The Permanent Republican Majority, Part IV: How corporate-GOP interests sought to topple Democrats in Mississippi
Since the deregulations of the Reagan era, the electoral strategy of the Republican Party and the interests of the corporate lobby have become intimately entwined.
Karl Rove – President George W. Bush’s former Deputy Chief of Staff and campaign maestro – capitalized on this alliance in Texas in the early 1990's, when he made campaigning against "activist judges" a cornerstone of Republican victories. He then applied the same technique in Alabama, where he and Republican consultant William Canary began systematically working in 1994 to elect pro-business judges.
As reported in Raw Story’s The Permanent Republican Majority - Part One, Canary reemerged in 2002 as the advisor to Alabama Republican gubernatorial candidate and now governor, Bob Riley. Canary’s wife, Leura, meanwhile, used her position as the US Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama to investigate Riley’s Democratic opponent, incumbent governor Don Siegelman, helping ensure his defeat and leading to his prosecution on bribery charges, conviction, and imprisonment in 2007.
During the mid-90s, a serious of state lawsuits against the tobacco industry delivered a heavy blow to American business interests in the South.
Initiated by Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore, they sought compensation for the costs of smoking-related diseases. Other state attorneys general joined the suit, and eventually the industry was forced to settle, culminating in a Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement that exempted the tobacco companies from liability in exchange for a $246 billion dollar payment and other concessions – the largest settlement in US history.
Alabama, however, refused to join the lawsuits. The decision, by the state’s Republican governor and then-Attorney General William Pryor, led to a political firestorm.
The conflict was a major factor in then-Democratic Lieut. Gov. Don Siegelman’s election as governor in 1998. Almost as soon as Siegelman took office, however, Pryor initiated a series of corruption investigations against him. After the Bush administration took office in 2001, these state probes were elevated to the federal level at the hands of US Attorney Leura Canary. As reported in The Permanent Republican Majority – Part Three, Rove and Canary also helped promote the Siegelman investigations.
In neighboring Mississippi, meanwhile, the tobacco suit had produced several extremely wealthy trial lawyers, who became major funders of the local Democratic Party.
In 2003, a Bush-appointed US Attorney, Dunnica Lampton (above right), brought federal charges against one of those lawyers, plaintiff’s attorney Paul Minor, alleging that he had bribed a Mississippi Supreme Court Justice, Judge Oliver E. Diaz, Jr.
Just as in the case of Governor Don Siegelman in Alabama, when the first trial of Diaz failed to produce the desired result of removing him from his elected seat in 2005, fresh charges were brought almost immediately.
Diaz and Siegelman also shared the ire of tribal casinos. Siegelman’s attempt to introduce an Alabama state lottery to support education initiatives had ruffled the feathers of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who saw it as a threat to their interests, while Diaz stood against the Choctaws by ruling in favor of more regulation of tribal casinos.
Diaz himself had previously been the target of GOP-allied business interests during his 2000 election campaign, when the United States Chamber of Commerce ran issues advertising supporting his opponent.
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