Tom Coburn
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The death of Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma takes from America one of the most admirable voices in our national debate — and just when we need him most. A physician, Coburn arose from Oklahoma, first to the House and then to the Senate, where he became a leading voice for limited and modest government and for fiscal rectitude.
We didn’t know Coburn well, but we encountered him in New York on several occasions. He backed up his political principles with his Christianity in a way that underscored the wisdom of George Washington’s famous warning — that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
Coburn was a practicing obstetrician when, he later told Joe Rago of the Wall Street Journal, he realized that government was impinging too much in his medical practice. He stayed with the issue through his three terms in the House and his one and a half terms in the Senate. He continued to see patients, the Journal noted in its moving editorial this morning.
Coburn carried on in the Senate an exemplary friendship with Barack Obama, despite their ideological differences. The Sooner himself issued annually a “wastebook,” listing ridiculous government spending. It included, say, $914,000 for research into in the “Twilight” movies and $17 million in tax exemptions that enabled Nevada’s brothels to use them for, among other things, promotional “free passes.”
Late in his career, Coburn devoted a part of his time to urging a Convention of the States. The idea is to call a convention to amend the constitution so as to curb the rapid growth in the federal government — and to do so by the kind of convention of the states at which the Constitution was crafted at Philadelphia in 1787. The New York Sun endorsed the convention in 2016.
The doctor’s care with public money harkened back to President Coolidge, and we had been looking forward to hearing him speak last year in New York at the annual Coolidge dinner. As his cancer progressed, he was unable to make it. He died as the country he loved was in the grip of, in the pandemic of the coronavirus, a crisis that is both medical and fiscal. How he will be missed in the coming seasons.
