Shifting South
This is the first installment of an occasional series by T he Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the political currents that define our region. Today’s story, by Washington-based staff writer Daniel Malloy, tackles Southern Republicans’ rising influence in the nation’s capital.
When Thad Cochran was first elected to the U.S. House in 1972, Republicans like him were an exotic species in his Mississippi home.
Across the Capitol, his state’s John Stennis and James Eastland were entrenched Democratic power brokers in the Senate, among several long-serving Southern committee chairmen.
Now in his seventh term succeeding Eastland, Cochran presides over the money-disbursing Appropriations Committee, as Southern Republicans have become nearly as dominant as the Southern Democrats of old.
The region and the Republicans it sends to Washington lean conservative, but so does the party as a whole. A closer look at Southern Republicans shows a group that runs the ideological gamut of the GOP itself, and its most powerful members have shown a penchant for deal-making and centrism.
Cochran, for example, built his career on bringing home federal money for Mississippi, which still is the poorest state in the country.
“I think we’ve earned a reputation for friendly persuasion and other characteristics of the Deep South that people find attractive,” Cochran said of his fellow Southern senators. “We have also some of the poorest people who live in our country are in the Mississippi Delta, and we’ve made great strides I think in bringing programs like Head Start and other education areas of emphasis to our state.”
Seated in his office, Cochran chuckled at the mention of the elements of his party that object to big federal spending on things such as education and who nearly toppled him in a primary election last year.
“We have to respect the views of the majority, but the good thing about the Senate is most everybody who serves in the Senate — representing an entire state — they have a broader base of interests and understand the importance of getting along and cooperating with each other,” Cochran said. “So I think there’s less concentration of just pet projects or activities. It’s much broader and bigger than that.”
‘Not that many barn burners’
In addition to Cochran’s Appropriations panel, seven more committees have Southerners at the helm, and new Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is from the border state of Kentucky.
The Senate’s seniority-driven chairmanship system is geared toward institutionalists who have been around a while, rather than younger firebrands such as U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
“It’s a very heterogeneous group of Republicans,” Ross Baker, a professor at Rutgers University and congressional scholar, said of the Southern chairmen. “And if anything, I think there’s a bias in the direction of bipartisanship and centrism. There are not that many barn burners among these chairmen.”
Among those known for working across the aisle is Georgia’s Johnny Isakson, the Senate’s only double chairman, in charge of the Ethics and Veterans Affairs committees. Another is U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who sits at the helm of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
The Southern worldview finds its way into his committee’s work, Alexander said, because Southern states are almost universally “right to work” states — with laws that significantly weaken unions by not requiring all workers in a union shop to join. Those laws helped spur the Southern shift of automobile manufacturers into Georgia, Tennessee and elsewhere.
Alexander also cited suspicion of the Common Core education standards in Southern states, though that has animated conservatives nationwide. He is seeking to rework the No Child Left Behind law this year.
“Culturally, we represent the values in our state,” Alexander said of his Southern colleagues. “We’re pro-life. We’re strong for national defense. We’re for limited government. We are skeptical of Washington control of local schools.”
‘We could get a little better representation’
In the House, Southerners are not as well placed, but they form the meat of the Republican caucus: Those 11 former Confederate states provide 101 Republican House members to 37 Democrats.
As a group, those Republicans lean more to the right.
In the last Congress, 67 Republican U.S. House members from former Confederate states scored higher than House Republicans' average in the closely watched Heritage Action for America conservative ratings, compared with 35 GOP Southerners who were average or below.
The South has one member in top leadership — third-ranking Steve Scalise of Louisiana. But a scandal involving a 2002 Scalise speech at a white supremacist conference has marred his public standing.
Tom Price of Roswell is among nine chairmen from former Confederate states, including six from Texas. In addition, Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers is from Kentucky.
Georgia’s Lynn Westmoreland has been among the advocates for increasing the South’s sway, given its sheer number of members. But his effort to get more Southern representation on the steering committee — the powerful group that doles out committee assignments — was tossed aside late last year.
“We represent about 43 percent of the (Republican) conference, and so I mean I’m not into quotas or percentages, but if you look at the number we have vs. how many people are actually on the steering committee, then I think we could get a little better representation,” Westmoreland said, counting Kentucky in his Southern total.
Southern House members get together for dinners once every six weeks or so at a Cajun restaurant. It's more about fellowship than building a Southern agenda, Westmoreland said, but there are distinctive characteristics for members from the region — reflecting their constituents.
“You look down there, it’s all red,” said Westmoreland, from Coweta County. “And so we think we are probably the heart of the conservatives in Congress.
“And so I mean there’s a lot of issues — smaller government, less taxes, more personal freedom, strengthening the family. Not things that are totally out of the realm of what’s on the Republican agenda. I just think it’s a little bit more deep-rooted in the South than other places.”
U.S. Rep. Rob Woodall, a fellow Georgian and member of the Transportation Committee, said in the forthcoming debate over a new highway bill, Southerners will have more interest in roads than rail and transit.
Yet Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Bill Shuster is from Pennsylvania, part of Amtrak’s well-traveled Northeastern Corridor.
Woodall said Southerners’ relative lack of chairmanships — Texas aside — and leadership posts reflects the fact that the GOP’s Southern dominance is a relatively recent development, and the newer Republicans need time to accrue seniority.
“It was just last Congress, after all, that two of the most important committees in Congress (Energy and Commerce, and Ways and Means) were both chaired by Michiganders,” Woodall said. “And that’s what the Congress looked like 20 years ago when those guys got here, but it does not reflect our Congress.”
‘Federal rights’ vs. ‘federal intrusion’
Their Congress is a reflection of partisan realignment that has turned the South from Democratic to Republican. It further solidified last fall with GOP Senate takeovers in Arkansas and Louisiana, and the defeat of Rep. John Barrow of Augusta — the last white House Democrat in the Deep South.
While the old conservative Southern Democrats united against bills to take down Jim Crow, the newer Southern Republicans are weighing a new generation of civil rights issues.
Take a proposed update of the 1965 Voting Rights Act after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the formula for federal "pre-clearance" of states' voting laws in 2013.
The bill did not go anywhere in the last Congress, though Southern House Republicans such as then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia and Spencer Bachus of Alabama were supportive of the idea. Both are now gone from the chamber. House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia stands in its way, but so does new Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa.
Many conservatives from across the country questioned any return to federal pre-clearance for new voting laws in the South, given the improvements cited by the Supreme Court. The bill’s advocates say local-level voting discrimination remains a problem that can only be remedied with strict federal oversight.
Deborah Vagins, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington office, called the voting rights opposition “more associated with party than region, perhaps.” She added that some Republicans are on board with restoring voting rights to felons or adding new equal pay protections for women.
“Civil rights is sort of a march toward federal rights, from the civil rights advocates’ perspective,” Vagins said.
“From opponents’ perspective, it’s federal intrusion. And so, if you’re speaking generally, sometimes you’ll see some states rights’ lens in Southern opposition. But it’s different now. You’ll see some of the Republican senators understanding that employment protections are a federal right that might mandate protections (on) private employers.”
And when it comes to appealing to female voters, Vagins added. “I think that overcomes any concern about states’ rights in some instances.”
The shift is part of a broader discussion within the Republican Party — even in states such as Georgia, where it dominates — about how to court a rising young electorate that includes more minorities. And it comes as migration patterns and mass media dilute the singular character of a region.
“The South is much more like the rest of the nation than it used to be,” Emory University political science professor Merle Black said. “Back in the heyday of Southern conservatism, it was almost like a separate nation. It’s not like that anymore.”
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