Path to Power
by Barbara Lago

Not since the first two years of the Eisenhower Administration have Republicans controlled the White House, U.S. Senate, and House. These are heady days for the GOP in Washington, and at Ole Miss, where four members of Congress received their law degrees.

Historically, the party out of the White House picks up seats in midterm elections. But this go-round, the two senators and two representatives saw their party buck history to reclaim control of the Senate and maintain its hold on the House.

Alumnus and U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.)—re-elected to his fifth term—became head of the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee and the Appropriations Committee’s Agriculture Subcommittee when the Senate reorganized in January. His seniority over other Republicans made him a shoo-in for both posts and gives him unmatched influence in Congress on U.S. farm policy and spending. He also sits on the Rules and Administration Committee.

Alumnus and U.S. Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), despite a post-election controversy, still looks forward to working with a GOP-controlled House and President Bush on the Republican agenda. He chairs the Rules Committee and Commerce Committee’s Aviation Subcommittee, and holds seats on Finance and Intelligence committees.

With its hold on the House, the Republicans also maintained control of federal spending, since all such bills must begin there. That’s especially of interest to alumnus and U.S. Rep. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), re-elected to his fifth term. Wicker has eight years on the Appropriations Committee and says he’s “one or two terms away from being a subcommittee chairman.” He’s also a House deputy whip, sits on the Republican Policy Committee, and chairs the Congressional TVA Caucus.

The House is where two other GOP alumni have wielded influence: Rep. Kenny Hulshof, re-elected to his fourth term in Missouri, and Rep. Ed Bryant of Tennessee, who gave up his seat in January after an unsuccessful bid for the Senate. Hulshof is on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, and Budget and House Policy committees.

“ We are very proud of our congressional leadership in the Senate and House and the fact that they received their law degrees from The University of Mississippi School of Law,” said Dean Samuel Davis. “The Law School has a great tradition of preparing people for not only the practice of law but also public service and leadership in government. All of these men continue that great tradition and honor their alma mater with their exemplary service.”

All five alumni are quick to tell how the Law School helped prepare them for the dog-eat-dog world of partisan politics.

“ The stakes went up in terms of competition when making the quantum leap from undergraduate school to law school,” Bryant says. “That competitive edge—if you didn’t have it by the time you got to law school, you sure had it when you left.”

In politics, he says, “they step on your shoulder to get around you. Having a law school background is very helpful in the legislative process.”

Wicker says law school helped develop his analytical skills and the ability to think through a problem and be quick on his feet. “Those are all things that are important in Washington,” he says. “A good law school teaches the prospective lawyer how to think.”

Rather than a dog fight, Cochran considers politics “a much more serious undertaking of shaping public policy and representing the interests of our state.” In terms of capabilities acquired at the Law School, “learning to write persuasively and effectively was the best gift, or most effective, most rewarding thing,” he says, in addition to preparing him as a lawyer.

Hulshof says he took “every justice, criminal, and tax law course” in law school. Then he returned to Missouri, where he spent 13 years in his state’s criminal justice system, first as a court-appointed public defender, then as a prosecutor, ultimately prosecuting death penalty cases for the attorney general.

“ In politics, you must be able to communicate, so your ability to write, to speak, or to move people with your words is so critically important,” he says.

A member of the Ways and Means Committee, Hulshof says, “Every tax law that is written comes through our committee, so all of those tax law courses have served me very well in that we are the committee that changes the tax code.”

Reflecting on his law school days, Hulshof remembers being called on in Professor George Cochran’s Constitutional Law class and being completely unprepared. “I wanted to melt through the floor,” he says. “I was standing there, and beads of sweat were popping out on my brow, and I was being made an example of, as only Mr. Cochran could do.”

Painful as they were, Hulshof admits that such experiences “help prepare you for whatever you choose to do.”

The other congressmen did not go unscathed. Cochran remembers an incident while a freshman in Professor John Fox’s Contract Law class. In discussing an old English case, Cochran mispronounced the word Leicestershire. “Professor Fox said, ‘Hold on, wait a minute, time out for culture,’” Cochran says. “I thought I had culture, and I was embarrassed that we had to take time out for him to give me a little added dose.”

On a lighter side, Wicker tells a story about Aaron Condon, who taught him Criminal Procedure. Judge J.P. Coleman visited the Law School to preside over a moot court event, and Condon appeared as a witness, dressed up as an old hippie with sunglasses. “He was in total disguise and disrupted the courtroom with his testimony,” says Wicker. “He was a dear friend of Coleman’s, but Coleman didn’t know who he was and was on the verge of throwing him out of the courtroom. It was a riot.”

They also share stories about each other.

