Haley Barbour
Haley Reeves Barbour is an American attorney, politician, and lobbyist who served as the 63rd governor of Mississippi from 2004 to 2012. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997.
Born in Yazoo City, Mississippi, Barbour graduated from the University of Mississippi with undergraduate and law degrees, where he was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. Barbour was an active Republican operative during the 1970s and 1980s, and he is often credited with building significant Republican infrastructure in Mississippi during an era when it was still dominated by Southern Democrats. He was the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in 1982, but lost to incumbent Democrat John C. Stennis.
In 2003, Barbour became the second Republican governor of Mississippi since Reconstruction when he defeated Democratic incumbent Ronnie Musgrove. As governor he oversaw his state's responses to Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the state's two most damaging environmental disasters since the 1927 Mississippi River floods. Barbour was expected to be a candidate for president in 2012, but announced he would not run in April 2011.
Since retiring as governor, Barbour has resumed lobbying as a senior partner at BGR Group, which he co-founded in 1991. He has been described as "one of Washington's all-time mega-lobbyists". His clients have often included foreign governments, oil, and tobacco companies. Barbour currently co-chairs the Immigration Task Force at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Early years
Barbour was born in Yazoo City, Mississippi, where he was raised as the youngest of three sons of Grace LeFlore and Jeptha Fowlkes Barbour, Jr. Haley's father, a lawyer, died when Barbour was two years old. Barbour's father was a Circuit Judge who had an inmate, Leon Turner, assist him after Judge Barbour became ill. As governor, Haley later gave Turner, who had helped raise him, a posthumous pardon in the closing days of his administration.His brother Jeptha Fowlkes Barbour III was elected mayor of Yazoo City in 1968 as an independent and served until 1972.
He enrolled at the University of Mississippi School of Law, receiving a Juris Doctor degree in 1972.
Subsequently, Barbour joined his father's old law firm in Yazoo City. He was also a law partner of his cousin, William H. Barbour Jr., who later became a federal district judge.
Early political career
Barbour soon became prominent within the Republican party running Gerald Ford's 1976 presidential campaign in the Southeast. He also worked on the campaign of former Texas governor John Connally, who had become a Republican, for president in 1980. In 1982 Barbour was the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate election in Mississippi, but was defeated 64% to 36% by longtime incumbent John C. Stennis, a conservative Democrat, despite an endorsement by President Ronald Reagan. During the campaign, The New York Times reported that a Barbour aide complained about "coons" at a campaign event. Barbour, embarrassed that the comment was overheard by a reporter, told the aide that he would be "reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks" if he continued making racist comments. As of 2023, Barbour is the last Republican to have lost a Senate election in Mississippi.Barbour later served as a political aide in the Reagan Administration and worked on the 1988 presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush.
Before being elected governor of Mississippi, Barbour "had a long career on the national stage" and was "well-known as a Republican operative since the Reagan years".
Lobbying career
Barbour has been described as "one of Washington's all-time mega-lobbyists". He "was a wealthy K Street lobbyist for giant corporations such as RJ Reynolds, Philip Morris, Amgen, Microsoft, United Health, Southern Company, and many others." In 1991, Barbour helped found the lobbying group now known as BGR Group, a Washington, D.C.–based lobbying firm, with Ed Rogers, a lawyer who formerly worked in the George H. W. Bush administration. In 1994, Lanny Griffith joined the firm.In 1998, Fortune magazine named Barbour Griffith & Rogers as the second-most-powerful lobbying firm in America. In 2001, after the inauguration of George W. Bush, Fortune called it the most powerful. The firm "is employed by several foreign countries, as well as oil and cigarette companies". Its role in advocating on behalf of the tobacco industry has been particularly prominent. BGR also "lobbied on behalf of the Embassy of Mexico in 2001 to promote a bill related to Section 245 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. This provision would have provided a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants in the United States, through family connections or job skills, without a requirement that they return to their home country for the requisite 3-10 years. This is what's often referred to as 'amnesty.'" "As part of that work, Barbour's firm arranged meetings and briefings with 'Senators, members of Congress and their staffs, as well as Executive Branch Officials in the White House, National Security Council, State Department, and Immigration & Naturalization Service'. Barbour's firm charged Mexico $35,000 a month, plus expenses."
