By Richard Engle

In contemplating the upcoming departure of Senator Tom Coburn from elected office, conservatives and constitutionalists (like me) are melancholy. We wax sentimental when we consider the loss of another "Dr. No" from the halls of Congress.

There is much to appreciate in the record of Tom Coburn as a member of Congress from the 2nd District and as the junior Senator from the Sooner state.

Any who read his biographical "Breach of Trust" came to appreciate that his courage behind the scenes was as great as it was in front of cameras, reporters and voters.

I was among those who begged him to enter the race for U.S. Senate, and among those who worked to secure his victory. He sent me a kind personal note after I successfully secured endorsements from two conservative groups in our state.

I took him at his word, and I knew that he would stand fast against the establishment of Washington and that he would stand firm on our Constitution. I was only partially wrong.

When he voted for TARP I was aghast. He openly admitted that the act was unconstitutional and yet voted for it anyway. For me the rose colored glasses were gone forever. I have more respect for those ignorant members of Congress who voted for TARP but did not understand that the bill was unconstitutional. Coburn's blatant violation of the Constitution made me wary of his every act thereafter.

As his time in office proceeded, I was more than a little pleased that the TARP vote was the great anomaly in his almost unsullied record. Year after year he continued to rail against government waste, oppose bad Presidential appointments and to take unpopular, but correct stands, even if his voice and his vote were washed aside by a tsunami of Democrats and Republicans who could not be held back from imposing destruction on the future of our beloved nation.

Nonetheless, he would on occasion, use a good opportunity to make a bad thing happen.

Senator Coburn was among those who rightly called the federal financing of national political conventions an improper role of government. I have been the inadvertent beneficiary of that largess. I was at San Diego in "96, Philadelphia in 2000, New York in "04 and Tampa in "12. My daughter was at the convention in Minneapolis/St Paul in "08. I know firsthand that national political conventions are more about image than substance and that they have long ago left their responsibility to accomplish the work of securing a nominee and a platform in favor of scripted pronouncements that in some cases are clearly contrary to will of the duly elected Delegates from the various states.

Coburn's HR 2019 properly defunds those multi-day political shows. If the act stopped there it would be a wonderful thing. Repeatedly, the Senator tried to pass a clean bill ending this waste. Sadly, those bills did not find their way into the law books.

HR 2019 was his final, and successful effort to accomplish the task. Signed into law, the Democrats and Republicans will have to fund their conventions honestly. It may be that they will restore the importance of the work and purpose of the events and cast aside the infomercial showmanship. We can dream.

Sadly, HR 2019 did much more. It is titled the "Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act." It uses the funds not wasted on conventions and diverts them to a medical research effort for ten years. While it might seem that such research is much more important than funding parties for political high rollers (and it is) it is still unconstitutional.

What's more, the only thing more permanent than a temporary tax in Washington is a short term project. Every penny that would have been spent by government will still be spent, and spent on something the Constitution does not permit. At the same time, the one government program that was on its way out anyway (GOP Chair Reince Priebus told me in 2012 that the next national convention would not have federal money) is now replaced with an endeavor that will never exhaust its hunger for increasing quantities of our money.

As Senator Tom Coburn leaves elected office government is bigger, not smaller. His friend, the President, is more a dictator than his predecessors. And, the U.S. Constitution is less relevant, not more.

In this act, Tom Coburn contributed to those problems when he might have at least held to the trust we placed in him.

I'm sorry to see him go. I don't know if a better will replace him. I'm even more sorry that his record is once again soiled by an errant action that does not reflect the overall virtue of his time of service to the State of Oklahoma.