“ Trent Lott swears that any success I have,” Hulshof says, “is because of my Ole Miss connection. He has told me that, actually.”

Hulshof almost believes it because of all the hoopla in 1994, when Wicker and the other freshman GOP congressmen were the majority makers for the Republicans.

“ Roger was elected by his classmates as president of the Freshman Class of Republicans. That was something I was very aware of, so I sought to be, and was elected, president of the freshman class of ‘96.”

Lott, Cochran, and Wicker are quick to point out how Mississippi’s entire Republican congressional delegation—which includes Rep. Charles W. “Chip” Pickering—supports funding for University research.

“ We have brought a lot of money to the University for the School of Pharmacy [housed in the Thad Cochran Research Center] and the National Center for Physical Acoustics,” says Lott. “We have also worked very closely with the University to make people around the country realize what an outstanding academic institution it really is, and what great leadership it has in Robert Khayat.”

The day Cochran, the senior senator, was interviewed for this story, he announced two grants—one from the National Institutes of Health, another from the Department of Health and Human Services—for additional research programs that will, he says, “contribute to health care in our state and nation.”

Both are “an indication of the recognition that has come to the University for excellence in medical research. That’s now been replicated in the Law School,” he says, referring to funding for the National Center for Justice and the Rule of Law.

“ I think the Law School benefits from the overall standing of the University, and I think that has been advanced by federal grants and programs located in Oxford and on The University of Mississippi Medical Center campus in Jackson.”

In fact, the delegation has increased Mississippi’s federal research dollars “by probably 100 percent the eight years I’ve been in Washington,” Wicker says. “We are showing that research doesn’t all have to be done in Boston and Silicon Valley.”

For proof, he refers to a Sept. 27 Chronicle of Higher Education cover story, “A Record Year for Academic Pork,” which ranks Mississippi seventh in the nation for the federal funds it receives. Neither Wicker, Lott, nor Cochran is much bothered by the term “pork.”

“ Congressman [Jamie] Whitten used to say, ‘Pork is a federal project in somebody else’s district,’” Cochran says. All five politicians believe national security is the nation’s most critical issue.

“ Protecting the security of our country is the most important obligation we have today,” Cochran says. “We are living in a dangerous world, and the threat of terrorism and other challenges to our security must be ranked as the most serious.”

Protecting Americans from a repeat of Sept. 11, 2001, “is going to take a great degree of wisdom and leadership,” Wicker says. “We’ve left one century where the threat was Nazism, fascism, and communism, and the concept of mutually assured destruction. Now we face the problem of Islamic fundamentalism, where hatred is ingrained in children and crosses national lines. We can defeat anyone militarily, but defeating a people determined to hate us is a long-term problem.”

Iraq poses another challenge and threat “that will dominate our national media for some time, depending, of course, on how weapons inspections go,” Hulshof says.

Bryant is hopeful the country can maintain peace, so it can focus on pressing domestic issues. Those raised by him and the other four congressmen include the sluggish economy, the decimation of Americans’ pensions by corporate CEOs, Social Security, and health care and its many facets, including Medicare reimbursements, prescription drug costs, health insurance, and medical malpractice insurance and damages.

“ We have a continuing challenge of making sure that America keeps those things that made it great,” Lott says. “We must make sure we find ways to encourage economic growth and opportunity, and that includes a good education. You don’t really benefit from the economic system in America if you don’t have the basic education to take advantage of it.”

When Lott and Cochran headed to Washington, Mississippi had a tradition of powerful Democratic congressmen. They included the likes of John C. Stennis, James O. Eastland, Jamie Lloyd Whitten, and G.V. “Sonny” Montgomery. Lott and Cochran were elected to Congress in 1972. Lott represented the Gulf Coast 5th District, while Cochran represented the Jackson-based 4th. Cochran made the jump to the Senate in 1978, succeeding the legendary Eastland. Lott stayed in the House, rising to Republican whip during Reagan’s presidency and getting elected to the Senate in 1988, succeeding the legendary Stennis. He became majority leader in 1996, when Robert Dole (R-Kan.) left the Senate during his unsuccessful bid for president.

Mississippi’s Republican congressional delegation expanded in 1994, when Wicker captured Whitten’s northern 1st District, and again in November 1995, when Mike Parker switched to the GOP after representing the 4th District since 1989. Their gains continued in 1996, when Chip Pickering won the east-central 3rd District seat following Montgomery’s retirement.

Some think following in the footsteps of Mississippi’s powerful Democratic delegation might be intimidating for the state’s “new” Republicans. It’s not. Most of them draw inspiration from the legacy—and that of others connected to the Law School, like L.Q.C. Lamar.

