Sen. Coburn's crusade: Bending ears against 'earmarking'
By Ken Dilanian
USA Today
October 17, 2007
Two years ago, when Sen. Tom Coburn proposed killing funding for two projects known as the "Bridges to Nowhere," senators from both parties reacted with fury. That sort of thing just wasn't done.
"If you want a wounded bull on the floor of the Senate, pass this amendment," thundered Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who inserted money for two bridges in a transportation bill -- a practice known as congressional earmarking.
Democrat Patty Murray of Washington warned, "If we start cutting funding for individual projects, your project may be next."
Coburn's amendment failed, but it contributed to a wave of bad publicity that eventually doomed one of the Alaska bridges. It also kicked off the senator's crusade against what he considers wasteful earmarks. Elected in 2004 after spending six years in the House, he has spent the past two years making life difficult for colleagues trying to steer money to local pet projects.
The Oklahoma Republican expects to be at it again as early as today, offering floor amendments that target what he considers particularly egregious (and Democrat-backed) earmarks in an education and health spending bill. If history is any guide, his colleagues will do their best to block him.
His tactic is to request that the money be spent on something that is hard to criticize. For example, he will propose taking $900,000 earmarked for a Lyndon Baines Johnson museum in Texas, sponsored by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and using the money instead to help people with disabilities.
"He frames the question in a way that people understand," said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a non-partisan watchdog group. "Why are we spending money the way we are spending money?"
Coburn, a physician, put it more succinctly: "The purpose is to awaken the American people to the stupidity of what we do out here."
Although Coburn tends more often to challenge Democratic projects, he also goes after Republican earmarks. For example, when the Senate passed a transportation bill last month, Kit Bond of Missouri objected to a Coburn proposal to nix a Kansas City pedestrian bridge in favor of more funding for emergency bridge repairs.
"When we put in earmarks ... they reflect the judgment of each member of this body on what is important in his or her state," Bond said. "Now, my friend from Oklahoma is earmarking money for bridges. If he believes Oklahoma is not putting in an adequate share of its money for bridges, then we would be happy to entertain earmarks. But don't tell us (how) to earmark ours."
Coburn calls his quest non-partisan: He wants Congress to deal with the looming fiscal crisis linked to the retirement of baby boomers. "What's in front of us is massive," he said. "We're adding earmarks like tomorrow wasn't coming."
Other newly elected senators agree with Coburn, but not many have voted with him.
Democrat Claire McCaskill of Missouri, for example, said in a floor speech that "the earmarking process in the past decade has ballooned out of control at a cost of billions of dollars to taxpayers."
"However," she added, "I am uncomfortable with cherry-picking which earmarks are worthy and which ones are wasteful."
Coburn doesn't share her discomfort: "My whole campaign was based on changing the culture of the Senate. This is an ingrained pattern of behavior that they're not going to want to give up easily."
