Dr. Lampton: Your great legacy in Mississippi is from being a governor. Prior to your election, when you were looking at options of running for a political office, what made you choose being a governor versus running for the U. S. Senate?
Gov. Barbour: A couple of things. First of all, I had run against Senator John Stennis. If he had been 61 instead of 81, I would have voted for him. I went to the White House in the eighties and ran the political office in the White House for two years for President Ronald Reagan. What I learned when I was at the White House was that I had more power than about 90 Senators because of the way the government is organized. So, the idea of running for Senator, which candidly I did in 1982, because Trent would not, and of course Senator Stennis was so popular down in the Coast where Trent’s from, I could understand that. But, if you look at the <Thad> Cochran race, once Senator Eastland got out, he would win, and Eastland got out because of Democrats opposing. I always thought this same chance existed, and that that would happen with Stennis, but Trent didn’t think that it was the right thing for him. And, and of course, with the career that he’s had or he had, I can understand why he felt that way, but I learned a lot more about Washington. I quit practicing law in Yazoo City for all intents and purposes, and opened what is today the largest lobbying firm in Washington that’s not a law firm. And it has been for several years in a row. What is a decision? If I had been elected Senator in 1982, I would’ve missed most of the great things in my life. The political director of the White House, chairman of the Republican Party. The Republican Party came back and took control of Congress for the first time 40 years, and I became very close to George Bush. Candidly, I think it was even providential that I got elected governor because that’s when we had Katrina.
Dr. Lampton: Your specific skills are executive skills. I think your background as chair of the Republican National Committee emphasizes executive competence, which is one of your great legacies as governor.
Gov. Barbour: I appreciate that. I will tell you, politics is a team sport, whether you are an executive, the governor or president or director of the White House or the chairman of the national party. I have never been the head of anything where I haven’t had a great team, and that’s appropriate because politics is a team sport.
Dr. Lampton: How did things align for you to decide to run for governor in 2003? What were you thinking and when did you make that decision to run?
Gov. Barbour: That election was November of 2003. And I made the decision to run after the summer of 2002. At that time, I was speaking a lot, doing a lot of political work for Republicans and just about everywhere I went, people started encouraging me to run for governor for different reasons. I had never really thought very seriously about it. But some of the people that I respected the most thought I should think about it. And two of them were Trent <Lott> and Thad <Cochran>. So, you know, you don’t just run for the hell of it. The big issues involved with my decisions were issues that governor Musgrove was not going to address. In fact, he was going to make those issues worse. One of them was tort reform. And the medical world was very, very concerned about that. I used to say every small business in Mississippi is one lawsuit away from bankruptcy. Our civil justice system was that far out of control. Then I started watching the year before I ran for governor that the state budget was 20% funded by non-recurring revenue. So, we were spending 600 million dollars or so that there was no money in next year’s budget to continue. And you know, I’m a fiscal conservative. I just don’t believe that you can fund government on non-recurring revenue. Because you run out of money pretty darn quick. The federal government could print money. We can’t.
Dr. Lampton: You perceived that the business climate in Mississippi especially about liability was a significant deterrent of companies moving into the state. Some of the car companies hadn’t come here yet and wouldn’t be coming in. They were looking to come to Mississippi, but they weren’t coming here cause of the liability climate.
Gov. Barbour: There’s no question about that. Toyota told me. I, I developed a relationship with Toyota from their economic development people, and they just made it plain: We are not going to a place that is the jungle for litigation, that is too big a risk for us to take that we have no control over.
Dr. Lampton: What were the terms? Jackpot Justice. A judicial hellhole. Those were the terms that were used.
Gov. Barbour: The US Chamber gave us the name that we were a “judicial hellhole.” And I said in Mississippi we had “Jackpot Justice.” And I also said rightly that every small business in Mississippi is one lawsuit away from bankruptcy. It wasn’t just the big car companies. It wasn’t just the medical community. As we worked through how we were going to try to achieve this, it became plain that the place that it was felt most by the most Mississippians was in healthcare. In a county next to me, they closed the hospital. They didn’t close the emergency room. They didn’t close the obstetrics ward. They closed the hospital. Kosciusko, not far up the road from me, no longer was delivering babies. So, if you lived in Kosciusko, you had to go to Greenwood or Starkville or Yazoo City for your daughter to have her baby. There was a reason that the leading issue was medical, because it hit the most people and they couldn’t do anything about it.
