Republican Thad Cochran, Mississippi’s senior senator, was elected to the House in 1972 and the Senate in 1978, where he sits at Jefferson Davis’s old desk. He has come to personify a vanishing breed of Southern Republican—amiable to all, conservative but not rigidly so, a devoted institutionalist, and a proficient procurer of funding earmarks for his poor, rural state.
Cochran grew up in small towns in northern Mississippi and near Jackson, the son of a principal and a mathematics teacher. Cochran was extremely athletic in high school and lettered in football, basketball, and baseball. He was also valedictorian of his senior class and a talented musician. (He still sometimes plays the baby grand piano in his Senate office for relaxation.) Cochran continued to excel academically at Ole Miss, where he was a cheerleader, which was not uncommon for men at that time and was in fact considered an honor. Cochran went on to get a law school degree from Ole Miss. He served in the Navy, spent a year abroad, and then practiced law in Jackson.
In 1968, he worked on the Nixon-Agnew presidential campaign in Mississippi, where Richard Nixon ran third. Four years later, when President Nixon was sweeping Mississippi, Cochran ran for Congress and was elected as a Republican from the Jackson-area district with a plurality against a white Democrat and a black independent. When segregationist Sen. James Eastland, a Democrat, retired, Cochran jumped into the race and once again won with a plurality over a white Democrat and a black independent. In the House and in the Senate, he has managed to amass a generally conservative record with little controversy or acrimony. His patrician demeanor, his refusal to engage in racial politics, and his Republican Party label—in a state where most whites have been voting Republican for president for three decades—have made him broadly acceptable to voters at home. His toughest race came in 1984, when he was opposed by popular former Democratic Gov. William Winter. Winter could make a case for himself but not against Cochran. Cochran outraised him $2.7 million to $738,000, and won 61%-39%.
Cochran is the ranking minority member on the Appropriations Committee, and was chairman from 2005 to 2007 when Republicans controlled the Senate. He has also been the ranking member since July 2008 on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, where he has been a key proponent of missile defense, and has worked to fund projects big and small for Mississippi. Timely amendments to appropriations bills that make major policy are a Cochran specialty.
When he first became chairman, Cochran promised to get appropriations bills passed on time, rather than rolling multiple bills into large “omnibus” measures, which had become practice as Congress grew more partisan and unable to agree on individual spending bills. Cochran also said, “We’re not going to have runaway spending on the Appropriations Committee when I’m chairman. I won’t tolerate it.” In spite of those assurances, earmarks and runaway discretionary spending were to remain major issues during his stewardship. Hurricane Katrina struck on Aug. 29, 2005, causing massive damage in Mississippi, and suddenly keeping tight controls on spending was not the chairman’s prime concern. Cochran viewed the devastation by helicopter on Aug. 31, and then persuaded the Senate to immediately vote for $10.5 billion in disaster relief. A week later, he persuaded it to vote for $52 billion more. In late October, President George W. Bush called for an additional $17 billion. Cochran, working closely with Republican Gov. Haley Barbour and others in the Mississippi and Louisiana delegations, pushed for $35 billion, with community development block grants available for homeowners and business owners with uninsured losses. This was a new policy, and one not included in the administration request. On Dec. 21, Congress passed a $29 billion bill, with $11.5 billion for community development block grants. Mississippi received $5.1 billion of the CDBG funds. In the meantime, work on the regular appropriations bills bogged down, and Cochran and House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., resigned themselves to a continuing resolution for nine appropriations bills they couldn’t get passed.
The following year, 2006, brought more vagaries in the appropriations process in the form of the Bush administration’s request for large amounts of additional money for the war in Iraq. The president asked for a supplemental Iraq funding bill, a proposal sweetened with nearly $20 billion in additional funds for hurricane recovery. Cochran drafted a bill that included some controversial provisions: $700 million for building a CSX rail line inland, to replace the line on the Gulf Coast; $500 million for Northrop Grumman, which was in litigation with the insurers of its Pascagoula shipyard; and $1 billion for Katrina housing. Cochran’s fellow Republicans were among his biggest critics. Speaker Dennis Hastert and House Majority Leader John Boehner called his bill a “special-interest shopping cart,” and conservative Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma tried to kill it. But Cochran prevailed on the Senate floor 50-47. Ultimately, Congress agreed to supplemental spending for Iraq and to $20 billion for Katrina recovery, although it rejected the railroad line.
As Cochran resumed trying to pass the regular appropriations bills on time, earmarked spending came increasingly under fire as more conservatives took issue with Congress’s long-standing practice of approving special projects for individual lawmakers, projects that often were not requested by any government agency. Cochran and Lewis managed to get through both chambers just two of the 12 spending bills in 2006, those for defense and homeland-security appropriations. Budget hawks raised objections to earmarks in the remaining 10 bills, and GOP Majority Leader Bill Frist declined to bring them to the floor before the November election. When Democrats won majorities in both houses, Congress passed a temporary measure to keep the government running, and work ceased on the remaining spending bills. Cochran lost his chairmanship.