As of 2010, the firm remained one of DC's top 25, but had seen revenues drop both in 2009 and in 2010. As of 2011, Barbour continued to "collect payments from BGR through a blind trust, which was recently valued at $3.3 million".
In early 2014, Barbour and his nephew, Henry Barbour, formed a Super PAC named Mississippi Conservatives, which supported the successful reelection campaign of Senator Thad Cochran.
RNC chairman
In 1993, Barbour became chairman of the Republican National Committee. In 1994, during his tenure as RNC chair, Republicans captured both houses of the United States Congress, taking the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. In 1997, Barbour retired from his position as chairman of the RNC.Governor of Mississippi
2003 campaign
After two decades in Washington, D.C., Barbour announced his intention to run for governor of Mississippi in 2003. On August 5, 2003, Barbour won the Republican gubernatorial primary over Canton trial attorney Mitch Tyner. Barbour's campaign manager was his nephew Henry Barbour.During the campaign, a controversy arose when Barbour chose to speak at the Blackhawk Rally, a fundraiser for the Blackhawk "council school" in Blackhawk, Mississippi. Such "council schools", also referred to in Mississippi lexicon as "academies", were established by the White Citizens' Council movement in reaction to the demands for racial integration by the Civil Rights Movement. The Blackhawk rally was hosted by the Council of Conservative Citizens. A photograph of Barbour with CCC members appeared on the CCC webpage, and some commentators and pundits demanded that Barbour ask for his picture to be removed from the site, but Barbour refused. Barbour stated that "Once you start down the slippery slope of saying, 'That person can't be for me,' then where do you stop?... I don't care who has my picture. My picture's in the public domain." Barbour's Democratic opponent, then-governor Ronnie Musgrove, declined to be critical, stating that he had also attended Blackhawk rallies in the past, and would have done so that year except for a scheduling conflict. Historically, both Democrats and Republicans have participated in Blackhawk rallies.
Barbour defeated incumbent Musgrove in the general election on November 4, 2003, with 53 percent of the vote to Musgrove's 46 percent. Barbour became just the second Republican governor elected in Mississippi since Reconstruction, the first being Kirk Fordice.
Barbour took office in January 2004.
Fiscal matters
Barbour called several special legislative sessions to force a financial issue.Writing for Reason magazine in February 2011, Damon Root expressed the opinion that Barbour supports farm subsidies, corporate welfare, and eminent domain. When he took office, the state of Mississippi had run a $709 million budget deficit for the 2004 fiscal year. With bipartisan support, and without raising taxes, Barbour implemented a plan called Operation: Streamline to cut the budget deficit in half. He accomplished this largely by reducing spending on social services, most notably Medicaid; the 2005 budget drastically reduced coverage for 65,000 individuals classified as Poverty-Level Aged and Disabled, most of whom qualified for the federal Medicare program, and also significantly limited prescription drug coverage. However, the same budget increased the percentage of Medicaid prescriptions that are for generic drugs. In 2005, the state was budgeted to spend a total of $130 million less on Medicaid than in the previous year. This trend continued in the state budget for the 2006 fiscal year. After a long special session, the legislature approved a budget that featured more social service cuts but also increased educational spending. With tax revenues higher than expected during the 2006 fiscal year, due in large part to increased sales tax revenues in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the state achieved its first balanced budget in years. In the 2008 fiscal year budget, for the first time since its enactment in 1997, the state fully funded the Mississippi Adequate Education Program.
