[Editorial]  Stop Barbour’s Power Grab

November 11, 2009

Gov. Haley Barbour does have gall, you have to hand him that. Since he came home from Washington, D.C., in 2003 to serve as Mississippi's governor, he has reconfigured the balance-of-power at the state capitol. The Mississippi Senate, which ironically has been majority Democratic on his watch֖at least in name֖has become essentially an extension of the governor's mansion.

That has left the Mississippi House of Representatives to try to balance out the former lobbyist's efforts to impose extreme-right ideology on the state, as well as make Mississippi as corporate-friendly as possible, regardless of the effects of his actions on the people of Mississippi, our health and our pocketbooks.

One way Barbour's power grab has played out is in his habit of calling expensive special sessions when he doesn't get his way from the Legislature in the regular session. He then uses a compliant corporate media, and takes advantage of the fact that so few newspapers around the state cover the Legislature any more, to pretend as if it is his opponents who are costing the taxpayers money. He then pressures them into doing his bidding.

What's frustrating is that Barbour does this kind of bullying right in plain view, and gets called out on it so seldom (except in the JFP). It's much like the absurdness of his going on the national circuit and pretending that his tort-reform crusade has helped Mississippi and our doctors, when all non-partisan studies have proved that not to be the case.

Now, Barbour is power-grabbing again as he approaches the lame-duck days of his second term and tries to figure out how to get back in power in D.C. In an even more blatant move, he now says he wants the power to cut the budget 10 percent without approval of the Legislature.

This is unconscionable. The governor wants the ability to slash and burn his way out of Mississippi—clearly targeting the kinds of programs he makes no secret of despising: the ones designed to help the people of Mississippi get a leg up and out of poverty. He doesn't have to make fun of Headstart kids on piano benches for us to know what this would mean for one of the country's neediest states. In fact, as chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1996, Barbour literally wrote the book on his vision for America: "Agenda for America: A Republican Direction for the Future." Read it and weep.

It is that very vision that put the country where it is right now: in a mess. The last thing Haley Barbour needs is more power to inflict bad policy on our state. The Legislature must hold firm against his power grab.

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