The Senate's G.O.P. Bomb Throwers
By Jay Newton-Small
Time Magazine
September 19, 2007
Senator Tom Coburn spent a good part of last Wednesday trying to stop the federal government from building bike paths. He wanted to redirect the $12 million allotted for them to shoring up U.S. bridges following the collapse of a highway bridge in Minneapolis that killed 13 people. The amendment failed 80-18. Undeterred, Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, immediately introduced his second amendment of the day: a motion to suspend all earmarks — or pet projects often attached in secret to funding bills — until structural integrity of all U.S. bridges can be verified. There were $2 billion in earmarks in the bill, which, if passed, will fund the Transportation Department next year; the amendment failed 82-14.
That same day Senator Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican, added his own amendment to suspend a rule that requires the government to use unionized workers to make emergency repairs to bridges, which DeMint says raises the cost by as much as 35%. That amendment also failed, 56-37.
The fact that DeMint and Coburn's amendments were defeated is nothing new in the Senate, and it does little to temper their enthusiasm as Congress rushes to finish all of the funding bills for next year. At a time when the conservative base is lamenting its choice of presidential candidates as well as the priorities of the Oval Office's current occupant, the two are the leaders of a small group of Republican hard-liners working overtime against Democrats and Republicans alike to make a firm stand against what they view as out-of-control spending.
The Republican base is "frustrated with us for not carrying through on the spending issue and overspending. It's the reason we're not in the majority and it's going to take us a while to earn that trust back," DeMint told TIME in an interview in his offices last week. The Senator heads a group called the Senate Steering Committee — an organization founded more than three decades ago by Senator Jesse Helms that purposefully eschews the label "Republican" in order to stress its independence. Its members, though, are all Republican, and the group has grown from a few Senators in 1974 to more than half the caucus these days. It has three staffers who spend most of their time looking for fiscal dragons to slay; in this Congress they've found plenty.
Much more here:
http://coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=LatestNews.NewsStories&ContentRecord_id=28cb77ae-802a-23ad-407e-d6ee2e512a7a
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