each loss on the Senate floor he helped popularize the cause of curbing government waste. His actions helped shame Republicans into adopting the ban on earmarks that will continue into the new Congress.
Washington is a town full of ambitious politicians who seek ever-higher honors and positions and love nothing more than to have their names on bills. Coburn was an exception. He term-limited himself, resigned early, and spent most of his time blocking bills and figuring out how to annoy the right people. His was an exceptional career, and the Senate will be worse without him.
