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How Congress changes men - for the worse
Bob Novak's 'Breach of Trust' foreword explains corrupting nature of D.C.

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ATG: This was written last Fall and could not be more valid in today's political arena. The "wimps" in DC appear to have only one goal in mind: STAY In OFFICE! In Their Ivory Tower! And we keep voting to keep them there??

September 13, 2003

Editor's note: Following is the foreword of former Rep. Tom Coburn's revealing new book, "Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders into Insiders." Written by longtime Washington columnist and author Robert Novak, the foreword explains why Coburn was such an extraordinary legislator and why his insights in the book are so critical to understanding the Beltway system.
"Breach of Trust," a recent release from WND Books, is available at WorldNetDaily's online store.

By Robert Novak
© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

In the nearly half century that I have been observing the Washington scene and writing and talking about it, I doubt anything has delighted me more than Dr. Tom Coburn of Muskogee, Okla., telling the congressional establishment to go stuff it.

It happened early in 1998, as Coburn was beginning his third year as a member of the House of Representatives. He had always intended to maintain his medical practice while serving in Congress. From the start, he had returned home every weekend to Muskogee to deliver babies - 200 of them in the first three years.

Since 1997, however, the House Ethics Committee had been pondering a complaint, filed by colleagues, that Coburn was violating House rules. After a year's procrastination, the committee ruled that delivering babies was a "fiduciary" relationship - akin to practicing law or selling insurance and real estate. Thus, his colleagues ruled, Coburn was in violation of a 1989 law restricting outside income by members of Congress.

That decision did not faze Dr. Coburn in the slightest. "I'm not going to abide by what they've said," he said. "If I can't resolve it I won't be here, period." He went on to declare: "I'm going to continue practicing medicine regardless of what they say." Faced with that determination, the House ethicists backed down.

It would not have broken Coburn's heart if he had returned home to Oklahoma in 1998. That would have advanced his timetable by three years. He had pledged to serve only three two-year terms, which meant 2000 would be his last year in Congress. That pledge and his refusal to abandon his medical practice makes Coburn the purest citizen legislator that I have ever seen in a Congress dominated by long-serving professional politicians.

That is why this revealing book is so important for Americans, who should understand the corruption of their national legislative branch. Tom Coburn's story is the modern version of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." In the melodramatic climax of the Frank Capra movie, the idealistic young "Sen. Smith" (played by Jimmy Stewart) appears to have won an ill-defined victory over corrupt special interests. Real life is more complicated. Coburn left Washington, intrepid and vindicated but unable to really change the status quo on Capitol Hill.

Coburn came to Congress as part of the big and boisterous Republican class of 1994 that won the party control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. These new legislators were ready to march behind fiery Speaker Newt Gingrich to effect a revolution in government. They were now in Washington, but did not want to be part of Washington.

Few of the rookie House members showed any inclination to settle in by moving their families to the capital. Most had campaigned on what was then the very popular issue of term limits. Several winning Republicans - Coburn among them - had promised to serve only three terms (some pledged four terms). Supposedly, the trend toward domination of the professional politician had ended, and the road back to citizen legislators had begun.

Supposedly, but not really. Even before the 104th Congress convened in January 1995, House Majority Leader-designate Dick Armey mused that term limits might no longer be necessary now that Republicans had miraculously won the congressional majority. The House roll call votes in 1995 subsequently were rigged so that every Republican had a chance to vote for one version of term limits while no version actually received enough votes to pass. Hypocrisy was the watchword.

As for House members who were self-term-limited, some blatantly ignored their campaign promises. Most notorious was George Nethercutt, who in the state of Washington had defeated Democratic House Speaker Thomas Foley (the first incumbent speaker to be defeated for re-election to the House since before the Civil War) by attacking Foley's lawsuit against the voters in his state for approving term limits in a referendum.

Some House members who kept their term-limiting promises quickly moved on to a new political venue. Mark Sanford was elected governor of South Carolina. Lindsey Graham was elected to the U.S. Senate from South Carolina. Matt Salmon was defeated for governor of Arizona. Tom Coburn was among the few who returned to his pre-congressional profession. He was a genuine citizen legislator.

I suppose the most extreme form of citizen legislator I have encountered was a retired farmer from Norfolk, Neb., named William Purdy, who served in the 1957 session of the Nebraska unicameral legislature (which I covered for the Associated Press in my first taste of legislative reporting). In his campaign, Purdy had promised to make no speeches on the floor of the legislature, to introduce no bills, to vote against any new expenditure or extension of government - and to serve only one two-year term. He fulfilled each pledge to the letter. I then thought of Purdy as an eccentric, but over the years I have come to regard him as a wise man.

