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Mississippi: Senior Senator Sen. Thad Cochran (R) Last Updated July 25, 2003
Thad Cochran was elected to the House in 1972 and the Senate in 1978, where he sits at Jefferson Davis's old desk. He grew up in small towns in northern Mississippi and near Jackson, the son of a principal and a teacher, graduated with high grades from Ole Miss (where he was a cheerleader, which was a very big deal) and its law school, served in the Navy, spent a year abroad and practiced law in Jackson. In 1972, as Richard Nixon was sweeping Mississippi, he was elected as a Republican to the House from the Jackson-area district with a plurality against a white Democrat and black independent. After three terms, he was ready to step down, when Senator James Eastland retired; Cochran ran, 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 pleasant personal 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. His toughest race came in 1984, when he was opposed by popular former Governor 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 now the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, the number two Republican on the Appropriations Committee and chairman of its Homeland Security Subcommittee. He played an important role in shaping the very different 1996 and 2002 farm bills. In 1996 he supported the move to phase out most crop subsidies over seven years, but 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 through the marketing loan program and the target price mechanism, which was abolished in 1996, and of vastly increasing the Conservation Reserve Program to provide money for producers of non-program crops, thus producing more support for the bill. The bill also required country-of-origin labeling for beef, pork, lamb and fish--the last being very important for Mississippi's big catfish farm industry; Cochran has worked hard to get the Senate to prevent a similar Vietnamese fish from being labeled catfish. Also included was money for biomass research, which means among other things finding uses for Mississippi's chicken waste. After the bill passed Cochran argued that it was weaning farmers from subsidies. He said that government in the U.S. provides 21% of farm income, higher admittedly than in Australia and New Zealand (4% and 1%), but much lower than in Europe (45%). In January 2003 Cochran moved swiftly to fashion a $3.1 billion drought relief measure, about half the size of Tom Daschle's, which spread money not just to the drought-stricken Great Plains but to most of the South, with special aid for tobacco and catfish producers; he got it into the omnibus appropriation with a coalition of all Republicans and seven southern Democrats. Cochran has used his Appropriations seat to legislate on many other issues. He has been the Senate's leading proponent of missile defense. In March 1999, after the implications of the July 1998 Rumsfeld report and the August 1998 North Korean three-stage missile launching sunk in, his missile defense resolution passed by 97-3. He defended missile defense after the test failure in January 2000. "We test because we expect to find problems and try to solve them. This technology is not just within our reach, but is actually in our grasp now." He has supported the construction of a land-based missile defense system on an Aleutian Island in Alaska, and in January 2001 opposed phasing that out in favor of developing sea-based or space-based systems--a stand that may put him in conflict with the Bush administration. "To change direction at this point … would unnecessarily delay deployment and cause us to be vulnerable for a long time." He serves on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and, working with Mississippi colleague Trent Lott, has worked to fund projects big and small which are based in Mississippi--the DDG-51 Aegis destroyers, two of them to be built at Ingalls Shipyard in Pascagoula, the LHD-8 helicopter carrier, additional AN/APG-73 radars for the F-18 Hornet, Mississippi State University's research center where superfast computers do undersea modeling of Navy projects, the University of Mississippi computer labs receiving information from orbiting satellites. The 2003 military construction appropriations contained $110 million for Mississippi facilities--a new hangar for the Air National Guard's 172d Airlift Wing at Jackson, new housing at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, a new Navy channel at the Naval Station Pascagoula, and a control tower for the Meridian Naval Air Station. Timely amendments to appropriations that make major policy are a Cochran specialty. To the bill allowing reimportation of prescription medicines in July 2000 Cochran added an amendment to require the FDA to certify lack of risk to public health and safety; HHS Secretary Donna Shalala was unable to so certify, and the law became a dead letter. An October 2000 amendment delaying the imposition of regulations on the treatment of rats, mice and birds in research laboratories prevented a big increase in the cost of medical research. Smaller issues also attract Cochran's attention: He tried to get the government to pay the legal fees of former Congressman and Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, he wants to make the Congressional Research Service separate from the Library of Congress, he wants to repay federal employees placed through no fault of their own in the wrong retirement system. He authored the Mississippi Wilderness Act, worked for grants for historically black colleges and for vocational training for the disabled, expanded the Grand Bay National Wildlife Refuge on the Gulf Coast and sought to let the entrepreneurial Choctaw Tribe in Neshoba County add newly purchased land to its reservation. He and Lott have worked to fund the Yazoo Pump Project in the Delta. Over the years he has built up a National Writing Program, to instruct teachers how to teach writing; for only $10 million it sends 100,000 teachers to summer programs on 167 campuses. He has fostered programs to improve arts education. Going into the 108th Congress, Cochran and Trent Lott have combined congressional service of 60 years; both were first elected to the House in 1972. Their relations have not always been harmonious. They clashed over judgeships and vied for White House favor in the 1980s and mixed it up in leadership fights in the 1990s. In 1990 Cochran challenged the more moderate John Chafee of Rhode Island for the chairmanship of the Senate Republican Conference, the number three leadership position, and won 22-21. When Lott challenged Alan Simpson for majority whip, the number two position, Cochran pointedly endorsed Simpson; Lott won anyway, with the support of junior conservatives, and thus leapfrogged Cochran. When Bob Dole announced in May 1996 that he would resign from the Senate in June, Cochran and Lott both entered the race for majority leader; Lott had the contest sewed up, but Cochran stayed in and lost 44-8. In January 2001, Cochran appeared by John McCain's side as a new co-sponsor of the latest version of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill; this had been strongly opposed by Lott, and Cochran's vote made the bill apparently filibuster-proof. It gave McCain leverage in his drive to get it early consideration. But Cochran spoke sympathetically about Lott after he relinquished the majority leadership in December 2002. Cochran holds what seems to be one of the safest seats in the Senate. In 1990 he was unopposed and in 1996 he was re-elected 71%-27% over a Democrat who spent half of his $4,700 on gas for a borrowed car. In 2002 he beat a Reform party candidate 85%-15%. He has a ways to go, however, before he matches John Stennis's record as Mississippi's longest serving senator: that won't happen until March 2020.
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