Tom Coburn Resigning From Congress, in a Year

Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) announced he would
be
resigning from Congress at the end of the current session, in
January 2015. Coburn’s term lasts through January 2017, so his
resignation will trigger an election, but maybe not until after the
mid-term elections this year. The Washington Post blog The
Fix
suggests he could tender his resignation early enough to allow
Oklahoma to schedule an election concurrent to the November ones.
Coburn insisted in a
written statement the decision wasn’t about his latest prostate
cancer, and said in his video statement he
would be coming back to Oklahoma to live under the laws passed
while he was in office, including “many” he had hoped to stop but
couldn’t.

Coburn did
not vote on yesterday’s trillion-dollar spending bill, but did
vote
against the stop-gap measure.  He voted
against the October bill suspending the debt ceiling and ending
a partial government shutdown, unlike 27 Republicans who voted for
it and then for a resolution disapproving of the president’s use of
the new authority to suspend the debt ceiling. Coburn might be best
known for his
annual report on ridiculous earmarks, and a 2007 Reason

profile of Tom Coburn starts with a review of the Senator’s
first earmark battle, over Ted Stevens’ “bridge to nowhere.” He
lost that battle, but his observation about the coming “rumble” of
anger from Americans about “out-of-control government spending” was
certainly prescient, despite continuing losses. But as Reason noted
in 2007, Coburn, a staunch social conservative, is no “libertarian
hero,” voting on the Patriot Act and other measures running counter
to civil liberties, and has
defended the NSA’s efforts.  The last Republican senator
to resign was Jim DeMint, who once insisted you couldn’t be a
fiscal conservative without being a social conservative. He went on
to take over the Heritage Foundation. Coburn, too, says he’ll
remain in public life.

Watch an extended interview Reason TV conducted with Tom Coburn
in 2012 about how both parties helped bankrupt America: