Speaking truth to power

The February issue of GQ magazine has a great layout on a US Senator who speaks truth to power. His name is Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK). Yes, he's a Republican. And yes, I know in 2006 that means spend, spend, spend, (again... the "$100 gas card") BUT... as I said... this guy speaks truth to power.

Having served several terms in the US House, he was first elected to the US Senate in 2004. Here's a classic example of who he is:

While fellow newcomers like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama observed the customary “freshman silence,” Coburn’s first major move as a senator was to pick a fight with one of his party’s most venerated leaders, Ted Stevens of Alaska, a forty-year veteran of Congress who also happened to be the Senate’s president pro tempore.

The fight was over pork. As the 2006 transportation budget passed through the Senate process, Coburn noticed something odd: $200 million to pay for a bridge in Stevens’s home state—a bridge almost as long as the Golden Gate and taller than the Brooklyn Bridge, connecting an island of fifty people to the coast. In the Senate, these kinds of giveaways are not unusual; members, and especially those in a position of influence, are frequently given millions of dollars for personal spending projects back home, items that bypass the normal review process and are quietly ushered in by their peers (whose own projects get the same deal). But to Coburn, who hadn’t spent forty years in the Senate and didn’t have any of his own special projects and didn’t particularly care about keeping pacts with his new colleagues, $200 million seemed like a lot to spend on a bridge for fifty people. So he tried to take the earmark out. And that’s when Tom Coburn discovered what his life in the Senate would be like.

Almost as soon as Coburn proposed to eliminate the bridge, Ted Stevens came tearing down to the floor of the Senate with his face red and his fists clenched, bellowing that he would not be treated with such disrespect, that the rest of the Senate would have to rise up and protect his project or he, Ted Stevens, would pack up his bags and quit the Senate and never come back. By the end of the day, eighty-two senators had voted with Stevens. Voted to spend $200 million on a bridge to nowhere, while Tom Coburn could find only fourteen members to agree that the money might be better spent somewhere else—like, say, rebuilding New Orleans.

Although I don't agree with him on everything, there are some great things about him. And again, I simply love the fact that he speaks truth to power.

Tim White
Town Council, 4th District