UNFORTUNATELY, GOOD VOTES ARE EASY WHEN YOU KNOW YOU'RE ON THE LOSING SIDE:

A Serious Man (ROSS DOUTHAT, 12/13/10, NY Times)

In the health care debate, for instance, it was Coburn who co-sponsored (with the ubiquitous Paul Ryan in the House) the only significant conservative alternative to the Democratic bill. Their Patients’ Choice Act, which would have replaced the tax deduction for employer-provided health care with a universal credit, was arguably a more “extreme” proposal than the milquetoast reforms Republicans rallied around instead. But it was also a more serious proposal, with a real chance of reducing costs and expanding insurance, instead of just shoring up the status quo.

Then came the financial reform debate, in which Republicans accused Democrats of perpetuating “too big to fail,” but offered counterproposals that often looked like business as usual for the financial industry. Coburn, again, was less conventional: He was one of only three Republican senators to vote for an amendment proposed by two Democrats, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown and Delaware’s Ted Kaufman, that would have taken the “extreme” step of capping the size of America’s largest banks.

“Capitalism works as long as you don’t have monopolies,” Coburn told me last week when I asked about that vote, “and when 65 percent of the deposits in this country are in nine banks, we’re still in trouble.” Again, his ideological rigor was a spur to creativity: it enabled him to consider the possibility that what was branded as a left-wing idea might actually be better for free markets than another round of regulation.

But Coburn’s most important vote was cast as a member of the White House’s deficit commission, when he chose actual fiscal conservatism over his party’s interest groups by voting to forward the panel’s recommendations to Congress for debate.