Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
The future of GOP control of the Senate depends on Oklahoma Republican candidate Tom Coburn, a former doctor who has covered up a scandal from his past until now.
Sep 13, 2004 | Tom Coburn may be indispensable to the Republicans' effort to hold on to their majority in the U.S. Senate in November. "He is their best hope for keeping an Oklahoma seat Republican in the closely divided Senate," wrote conservative pundit Robert Novak.
In 2003, President Bush appointed Coburn chairman of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS, giving him a prominent platform as he prepared to run for the Senate. If elected, Coburn would not only help the GOP maintain its power but would surely emerge as one of the most outspoken conservatives in the country. The former three-term congressman, one of Newt Gingrich's "revolutionaries" from the class of 1994, an Okie from Muskogee, thunders for traditional values and crusades for limited government. He packages this political agenda in his image as a kindly family doctor -- an obstetrician.
For Coburn, the imminent danger facing America is apparently not terrorism but the "gay agenda." His thumping about this menace within contributed to the pressure that led to Bush's endorsement of a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage. At a Republican meeting this spring, Coburn warned: "The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power ... That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That's a gay agenda."
In 1997, Coburn proposed a bill that would have ended anonymous testing for HIV/AIDS and required reporting the names of those who tested positive to public health authorities, among other draconian measures -- including withholding Medicaid funding from states that failed to comply.
But an incident involving Medicaid from Coburn's past as a physician may cloud his current ambition to fill the seat being vacated by Sen. Don Nickles. He is squaring off against Democratic Rep. Brad Carson, who succeeded Coburn in the House in 2000.
According to records obtained by Salon, Coburn filed an apparently fraudulent Medicaid claim in 1990, which he admitted in his own testimony in a civil malpractice suit brought against him 14 years ago by a former female patient. The suit alleged that Coburn had sterilized her without her consent. It eventually was dismissed after the plaintiff failed to appear for the trial. In his sworn testimony, Coburn admitted he sterilized the then 20-year-old woman without securing her written consent as required by law. He blamed the omission on a clerical error, but maintained that he had her oral consent for the procedure. (Salon has been unable to contact the woman and is withholding her name out of respect for her privacy.) Coburn also revealed under oath that he had charged the procedure to Medicaid -- despite knowing that Medicaid, also known as Title 19, does not cover the cost of sterilization for anyone under age 21.
This previously unpublicized episode from his medical practice cuts to the heart of Coburn's political identity. He has built his congressional career on extreme gestures against government programs, exceeded in virulence only by his pronouncements on social issues, including advocating the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions under any circumstances other than those threatening the life of the mother. (And yet, as a doctor, he has performed abortions.)
Local political observers say the likely result of the Oklahoma Senate race is a tossup, with a possible slight advantage to Coburn because of Bush's overwhelming support in the state. The latest poll, conducted Sept. 1 and 2 by the Democratic firm Westhill Partners, had the race within the margin of error, with Carson leading 44 to 42 percent.
Coburn was swept into Congress as a member of the Republican class of 1994 that gained control of the House for the first time in 40 years and installed Newt Gingrich as speaker. "He really drank the Kool-Aid with the class of '94; he was one of the real far-right guys," says Kenneth Hicks, a political science professor at Rogers State University in Claremore, Okla.
"He's a principled, pompous member," said a senior Republican staffer turned lobbyist. "He's one of those '94 guys, and there were a certain percentage of them who were so anti-system that they don't want to play the game. And from a leadership perspective and a lobbyist perspective, we don't like those kind of people ... He's going to be a frickin' nightmare in the Senate [if he wins]."
In Congress, Coburn distinguished himself, even from other conservative Republicans, by actively opposing federal spending for his own state. After unsuccessfully trying to stop disaster relief after a 1999 tornado, Coburn called the measure "malarkey." His dogmatism made him a thorn in the side of GOP members who might rhetorically denounce "big government" but still legislate plenty of pork. In 1996, after voting for provisions of an agriculture bill that aided Oklahoma farmers, Coburn told the Wall Street Journal that it made him sick for days afterward and that Washington was "a dirty place." In 1997, he boasted, "I don't ask for anything from Appropriations." The year after that, he complained to USA Today that he was underpaid as a congressman: "You have to be able to earn more money to attract good people."
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