Vin Suprynowicz

Considering the performance of the two elected obstetricians most recently in the national eye, it’s intriguing to speculate how much better off the country might be if we could send the 533 big spenders currently holding down seats in Congress on an extended world cruise, replacing them for a term or two with randomly selected members of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, requiring only that they read aloud Article I Section 8 of the Constitution (the powers of Congress) before taking their seats.

In the lower house, Texas Congressman and obstetrician Ron Paul — who recently made an abortive run at the GOP presidential nomination, receiving sizeable support only in freedom-loving Nevada — has received the honorific “Dr. No” for his determined opposition to allocations of tax money for purposes not authorized in the Constitution. That is to say, to most of the spending bills that now sail through Congress with hardly another discouraging word.

Coincidentally enough, over in the upper house, Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is also a baby doctor — and also drives fans of “unlimited government” to distraction.

Under Senate rules, a single senator can put a “hold” on almost any bill, barring it from slipping through without full (time-consuming) debate unless 60 fellow senators vote to overrule that “hold.”

And Sen. Coburn has used that power widely enough to draw the ire of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, whose Democratic-Socialist coalition now sees 35 of its pet spending projects waylaid by Sen. Coburn’s predilection to exercise his “hold.”

Sen. Reid has now packaged up those 35 bills, which he argues have “virtually unanimous” bipartisan support — though, curiously, Sen. Reid hasn’t been able to cobble together 60 votes to override Sen. Coburn’s “hold” on a single one — and now demands an up-or-down vote on his package, possibly today or tomorrow.

The Democrats brag that their package of bills includes funds for paralysis research and a national database for victims of Lou Gehrig’s disease — the kind of measures which (true enough) few politicians wish to go on record opposing, lest they be accused of “favoring disease” … though in fact the Constitution grants Congress no power to fund medical research, an undertaking long and properly left to private charities.

The Democrats are less likely to mention that the package authorizes $11 billion in new spending and creates at least 34 new deathless federal programs, according to Sen. Coburn’s tally. They’re also reluctant to mention it includes more money to care for kids rendered parentless by the counterproductive War on Drugs; millions to school and care for the children of illegal aliens; funding for a War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission (I can’t wait till they get to the Mexican War): $12 million for some botanical greenhouse in Maryland, and an act to prohibit the commercial sale of apes and monkeys. (When do they get around to dogs?)

Even the bills authorizing money to fight crippling disease “do so ineffectively, by duplicating spending and existing programs that have not demonstrated results,” Sen. Coburn charges.

“This legislation prioritizes the parochial wishes of many senators above the true needs of the American people,” Sen. Coburn says in a summary posted on his Web site.

“The fact that he wants things paid for, that is a good thing, that is fiscal discipline,” Nevada’s other senator, Republican John Ensign, said in Sen. Coburn’s defense Tuesday. “Individual senators have rights, and to try to destroy some of the traditions of the Senate, I think it is a dangerous precedent to be setting.”

Don’t mistake what this fight is about. In Washington, a few lonely examplars of rectitude and fiscal sanity are standing at a bottleneck in the road to bankruptcy, like Leonidas and his Spartans.

Against them the majority — led by Harry Reid and his Democrats — seek to pour through like a barbarian horde, spending billions more tax dollars on stuff not even authorized in the Constitution, at a time when American taxpayers are struggling to keep a car on the road and food on the table.

America does not need $11 billion in new non-essential spending, much less 34 new federal programs (including a War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission) that will still be sucking tax dollars when many of us are in our graves.

The best thing the Congress could do now is to repeal the ban on drilling for oil offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; repeal or suspend any federal laws which slow or block the rapid and reasonably safe construction of new oil refineries and nuclear power plants, and then go home.

But for those vital steps to jump-start our economy — we will doubtless be told before September by these same Democrats now hyperventilating over a commission to memorialize General Stansbury’s fine work at the Battle of Bladensburg; over the commercial sale of monkeys — there “just won’t be time.” Will there?