WASHINGTON - U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn's pork-busting got personal Thursday, prompting the equivalent of a schoolyard brawl in the staid Senate.

 

     Though Coburn wound up being pummeled like a new kid who doesn't know the playground rules, he got in a few licks before losing.

 

     Coburn, the freshman Republican from Muskogee, started the fight when he tried to knock out some "special projects" from a spending bill, including $500,000 for a sculpture garden at a Seattle art museum and another $950,000 for a parking lot at an art museum in Nebraska.

 

     The projects were in the portion of the spending bill that funds the Housing and Urban Development Department.

 

     "What's more important -- feeding people and housing people or building a sculpture park?" Coburn said, noting that 15,590 homeless people are in the state of Washington.

 

     Senators ultimately decided to preserve the funding for the sculpture park.

Though many lawmakers will criticize so-called pork barrel projects and curse their effect on the national debt, they don't typically offer amendments aimed at stripping a colleague's home-state projects from a bill and force them to justify the spending.

 

     And most senators -- including Oklahoma U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe -- didn't appreciate Coburn's efforts to do that Thursday.

 

     Coburn got the strongest rebuke from U.S. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., who managed the spending bill on the Senate floor.

 

     Bond, seeming to mock the Senate convention of complimenting colleagues during debate, talked about Coburn's habit of practicing medicine during Senate breaks and said he envied Coburn's abilities.

 

     Then he delivered the blow.

 

     "You know what I do when I have time off?" Bond said. "I travel around the state."

 

     He said he goes to communities to find out whether they need a county health center or improved water and sewer facilities.

 

     "They know I'm not a physician," Bond said. "But they know I'm up here to serve and represent them."

 

     Bond asked about funding in the bill for an Indian museum in Ponca City.

 

     Coburn said he didn't know anything about it and that Inhofe must have requested it. He said he would offer an amendment to strip funding for that project.

 

     Ryan Thompson, a spokesman for Inhofe, said the bill included $200,000 for Ponca City to help build a museum and statue commemorating Ponca Chief Standing Bear. The request came from Inhofe.

 

Wouldn't save a nickel

     Responding to Bond, Coburn said he was offended at the suggestion he had sacrificed meetings with his constituents to practice medicine.

 

     "I'm listening to the people of Oklahoma," he said, adding that he had been in almost every county in the state since being elected and was trying to fulfill his campaign promise to reign in federal spending.

 

     "This isn't a water treatment program. This is a sculpture park," Coburn said.

 

     Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., then calmly defended the sculpture park and said senators who voted to strip it out might have their own projects scrutinized.

 

     Bond made a motion to postpone Coburn's proposals to kill projects in Washington, Nebraska and Rhode Island, and the Senate rebuked Coburn with a vote of 86-13.

 

     Inhofe, who voted against Coburn's proposal, said later he respected what Coburn was trying to do, "but his amendment does not accomplish what he set out to achieve. Trying to pass an amendment to eliminate projects that senators from these respective states thought in the best interest of their constituents would not have saved one nickel."

 

     After a brief afternoon break, Coburn started the battle again with an amendment to kill $75 million in funding for two controversial bridge projects in Alaska -- one dubbed "The Bridge to Nowhere." Coburn wanted to redirect the money to an Interstate 10 bridge in New Orleans that Hurricane Katrina damaged.

 

     U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, became enraged, shouting on the Senate floor that one state shouldn't be singled out to lose money that Congress had approved.

 

     He said he would resign if the Senate voted to kill his state's bridge funding.

 

     Inhofe, whose committee wrote the highway bill authorizing the Alaska bridge projects, stood to object to Coburn's amendment, reiterating that lawmakers should be able to judge what's good for their states.

 

     Coburn's amendment went down 15 to 82.