Dr. Lampton: I do not know if Senator Charlie Ross used the term first or you used it first, but your team perceived the medical community as the “tip of the spear” in the tort reform war. Certainly, from a strategic perspective to battle tort reform, emphasizing medical, in order to take care of both medicine and business, was your strategy.
Gov. Barbour: Anybody can understand that if they close your hospital or your doctor quits delivering babies that’s a problem. There were lots of doctors in Mississippi who just retired; the liability risk was too large. A wonderful chest surgeon here in Jackson, Dr. Henry Tyler, quit practice. He quit operating, and he said it was because he couldn’t afford the tail of the insurance policy. He was sitting there with this long number of cases where he had done sophisticated surgery, and so he quit. He came back after we did tort reform.
Dr. Lampton: In 2001, St. Paul quit writing medical malpractice, and MACM became the only provider of medical malpractice in the state.
Gov. Barbour: What did MACM do about this? I’ll tell you what they did. They cut their rates once we had this judicial hell hole shut up for a while, and they cut the rates like 40% in first year. I should mention why. Because the number of lawsuits subsided greatly. If I remember right, in the first year, the number of medical malpractice lawsuits went down over a half.
Dr. Lampton: As you were beginning your campaign in 2002, tort reform was a major part of what you were campaigning on.
Gov. Barbour: I didn’t make a speech without talking about tort reform. If I went over to St. Joe Elementary School, I talked about tort reform and tried to explain to the kids, students, even grade school students, why this was important. Tort reform was the point of the spear, as you say. The other thing is big business didn’t have to have it explained to them. The CEO of Caterpillar called the Speaker of the House, Bill McCoy, a friend of mine by way, but he was the leader against tort reform, and he told him even though Caterpillar has six plants in northeast Mississippi, they would not consider opening another plant there until we did something about lawsuit abuse. And Toyota told me, we like the sites y’all can show us, but we’re not considering it until you have a better lawsuit environment.
Dr. Lampton: If you look at the political climate at the time and the infrastructure, plaintiff lawyers controlled everything, especially at the Legislature, and dominated the political culture.
Gov. Barbour: They were the biggest donors to the Democratic party. And a lot of people in the law profession were Democrats because of lawsuit abuse, you know, they were plaintiff lawyers. But there was more to it than that. If you remember the case from down at Fayette, where there was one drugstore in town and they ganged up and filed, I don’t know how many hundred cases together for Fen Phen. It was a Fen Phen case. Of course, what happened? The one drug store closed, but the plaintiff lawyers wouldn’t let the lady who owned it out of the lawsuit. You had some judges that were complicit. I don’t say they did anything illegal, but they just bent over backwards. I remember a case where there was an $80 million finding of noneconomic damages. There’s not any serious person in Mississippi who would consider that a rational amount.
Dr. Lampton: The tort reform battle in 2002, as it evolved, and in that special session that Ronnie Musgrove called, which I perceived as him trying to position himself to run against you with what was going on. What happened in 2002 with tort reform and what was passed in the Legislature? What is your take of that bill that was passed in 2002?
Gov. Barbour: Well, I thought at the time it was a charade. And I still do. I think it was done to try to pacify people who were half-informed. The trauma they had was the problem was in the minds of far more Mississippians than they realized and the problem had already set in and most Mississippians said, it is a problem, my problem. You could not go to the meeting of the school board, go to the meeting of the tennis club, or the meeting at the church without this being on people’s minds. It affected them, it affected their quality of life. The number of doctors every year started going down in Mississippi during this relatively short period of time.
Our view was that we had a good team around us that needed to make the case. Put the doctors out front, healthcare out front. Because it affected virtually every human being, and let’s let the business community pay for it and let’s let the business community be sure their employees understood why this affected them. I don’t remember how many hundred people Caterpillar had employed in Mississippi at that time, but I guarantee you Caterpillar in Illinois was making sure that their employees in Mississippi understood why it’s important to you. But secondly, we wanted to infiltrate the small business communities to make sure they understood the stake they had in this. And I can tell you these trial lawyers were doing this and leading this at the time. They understood you were a lot smarter to sue some small business that had insurance than to try to see if you can go toe to toe with Nissan. That’s a big toe!