To be sure, by virtue of his non-participation, Bill Purdy was a cipher in the Nebraska legislature. Tom Coburn was far from a cipher in Congress. From his first day in the House, he violated legendary Speaker Sam Rayburn's advice to new members to spend their first few years with their mouths clamped shut before daring to say anything or attempt anything on their own. Coburn had only six years, and he meant to make use of them.

The 104th Congress contained many freshman Republicans who were outside the political stereotype, but none more unusual than Coburn. After working in his family's optical business, he became a doctor at age 35 and - "disgusted with Congress," he said - was elected to the House at 46 in his first attempt at public office from a district that had not been represented by a Republican since 1922 and was thought to be unwinnable.

Coburn made his presence felt immediately. It became clear to him that Speaker Gingrich, House Majority Leader Armey and the rest of the Republican leadership were not what they pretended to be. They were revolutionaries in name only, content to take possession from the Democrats of the machinery government and then run it virtually unchanged. That froze in place the system of pork-barrel spending that young Woodrow Wilson described in "Congressional Government" more than 130 years ago.

So, the obstetrician from Muskogee, new to government, on his own began analyzing the contents of appropriations bill and exposing the heavy infusions of pork. That created the curious situation where this freshman congressman knew more about what was contained in these spending measures than the "appropriators" - members of the appropriations committees of the House and Senate who considered themselves an elite corps in Congress.

The appropriators had long since delegated these details to career staff members, but they are hardly unique among today's lawmakers. As part of their evolution as professional politicians, current House members are far less knowledgeable about legislative issues than their predecessors of 1957 when I first began covering Congress. Increasingly, their time is spent raising campaign money - a far lower priority for Coburn and his term-limited colleagues.

Coburn, along with other rookie Republicans, totally violated the Rayburn doctrine in 1997 by planning a coup to remove Gingrich as speaker. Coburn, as a plainspoken Oklahoman, killed whatever chance the effort had of succeeding. Armey had joined the plotters in hopes of becoming speaker. When Coburn blurted out that they did not want Armey either, Armey abandoned the enterprise and resumed his place at Gingrich's side.

No wonder that after two years of troublemaking by Coburn, senior Republicans suddenly took notice of his weekly excursions to Muskogee to deliver babies. The 1989 act was passed to prevent members of Congress from using their office to fatten their bank accounts as lawyers, real estate agents and insurance brokers. Behind the legislation was an unsavory history of immigration bills sold by well-placed congressmen, acting under the guise of attorneys. Until it was decided to punish Coburn, nobody dreamed that the relationship of a doctor and a mother giving birth was "fiduciary."

When Coburn refused to bow to the Ethics Committee, the Republican leadership capitulated (just as they had surrendered to President Bill Clinton on many issues). After all, Coburn would be gone in another three years anyway.

He has been gone since the end of 2000, and he has been badly missed. So have the other term-limited House members. There is an unmistakable difference between the term-limited lawmaker and the rest of Congress. The fate of some pork-barrel project is everything to the latter and nothing to the former. The member who is not making a career of politics looks quite differently at the world. A Congress that is fully term-limited would open the way to limitation of government and badly needed reform of federal taxation, Social Security, tort law and much else.

Without question, life on Capitol Hill corrodes the most principled of legislators. As the years go by, they are no longer the persons they were when they arrived in Washington. It is the very rare member of Congress who improves with time, and most lose their focus and indeed their principles as the years go by. Nobody better exemplifies this phenomenon than Dick Armey, as Dr. Coburn makes clear in these pages.

Armey, a 44-year old professor at the University of North Texas with a Ph.D. in economics, came to Congress in 1984 as a conservative with a libertarian flavor and as a citizen legislator with no taste for the ways of Washington. To save money and in the process show his contempt for capital society, he slept on a couch in his office and showered in the members' gym. After eight years in Congress, he was elected chairman of the Republican Conference and two years later was tapped by Gingrich to be majority leader. By then, he was no longer the anti-establishment professor who had come to Washington.

Coburn's interaction with Armey is one of the most fascinating parts of this book. It shows Armey turning from being an idol of the Class of '94 to its anathema. When Gingrich resigned under pressure following the disappointing 1998 election a year and a half after the aborted coup against him, there was no support for Armey as speaker. Indeed, he barely was retained as majority leader after three ballots of voting by his colleagues. Yet, when he decided not to run for a 10th congressional term in 2002, he soon seemed more like the old Dick Armey, concerned with big government and civil liberties. Here was the therapeutic value of being a civilian again.

