The Public Record
Tom Coburn is a former U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, serving from 2005 to 2015. A member of the Republican Party, Coburn was known for his fiscal conservatism and advocacy for government transparency. He was a practicing physician before entering politics, which influenced his views on healthcare and government spending. Throughout his tenure, he was a vocal critic of wasteful government expenditures and often called for reforms to improve accountability in Congress.
I wish to make one point. The Institute of Medicine did not recommend this. As a matter of fact, their recommendation was that causality ought to be the only way in which we would do this. I would ask for the yeas and nays on the amendment.
This is a commonsense amendment that will secure this for veterans and make sure we are not paying for disabilities for those who are not truly service connected, that are not based on science or causation. I know it is a tough vote, but…
I was not a big fan of the Affordable Care Act, but the fraud provisions in it, I readily support.
As recently as July 2011, Senator Tom Coburn introduced an amendment to eliminate the presumption of service connection for Vietnam War veterans exposed to the poison Agent Orange.
Again, I will state, if you are against this amendment, you are against eliminating the very cause of our problems in this country, which is duplication, redundancy, overlap, and you are against doing the proper oversight so we make…
I advise the senior Senator from New York that I will ask unanimous consent, if it is agreeable to him, that when I finish my few words, we go directly to the vote.
You need to know what you want before you write it, what you intend and what you expect.
If you don't know what you want, you are not any different than the agency that is passing a grant out there.
Well, it is because we are lazy legislators. What we decide is we will pass a bill and grant maximum flexibility to the bureaucracy.
We are responsible for allowing all of the duplication that has come because we have passed the legislation and appropriations bills that have actually caused it.
We need to focus down and put somebody in charge of science, technology, and math but not 12 different agencies.
I think it is tremendously important. We lose hundreds of billions of dollars of GDP to intellectual property theft every year.
May I make an inquiry of the Chair? The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Oklahoma.
Would the Senator define what a subsidy is to him, because part of the problem with the debate is that we keep saying ``subsidies.'' We don't have subsidies--not in the Senator's State or in Oklahoma. We have accelerated depreciation…
I will oppose that amendment. My worry is because of the process of the Senate, we may not get that amendment to vote on. My colleague, as part of our leadership, would recognize that we have a problem with amendments.
The Senator obviously didn't hear what I said. I said I support ethanol, and I would not support that. I have been upfront with the Senator in the past, and you know my position on that. So the question here--and I ask him a question: How…
When we are sitting at $14 trillion worth of debt and we are drowning in debt...
Title V is a problem because we inappropriately match properties to the benefit of Title V...
The $1.2 billion does not come close to the cost of maintaining those 70,000.
Politicians like Tom Coburn