Dr. Lampton: When you were elected and came into office in January of 2004, you felt the time was right to push and to accomplish everything needed, comprehensive tort reform, both medical and business.
Gov. Barbour: I grew up in Republican politics in Mississippi, and to be a Republican in 1968 in Mississippi, you had to be an optimist. When we looked at this deal, my team and my team included a lot of y’all, a lot of people in another community, the chamber of commerce, small businesses, and farmers. We decided that we couldn’t take our foot off the accelerator. I beat Musgrove by seven points and most of it was about tort reform and money. As I said earlier, the state was spending more money than we were taking in every year. He was gone. Why? He increased the Medicaid roles by a very large factor, and he never kicked anybody off Medicaid, even though there were legal requirements of what you have to do. That was his idea. I’m not mad at him, he just thought the more money he could push out into helping people than the better off he would be. He didn’t realize that people realize that money had to come from somewhere and for a lot of us it comes out of our pockets. So, we made the decision that in January, we were going to push hard for our agenda, particularly in the Senate. McCoy was very, very opposed to us in the House and was very resourceful, smart, understood the rules, and well liked. You know I always thought he was nice guy. We were just on different sides about this particular matter.
Dr. Lampton: You didn’t exactly have a friendly Legislature. I know there had been a lot of pro-tort reform people elected with you, so the climate was beginning to change, but McCoy had just taken office after Tim Ford. It was very much an old Democratic guard there.
Gov. Barbour: And he <McCoy> was very open about it. <Lt. Gov.> Amy Tuck, on the other hand, was wide open for tort reform even with a Democrat senate.
Dr. Lampton: Tuck had just left the Democratic Party and become a Republican when she ran.
Gov. Barbour: That’s right, she ran on the ticket with me, and she was for tort reform, she understood it cold. She did have a Democrat senate to control. She was dang good at control, and on the House we had a much bigger Democratic majority that made it harder and McCoy, who was a very wise student of the rules. We had stuff that we got out of the Senate by 20 votes and McCoy would never let him come up for a vote in the House.
Let me tell you a funny story. There was a legislator from up in northeast Mississippi, very near where Speaker McCoy is from, named Bill Miles. Just as nice a guy as you ever met. Democrat, chairman of the transportation committee, if I remember right. And we were doing some really hard work, but he was holding the line for McCoy and standing with McCoy and talking with McCoy. So, finally he received a call from the car dealer from his hometown <Fulton> named Buster Davis. Buster called him on the phone on Saturday night and told him, “Bill, if you vote against tort reform, we’ll kick you out of office.” And Bill starts explaining, and the conversation got hotter and hotter until Bill said, “We ain’t gonna just get even with you. We’re gonna kick you out.” Bam! He slammed the phone down. Miles calls him back. Buster just gives it to him again. Finally, he gets up the next morning and calls Buster back. Miles says, “Buster, I couldn’t sleep last night. You know, I coached your kids in Little League, and you taught my Sunday school class, and I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about you saying you’d kick me out of office over tort reform,” and Buster says, “You know what? I couldn’t sleep last night either. I couldn’t sleep worrying about you helping some slimy lawyer sue me and taking everything away from my children that I’ve worked all my life to get. So, we are going to kick you out.” Slam! Bill Miles then went to see the Speaker and told him what happened. He said, “Speaker, I can’t go with you anymore.” He was with us every time after that. It’s kind of a funny story, but that’s where the muscle came from, not from Toyota or Nissan or, or any of the big guns. It was the local businessman. The local guy who was in the ditch working, who was farming, or who was on the board of the local hospital. That’s who won at the end. But it was hard for them to get it by Billy. After that, he still was able to keep us from getting it out of the House.
Dr. Lampton: What happened in your first legislative session? There was a big effort for tort reform, right?
Gov. Barbour: Yeah. Passed the senate three times, and then there are a series of deadlines in the Legislature. They didn’t put them in place while I was there, but they’re common sense. But if the bill doesn’t pass one house by a certain deadline, it can’t pass the other one, then it’s dead. Well, this tort reform bill passed the Senate over and over, and they killed it in the house. There was another deadline by which it had to get out of both houses. And so, Billy, who’s a master at the rules, held it up. And so, as the session closed, we then tried to stop the Speaker from getting the votes to adjourn. And he was only able to adjourn by four votes. That encouraged me.
