“Retirement” is probably not the best word to describe Dr. Tom Coburn’s activities since he left the U.S. Senate almost three years ago.
Coburn has traveled to 32 states this year, mostly on behalf of the convention of the states movement. He’s published a book on the same subject, and written papers for the Manhattan Institute on health care.
Approaching 70, Coburn said he plans to cut back on his schedule next year. But he doesn’t seem to have lost any of the focused intensity that made him a thorn in the side of official Washington during his 16 years in Congress, or his conviction that just about everything Washington does is wrong.
“No one is working on the things that are really important,” he said Friday during a visit to the Tulsa World.
To Coburn, what’s important continues to be debt — not just the $20 trillion or so in accumulated federal operating debt, or even the tens of trillions more in obligations like Social Security and Medicare, but also credit card balances and upside-down mortgages.
“Name a country that has survived the debt burden we have,” Coburn said. “You can’t. There aren’t any.”
The nation’s problems, he says, require a never-before-tried solution — a convention of the states to draft amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
An Article V convention, so called because that is the section of the Constitution that outlines the process, has never been convened. Doing so requires two-thirds of the states — 34 of the 50 — to call for one.
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