Unfortunately, the term-limits movement is in retreat. The Supreme Court dealt it a devastating blow by finding invisible writing in the U.S. Constitution that, according to a 5 to 4 decision of the justices, prohibited states from limiting terms of their representatives in Congress. The Republican Party in effect has abandoned the issue. Successive biennial elections since 1994 have produced fewer and fewer advocates of term limits. The bulk of freshman Republicans entering Congress tend toward the professional politician rather than the citizen-legislator model.

Typical of the newcomers is the bright and ambitious Evin Nunes, elected in 2002 from the Central Valley of California at age 29 - making him the second-youngest member of Congress. He probably never heard of Tom Coburn, and would not look to him as a role model if he had. Nunes' mentor and patron is 13-term Rep. Bill Thomas, the imperious chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee who runs a mini-political machine in California that is responsible for Nunes being in Congress. Nunes frankly asserts that he wants to be like Bill Thomas, that he wants to provide as much government spending as possible to his district and that he wants to stay in Congress for a very long time so that he can be a committee chairman and bring still more aid back to his constituents in Tulare and Fresno counties.

Although most voters still prefer term limits, that goal is not high on their wish list, and public support is slowly but steadily falling. Tom Foley predicted to me years ago that while support for term limits by ordinary people was superficial, the determination by politicians to defeat it was firm and would prove decisive. It looks as though as he was correct.

Since Coburn returned to Oklahoma, one deplorable development has accelerated the degeneration of Congress as a democratic institution. The decennial reapportionment mandated by the 2000 census produced what is arguably the most gerrymandered congressional districting in the nation's history. Thanks to the introduction of computers, the distortion of districts that used to be accomplished crudely with pen and ink now has been brought to a fine art.

Gerrymanders originally were intended to provide an unfair advantage for one party or another, but that is not their primary purpose in the 21st century. It is to protect incumbents. A post-2000 re-map of New York's delegation nearing approval would have given Republicans a slight advantage in two incumbent Democratic districts, but incumbent Republican House members blocked that change because it would have narrowed the very comfortable margins some of them enjoyed. So, no additional Republican seats were gained, and the delegation is controlled by Democrats, 19 to 10.

In California the same year, Republican leaders passed up a chance to challenge incumbent Democrats and settled for a new map where no incumbent is in danger. The nation's largest congressional delegation (controlled by Democrats, 33 to 20) offers the voters no contests. (To his credit, young Rep. Nunes was embarrassed that his district was so badly loaded in favor of the Republicans that - as an unknown new candidate - he received 72 percent of the vote. Nunes is pushing for a referendum to force a fairer redistricting, but his party's leaders are not enthusiastic about it.)

Indeed, there are not many contests nationwide. In a perversion of democracy, only 35 to 40 out of the current 435 House districts can be called competitive. Coburn's 2nd Congressional District of Oklahoma is not considered one of them. It is doubtful that any Republican other than the doctor could win this district. When Coburn made clear he would stick to his promise and not run for a fourth term in 2000, Republican leaders were conflicted. They were delighted to be rid of so principled and troublesome a member but saddened by the loss of one seat (captured in 2000 by a Democrat, who was re-elected easily in 2002).

The absence of statutory term limits leads to a dilemma. Members of Congress serving under self-imposed term limits are those most willing to reform and restrain the government. Not only Coburn and the other warriors from the Class of '94 have departed, but members who were elected in later years and try to follow in Coburn's footsteps are going as well. Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania, elected in 1998, will not seek re-election in 2004. Jeff Flake of Arizona, elected in 2000, will not run in 2006. The professional politicians, of course, stick around. Much as I admire the integrity of the term-limited members of Congress, I also miss them.

To hear again from Dr. Coburn not only dramatizes how much he has been missed, but sends an important message from the belly of the congressional beast to the rest of America. This book provides a rare, invaluable portrait of life as it really is on Capitol Hill that should open the eyes of ordinary citizens.

In a book published early in 2000 ("Completing the Revolution"), I pondered the abandonment of genuine reform by congressional Republicans and came to this conclusion: "What we need is to have a whole succession of Tom Coburns. A proliferation of Tom Coburns. Who knows? Maybe Tom Coburn should run for president."

It still seems like a good idea.