Lamar, Cochran says, “is one of those I look to for inspiration in trying to achieve some degree of national influence as a United States senator from Mississippi. In fact, I have four portraits on my office wall that I had placed there when I was sworn into the Senate: Jefferson Davis, L.Q.C. Lamar, John Sharp Williams, and Pat Harrison. At the time I was elected, those four U.S. senators from our state came to mind as the most influential in our state’s history. I have them here as reminders of the influence Mississippi has had in the Senate and in our nation’s government.”

Lott, who succeeded a 40-year representative, then a 40-year senator, says it wasn’t until he got to the Senate and into its leadership that he began to think about the great men who have served our state and nation.

The room he sat in late last fall is the room in which Thomas Jefferson was elected president of the United States. And across the hall from his office was the room where the great debates with Daniel Webster and Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun took place.

When in the Capitol, “you begin to realize that you are in an august building, an institution where a lot of great history has taken place, and that you can make some contribution,” Lott said.

Reflecting on Mississippi’s great statesmen, Wicker says, “We have a lot to live up to. I think it’s important that we always keep what (former) Rep. J.C. Watts calls ‘a sense of wow.’ When I am walking across the Capitol plaza late at night, and I see that huge marble dome, it still does something to me.”

All five law alumni remember their first day in Washington, surrounded by family, friends, and supporters as they were sworn in. It was especially hectic for Wicker and Bryant.

“ There was nothing poetic about it,” Wicker says. “I was about to go over and get sworn in, and my former neighbor came up and told me my shoes were untied.”

It was a prelude of things to come. “We had promised to enact a litany of House reforms on the first day, and in order to get it done, we had to work into the wee hours of the morning,” Wicker says.

“ We were sworn in and started working,” says Bryant. “We had a contract with America, in which we had pledged to do things within the first 100 days. We were setting the standard with that first day’s work, so we missed the parties and celebrations. We were the party poopers at our own parties.”

When Hulshof went to Washington, his parents attended his swearing-in ceremony. He remembers that January day in 1997.

“ We had a local press person following me and my family around, and I remember Dad being asked, ‘What do you think about this day?’ And my father—who is not one for emotion—with tears welling up in his eyes, told the reporter, ‘My boy is going to be in the history books some day.’”

Eight months later, Hulshof had a bill in front of President Clinton, and he got a call from Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman telling him he had good news and bad news. The good news was that the president liked Hulshof’s idea for value-added agriculture; the bad news was that Clinton planned to veto the bill with the first-ever use of the line-item veto.

“ I called my dad, and I said, ‘Dad, you were prophetic. I’m in the history books. I just thought history would be kinder than this.’”

Hulshof says he had no intention of going into politics but caught the bug when a Republican candidate for Congress pulled out of his district’s race in the summer of 1994, a few months before the election.

“ The party was looking for someone to jump into the race against a very well-known, very popular, and very well-funded 18-year conservative Democratic incumbent [Harold Volkner],” he says. “With all these high-profile murder cases I prosecuted, I thought I was going to be a household name in the 9th District of Missouri, until we took that first poll. I found out I was known by a whopping 3 percent, plus or minus a 5 percent margin of error. So I wasn’t starting off very strong.”

Hulshof barely lost the race and went back to his job with the attorney general. Two years later, he defeated Volkner and headed to Washington.

Wickers road to D.C. was far different.

“ This is my third career in Washington,” he says. “When I was a junior in high school, I served as Jamie Whitten’s page. In the early ’80s, I was a Rules Committee staffer for Trent Lott when he was a House member. After having been a state senator for seven years, the transition to Congress was painless.”

All five alumni say they probably could have made more money in private law practice than public service. But the greatest cost is lost time with families.

Hulsof’s family was in Missouri while he was being interviewed. “I’m away from them this week, he said. “Even when we return home, there are constituent demands to be taken into account.”

“ That’s one thing that is troublesome,” Lott says. “It takes a lot of weekends on the road. Most people are at ball games or with their families, and you’re in Florida, Montana, New Jersey, or New York. That’s the only part I feel badly about, but it’s been a great run.”

Hulshof agrees, saying, “The ability to be effective, to carve out a niche, to have a piece of legislation become the law of the land after a lot of hard work, those rewards clearly outweigh the personal challenges.”

If he were to propose a toast to Mississippi, Ole Miss, and its School of Law for the progress they’ve made in the past 40 years, what would he say?

“ I would be toasting not only the positive heritage and traditions—The Grove on football Saturdays, those political giants we spoke of earlier—but also its willingness to be open-minded and make progress where needed,” he says.

“ That, to me, is where I would clink my glass to those of you
who still call Ole Miss and Mississippi home.”

Barbara Lago is director of UM Media and Public Relations.

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