Pearson said Coburn continues to look for wasteful spending. Last year, he found $200 million in duplicated and overpayments.

Coburn recently opposed an ethics bill before the Senate. She quoted him as having said there was something wrong with legislation that prohibited buying officials a $20 meal but allowed the legislators to give out $20 million earmarks.

Cormier said Boren’s trip to Iraq and a military hospital in Germany last week gave him more insight into the war. He continues to oppose sending more troops to Iraq but also opposes establishing a timeline for withdrawing military presence there.

Miller took advantage of Friday’s forum to brag a bit on the Sequoyah High School girls state basketball championship.

He said all Sequoyah students and all basketball team members are Native Americans, but to look at them, they appear to be a mix of Native Americans, African Americans and Caucasians. But, each of them has a Native American ancestor.

He used that point to make one about the tribe’s recent vote to not allow Cherokee freedmen to have full voting rights in the tribe.

Their ancestors were allowed to sign Dawes Commission rolls in the late 1800s, but as freedmen, not as having Native American blood, he said.

“The largest piece of this controversy is coming from outside the Cherokee Nation and from outside northeastern Oklahoma — from New York City, from Los Angeles, from Washington D.C.,” he said.

They don’t know the full story and see the freedman vote as an exclusionary policy “and they don’t want the facts to get in the way.”