Senate choose boozes over body armor

The Club for Growth has a tally on a Senate vote defeating one of Tom Coburn’s anti-pork amendments. The vote preserves $100 million in pork for Democrat and GOP conventions in 2008. Most Republicans voted to remove the pork. Most Democrats voted to keep it.

(Pause for readers to recover from their shock)

The Senate just voted down one of Coburn’s amendments, 44-52. The rider to the Iraq emergency supplemental bill would have denied the $100 million earmark to next year’s political party conventions.

As Coburn said previously, “Members will have to make a difficult choice between booze and balloons or body armor and bullets.”

Notably, “conservative” Democrat Sens. Jim Webb and Bob Casey, who replaced former GOP Sens. George Allen and Rick Santorum in 2006 promising fiscal responsibility, voted to keep the pork.

(Via Club For Growth)

Who Will Coburn Favor in ‘08?

So far, no word. However the Race 4 2008 has the Politico speculating about him possibly favoring McCain soon, and has him showing at a McCain fundraiser in Washington last week.

Showing at McCain’s swank shindig Wednesday at the Mandarin Oriental was Sen. Tom Coburn. Like McCain an outspoken critic of pork-barrel spending, the Okie from Muskogee also has considerable street cred with social conservatives. If he were to support his fellow maverick, Coburn, an obstetrician and vocal anti-abortion advocate, would probably become McCain’s top surrogate and validator with the pro-life community.

A Coburn aide told me that the senator is officially undecided but has great respect for Sen. McCain.

Keep an eye on this one.

Given McCain’s shakiness on taxes, his championing of CFR, and closeness to oh so many Democrats, I hope this stops at ‘great respect’. A man is not who is the last time you saw him, he’s who he has been from the beginning.  McCain may be saying the right stuff right now, but it’s awfully close to election season for a genuine conversion.  To boot, it’s a little early in the process to endorse a frontrunner.

(Via the Politico, HT Race 4 2008)

Video Clip from 20/20

Coburn’s War on Pork

“I’m not a very good politician, ’cause I’m obviously irritating a whole lot of people.” — Tom Coburn

If you missed Stossel’s report Friday, be sure and watch the whole clip.

( Thanks to Club for Growth)

Coburn’s Healthcare Blueprint

The Wall Street journal is reporting on Tom Coburn’s efforts for a health care solution that doesn’t put us all in danger of Nanny State SIDS.

That debate is about the future of health-care reform, and it got some momentum this week when Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn released a big-ideas blueprint for restructuring the entire health-care system–the tax code, Medicare, tort liability, insurance laws–along free-market lines. Dr. Coburn’s plan builds on the White House’s own bold proposal in January to revamp tax laws so as to put consumers back in control of their health-care decisions. Both plans are about fundamental, bottom-up health-care reforms, cast in the language of markets, consumers and individual control.

Coburn’s Senate page has this to say about the plan:

U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK), a practicing physician and member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), today introduced the “Universal Health Care Choice and Access Act,” a comprehensive health care reform plan. U.S. Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), who also is a member of the HELP committee, joined Dr. Coburn as an original co-sponsor.

…

“Government-run, ‘Big Brother’ health care plans that some politicians are vowing to revive would drive-up tax rates, strangle our economy and deprive the most vulnerable individuals in society of basic health coverage. The seductive rhetoric behind ‘Big Brother’ health care hides the fact that socialized systems stay afloat by rationing care and letting people die before their time. In the United Kingdom, for example, cancer patients sometimes have to wait a year between their diagnosis and first chemotherapy treatment. That approach to health care is unconscionable,” Dr. Coburn said.

Provisions include encouraging prevention, shifting tax breaks towards individuals, creating a national market for health insurance so that consumers aren’t limited to local choices, clarifying the nature of health care costs, reforms portions of Medicare and provides states incentive to make Medicare less restrictive.

That last portion is extremely important. One massive HillaryCare program for the entire nation threatens all sorts of economic disruption. But the whole point of a multi-state nation with a limited national government was to allow for 50 labs where these ideas could be worked out and compete with each other. If HillaryCare is going to work so well, let’s let Minnesota, Iowa, and New Mexico prove it first. Once the national bureaucracy is created, any efforts to reform it will be a 50+ year effort of untold energy and political capital, and we’ve already got other problems that need our collective attention.

Keep up the good work Senator.

(kudos to Commonwealth Foundation’s Policy Blog for the find)

Dr. Coburn On 20/20 tonight

Meet Dr. No

And now in Washington, they call him “Dr. No.”

Dr. No loses a lot of his battles, like his fight to keep Congress from giving $500 million of your money to military manufacturer Northrop Grumman after its ships were damaged in Hurricane Katrina.

“Yeah, I lost that one,” said Coburn. “But it’s wrong.”

Lately he’s been winning more. Congress has now gotten rid of about $16 billion worth of earmarks.

“We’re winning,” said Coburn.

Watch it tonight on ABC, 10pm EDT.