I’ll tell you another story. So, the Legislature ends two or three days before, and I get my team back together, including Marsha, my wife. We decided we had two choices. Bring them back for a special session or take May and June and spend X, Y, or Z amount of money and then call a special session. Well, my wife of now 51 years was very much in support of tort reform Back then she said, “If you are not going to call them back in special session, then we’re not going to Europe.” We were supposed to go on 16-day trip to Europe, and visit five ambassadors who were friends of mine and who had invited us to stay at their ambassador residences in London, Paris, Spain, and Italy. You can accomplish a lot quickly with such encouragement. So, I called them back in session.
What happened in the special session? Senate passed it. McCoy blocked it in the house. Senate passed it. McCoy blocked it in the house. But when he did that a second time in the special session, he started getting real unhappiness and fear among his team of legislators, fear that they were going to get beat at home because of this. And that was always our strategy: to try and make it about what people at home. Billy then asked me to come down to his office. He said he would like to give me a test vote. “Everybody’s getting tired of this and people are mad, so why don’t you give me a bill.” We left something out of it, at his request, I can’t remember what it was. We left something out of it that had been in the original bill, put it on the floor, passed two to one in the House. And then when it actually passed, when filed, passage was an even bigger majority.
Dr. Lampton: You had a conversation with him about doing this?
Gov. Barbour: Literally standing up at his desk, he said I want to give you a test vote because he knew he was running out of gas.
Dr. Lampton: Didn’t Ed Blackmon, who chaired the House Judiciary A Committee, say it’d be a cold day in hell before he would ever bring tort reform out of his committee?
Gov. Barbour: Ed worked very hard against it and was a very successful trial lawyer.
Dr. Lampton: There was a big group of people in the House that were saying no compromise at all.
Gov. Barbour: Billy <McCoy> was one of them for a long time, but they just got to where they couldn’t continue because their own people were getting so beat up in their home districts. Buster Davis wasn’t the only guy that could make a phone call on a Saturday night, I can assure you.
Dr. Lampton: In the House there was a conservative coalition of Democrats and Republicans that were supportive of you and also of tort reform. Sid Bondurant, Mike Lott, Jeff Smith, Jim Simpson. Were those some of the leaders?
Gov. Barbour: The lady from up in Northern Holmes County, real nice, real, real smart <Mary Ann Stevens>. She was a part of that. I did not want to organize the House and the Senate by party. Because look, I’m sitting there, and they got a majority vote. So, my idea was let’s take the House and organize caucuses, such as the conservative caucus. And, that was the tool we used my first term. And then by my second term, we actually won the majority of the Senate, 27 to 25. It wasn’t exactly a Babe Ruth homerun. But this was an important thing because the issue is important. It’s not a bunch of chatter. I don’t know if you remember, we had a TV spot by a lady whose husband was hurt in a car wreck and was taken to the nearby hospital in the Delta and the husband had a severely broken body and no surgeons were available to care for him, they having left the state because of lawsuit abuse. He had to be transferred to Memphis where he died.
Dr. Lampton: The turn really was Billy McCoy realizing that this issue was going to destroy the electability of a lot of his supporters. And you had a conversation with him. What, what else did y’all talk about in that conversation?
Gov. Barbour: Very short conversation. He wanted to give me a test vote and see if we could settle it or not.
Dr. Lampton: Do you think he was being honest and straightforward? Do you feel like you had won at that point?
Gov. Barbour: When you are the leader and most of your followers tell you they can’t go with you anymore, you have two choices: figure out something that could be called compromise or quit being the leader. Billy wasn’t a quitter.
Dr. Lampton: And you wanted the full package. You weren’t going to compromise on what it was about. Were you pleased with the final result?