In 2007, the first year of the Democratic majorities in Congress, the appropriations bills became magnets for anti-war lawmakers. Cochran opposed Democrats’ attempts to set timetables for troop withdrawals in the 2007 Iraq war supplemental spending bill. In subsequent years, however, he has become more inclined to abandon his party on floor votes. He was one of just 11 Republicans to support a $17 billion Democratic jobs bill in 2010, and joined Democrats that year in backing the New START arms reduction treaty with Russia. He also has worked with Democrats on legislation to enhance national service and to promote geography literacy among students.
Cochran regularly incenses watchdog groups with his additions to spending bills for Mississippi projects. He had the highest total of earmarks in fiscal years 2008, 2009, and 2010, with more than $497 million in fiscal 2010 alone, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. He takes a particular interest in his state universities’ research needs and casts a wide net—in the fiscal 2009 omnibus spending bill he earmarked $3.5 million to the University of Mississippi’s National Center for Natural Products Research, at the time the country’s legal producer of marijuana for medical research. (The center is housed in a building that bears his name.) As younger, more conservative Republicans sought to halt the practice, Cochran continued to wholeheartedly defend earmarks. “Analyses of how the executive branch spends discretionary federal dollars when left to its own devices show that rural states like Mississippi, states that often have a great deal of need, are largely ignored. This is why our Founding Fathers gave Congress the explicit power to direct spending, so that those who are elected by the people, not bureaucrats, decide how funds are spent,” he said. However, when Republicans announced an earmark moratorium for the 112th Congress (2011-12), he reluctantly went along. “I remain unconvinced that fiscal prudence is effectively advanced by ceding to the Obama administration our constitutional authority,” he said.
The other area of interest for Cochran is farm legislation. On the Agriculture Committee, he played an important role in shaping the very different 1996, 2002, and 2008 farm bills. In 1996, he supported the Republican initiative to phase out most crop subsidies, although he insisted on maintaining the cotton marketing loan plan that he largely wrote in 1985. In 2002, he supported the strategy of reviving annual crop payments and of vastly increasing the Conservation Reserve Program. In 2005, Cochran defeated on the Senate floor, 53-46, Iowa Republican Charles Grassley’s move to cap subsidies to individual farmers at $250,000. In 2006, he opposed Bush’s proposed 5% cut in farm subsidies. And in 2008, he supported the farm bill that passed over Bush’s veto. The president said the bill was too costly and did not go far enough to curb subsidies.
Also in late 2007, Cochran got a new Mississippi partner in the Senate with the arrival of newly appointed Sen. Roger Wicker, a Republican. The two quickly teamed up to try to compel Congress to allow federal flood insurance policyholders to add wind coverage to protect themselves financially against future hurricanes. A former U.S. House member, Wicker was appointed by Barbour to replace GOP Sen. Trent Lott, who resigned from Congress. It was a welcome change for Cochran, who had competed with Lott over the years to advance in the leadership and usually wound up losing to him. In 1990, Cochran was elected to the chairmanship of the Senate Republican Conference, the No. 3 position. Although he had less seniority than Cochran, Lott set his sights higher. Rather than wait his turn to move up, Lott challenged Wyoming’s Alan Simpson for majority whip, the No. 2 position. Cochran pointedly endorsed Simpson, but Lott won anyway, with the support of junior Senate conservatives, and leapfrogged over Cochran to the higher-ranking post of whip. Then in 1996, the top job of Senate majority leader came open when Kansas Republican Bob Dole ran for president. Cochran and Lott both entered the race. Lott was able to sew up a majority of votes quickly. Cochran stayed in the contest and lost 44-8.
Some political observers wondered whether Cochran would run for re-election in 2008. But he did and his challenger wound up being a former state representative with little money and no paid staff. Cochran spent $2.8 million and won 61%-39%, his closest margin since 1984.
Though Cochran has steered clear of scandal, in March 2009 one of his former longtime aides pleaded guilty to swapping legislative favors for event tickets and other gifts from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s firm. During the presidential contest in 2008, his unflattering remarks about Arizona Sen. John McCain were widely quoted in the media. Cochran told the Boston Globe, “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He’s erratic. He’s hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he worries me.” When McCain ultimately became the party’s nominee, Cochran was conciliatory and called his earlier appraisal of McCain “ill advised.” He added, “I didn’t think he was going to win the nomination either.”
After Democrat Barack Obama defeated McCain, Cochran said, “There are a lot of people coming in with a lot of enthusiasm. We need some people with a little gray hair to help be a calming influence. That is the role I will play.”
