The Patriot Post® · Coburn to Retire

Two-term Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn is retiring at the end of his term next January. It isn’t for health reasons, he says, despite his battle with cancer. “My commitment to the people of Oklahoma has always been that I would serve no more than two terms,” he explained. “Our founders saw public service and politics as a calling rather than a career. That’s how I saw it when I first ran for office in 1994, and that’s how I still see it today.” National Review’s Jim Geraghty sums up why Coburn will be missed: “Oh, he’ll almost certainly get replaced with another Republican, and probably a conservative Republican, but … Tom Coburn was fighting runaway spending long before it was cool.”