Gov. Barbour: It seems to me that there were seven major elements, and there was one piece that we took out of the bill that was the test, and then I think the next year we put it in. This and the money were the two big things that I ran on. We talked earlier about non-recurring revenue. The other thing that I should, should clarify is between my election and my inauguration, I had a big economic summit with 1100 people invited, including every legislator. We invited tons of doctors and people from this and this, and all the business community. What should the administration focus on now? In politics, if you’ve made a big deal out of something in the campaign, this is your chance to make sure everybody knows you mean it and see who’s going to be there and who’s not. And the business community was totally powerful. I had Fred Smith come speak, the CEO of FedEx, born in Marks, Mississippi by the way. He really pitched hard. He and I had talked about this a couple times, improving the quality of the workforce was one of our problems which would improve economic development. The business community did not have enough confidence in the quality of our workforce or even in the ability of our workforce to learn the job. So, that was the third point of the deal. The legislature was very good on this issue. They let me take 30 million and place it in workforce training. Over the last 20 years, we have spent a lot on training, and it has paid off just enormously.
Dr. Lampton: Tort reform historically is probably the first great accomplishment of what I call the Barbour Revolution. What Reagan did at a national level, Haley Barbour did at a state level, and really the Barbour Revolution, which we’re still in, whether or not your successors are as competent executives as you are, has transformed Mississippi politics and really began with this tort reform success.
Gov. Barbour: Maybe it was a great propellant. I have to think back to the importance of when Trent Lott and Thad Cochran got elected to the House. A lot of people that had never dreamed of becoming Republicans were within six years of having a Republican bumper sticker.
Dr. Lampton: Let’s discuss the physician’s role. Tort reform engaged physicians in a way in politics that they hadn’t been engaged before. What was the significance of white coats at press conferences and you giving a press conference and there being a large number of people in white coats behind you?
Gov. Barbour: Maybe it’s because my great uncle was a physician from Yazoo City. He was very conservative and he knew this was something that had to happen. What you learned is most people admire their doctor. Most people admire the profession. Most people see the need for having a good hospital. Today, medicine has certainly changed a lot, but the view of the patient to the doctor has all of my life and even up to this day has been one of looking up to the doctor. So, when you like your doctor, when you look up to your doctor, and he tells you vote for Haley Barbour to enact tort reform, then they say, I’ll vote for him!
Dr. Lampton: One thing about tort reform, it had to pass the constitutional test in the courts after you won the battle in the special session. What was your concern about whether it would hold up in the court system in Mississippi?
Gov. Barbour: That’s a legitimate concern, and a lot of our listeners may not realize this, but there are states in the Midwest in particular that passed real tort reform and then the supreme court threw it out. Now listen to what I’m saying. The legislature passes legislation that applies to the supreme court, and the supreme court just says, well, that, that’s unconstitutional. It happened in Ohio and in Illinois. However, I felt very comfortable that this was not going to get stabbed in the back by the courts. Frankly, some of the judges on the court already had come to the conclusion that this needed to happen. You noticed venue. We changed the, law of venue. There are a number of states where the supreme court said that that’s not a legislative decision. Now, this is the law of Mississippi.
Dr. Lampton: The impact of tort reform on Mississippi. When did you began seeing it during your term as governor? Such as the ability to recruit significant businesses, etc.
Gov. Barbour: The retention of physicians was almost immediate. There was a group of physicians in Natchez that built a building across the river and had moved to Louisiana. I said, Lord God, if these people would rather than live in Louisiana than Mississippi because of the court system, then they have a really bad view of our court.
Dr. Lampton: Looking back, would you have done anything differently with tort reform?
Gov. Barbour: I don’t think so, Look at the big picture. First of all, we let everybody have their say, so we had a very good consensus among proponents. Now the trial lawyers, they were not going to give in until they saw the writing on the wall. And then some of them said, “Well, there are some changes that we could make that would be better.” My fraternity brother at Ole Miss, Dickie Scruggs, wrote a piece in some newspaper that said there are some things that ought to be changed. He wasn’t thinking along the same lines as we. I will tell you something else, after it happened, some of the big defense law firms weren’t as happy as they thought they were going to be because they lost a lot of business.
Dr. Lampton: Are you thinking anything else about tort reform that we need to discuss in looking back at the issue?
Gov. Barbour: What we passed is not only a comprehensive bill, it’s a very fair bill and it’s just part of our present fiscal responsibility. Governor Musgrove was running the state to a large degree on non-recurring revenue. We’ve pretty well stopped that. We need to always be certain that when we’re planning on building something, we know how we’re going to pay for it all the way to the end. It can’t be, you know, hopefully some money will come in. We have some of that going on in this administration, but the state’s been given enormous amounts of money that we don’t know if we’ll ever have come back.
Finnis