That speech helped to galvanize anti-earmark sentiment inside Congress and beyond. Coburn supported the fledgling “Porkbusters” movement, popularized by University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, the blogger known as Instapundit. Reynolds believed in the persuasive power of ridicule, and Coburn helped to provide the movement with the ideal weapon—a law pulling the curtain back on who was stuffing pork into which legislation. “Coburn was very involved in the embryo of the Tea Party movement, the Porkbusters movement,” says Reynolds. “I would say that Coburn was Tea Party before there was a Tea Party.”
Coburn says that he deeply admires the movement (“I think the Tea Party is one of the best things that ever happened to this country”), but he has not publicly associated himself with it, as some, such as Jim DeMint and Michele Bachmann, have. This is partly because Coburn believes that politicians tend to exploit such forces, but it is also because Coburn’s natural role is as a dissident, rather than a move-ment leader…
Coburn’s Gang of Six role—he left in May only to return—has put him at political variance with another C Street housemate, Senator DeMint of South Carolina, who believes that the Gang’s rollout played into Obama’s hands, and deflected attention from the House’s “Cut, Cap, and Balance” legislation. “Jim may be right, and I may be wrong,” Coburn allows. But he adds that political reality, not the Gang of Six, doomed the House proposal—which Coburn also supported. “I don’t see a time anywhere in the future where there’s 60 people that’ll be in the Senate that think the way that Jim DeMint and I do.”
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