Building on a 2002 tort reform bill passed by his predecessor, Barbour also introduced a new tort reform measure that has been described as one of the strictest in the nation. Barbour rarely made a speech during his gubernatorial campaign without mentioning this subject and was able to convert political support into law, overcoming the resistance of House Democratic leaders, who argued that further legislation would disenfranchise people with legitimate complaints against corporations. Barbour then embarked on a "tort tour" to encourage other states to follow Mississippi's lead. "We've gone from being labeled as a judicial hellhole and the center of jackpot justice to a state that now has model legislation," commented Charlie Ross, the chair of the Mississippi Senate's Judiciary Committee.
The effectiveness of Barbour's tort reform efforts has been questioned. According to conservative journalist Timothy Carney, he "touts job growth down in Mississippi under his governing, and some of that is due to tort reform, but some of it is due to rank favoritism and special-interest deals more akin to Obama than Reagan — for instance, subsidies for a biofuels plant."
Through his entire terms, Barbour's Commissioner of Corrections was Chris Epps, who had been appointed on August 30, 2002 by Democratic Governor Ronnie Musgrove. Republican governors Barbour and Phil Bryant reappointed Epps on January 13, 2004 and January 11, 2012, respectively. On November 6, 2014, it was revealed by federal prosecutors in the FBI's Operation Mississippi Hustle sting that Epps and a confederate, former Republican state House member Cecil McCrory, had taken bribes from many for-profit prison operators, consultants, vendors and subcontractors for other prisoner services. The amounts Epps personally received were estimated to be at least $1.47 million in bribes for steering what Assistant US Attorney LaMarca estimated was $800 million in contracts between 2006 and 2014. Epps cooperated with the prosecution and wore a wire for a substantial amount of time before their indictments were made public. Before federal Judge Henry Travillion Wingate pronounced his sentence in July 2017, Epps asked forgiveness of the many he had harmed. He said, "It comes back to greed. I made some stupid mistakes I will regret for the rest of my life." Judge Wingate characterized Epps' conduct as, "staggering." He continued, "Mississippi is still in shock. It was an act of betrayal. He has bruised the image of Mississippi and given joy to many of the inmates he’s overseen who can now say the head of the state prison system was just as corrupt as any of them." He sentenced Epps to over 19 years in federal prison. On February 8, 2017, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, a Democrat, announced he had filed civil cases against 15 corporations and individuals who had engaged in contracts with the MDOC and Epps, seeking damages and punitive damages. He stated,
"The state of Mississippi has been defrauded through a pattern of bribery, kickbacks, misrepresentations, fraud, concealment, money laundering and other wrongful conduct." He continued, "These individuals and corporations that benefited by stealing from taxpayers must not only pay the state's losses, but state law requires that they must also forfeit and return the entire amount of the contracts paid by the state. We are also seeking punitive damages to punish these conspirators and to deter those who might consider giving or receiving kickbacks in the future."Defendants in the bribery cases included Management & Training Corporation; The GEO Group, Inc.; Cornell Companies, Inc.; Wexford Health Sources, Inc.; Global Tel*Link Corporation; Health Assurance, LLC; Keefe Commissary Network, LLC of St. Louis; Sentinel Offender Services, L.L.C.; AJA Management & Technical Services, Inc., and the Branan Medical Corporation; On May 18, 2017, Hood announced that the state had quickly settled the first suit for two million dollars. The defendant was Alere Incorporated, which had purchased the Branan Medical Corporation. Ten lawsuits in bribery schemes remained pending. Those have accused at least 10 individuals and 11 out-of-state corporations of using so-called "consultants" to gain more than $800 million in Mississippi prison contracts. On January 24, 2019, Hood announced his actions had recovered $27 million from those vendors against which he had filed suits. Management and Training Corporation paid $5.2 million. GEO Group paid $4.6 million, with the named defendant being Cornell Companies, which had been merged with GEO in 2010. Wexford Health Sources paid $4 million. Keefe Commissary Network paid $3.1 million. $3.1 million was paid by C.N.W. Construction Company. $750,000 was paid by CGL Facility Management, which provides maintenance services. $32,188 was received from AdminPros LLC, a Medicaid billing service. Insurance agent Guy E. "Butch" Evans paid $100,000.