Jim Herring

James Harrell Herring, Sr., known as Jim Herring (born 1938) is a lawyer in private practice from his native Canton in Madison County, outside the capital city of Jackson in the U.S. state of Mississippi. From 1997 to 1999, he was a judge of the Mississippi Court of Appeals and from 2001 to 2008 the state chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party.

Background

In 1960, Herring received a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Mississippi at Oxford, where he joined Phi Delta Theta fraternity. In 1963, he obtained his Juris Doctor from the University of Mississippi School of Law. He served in the United States Army for three years of ACTIVE duty as a member of the Judge Advocate General's Corps. For another twenty-one years, he was an Army reservist, in which capacity he reached the rank of colonel. He received the Army Commendation Medal and three Meritorious Service medals.

Herring and his wife, Beverly, have a son, James, Jr., and daughters, Caroline and Christine. He is an elder in the Grave Chapel Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Canton.

Political career

A former prosecuting attorney for Madison County, Herring was elected as a Democrat in 1971 as the district attorney for the 20th Circuit District of Mississippi. On August 7, 1979, Herring ran for governor of Mississippi and polled 135,812 votes (18.4 percent) in the Democratic primary election. The nomination went to William F. Winter, who defeated Evelyn Gandy, the lieutenant governor, who carried the backing of former U.S. Senator James O. Eastland, in the runoff election. Winter then handily defeated Republican Gil Carmichael of Meridian in the general election in what became Carmichael's second consecutive defeat for the state's highest office.At some point after 1979, Herring defected to the Republican Party.

In 1996, Governor Kirk Fordice, the first Republican chief executive in his state since Reconstruction, appointed Herring to the Mississippi State Personnel Board. In 1997, Fordice named him to the state Court of Appeals, in which a capacity, he participated in more than one thousand legal cases. Governor Haley Barbour named him a special judge of the Mississippi Supreme Court.

Herring's state party chairmanship led to high positions at the national level too. He has been a member of both the Executive and Rules committees of the Republican National Committee. Through an appointment from the national party chairman, he has been the "Chairman of the Chairmen" of all state and territorial Republican parties. U.S. President George W. Bush appointed Herring to the trustees of the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation for a six-year term. He was also vice chairman of the foundation board. He is a board member of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. In 2012, he headed the transition team for incoming Republican Governor Phil Bryant.

Herring considers himself an advocate of the Eleventh Commandment, promoted by former President Ronald W. Reagan:

I have always preached Ronald Reagan’s "Eleventh Commandment" when speaking to Republican groups (“Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican”), because I know that acrimonious public discord between Republican elected officials and/or candidates during the primary season is like manna from heaven to Democrats and to liberal news media types who are always looking for a good story on how Republicans are “breaking ranks” or fighting among themselves on some issue or another.
There is, of course, no way that elected Republican officials (or their staff members) are going to agree on every issue, nor should they, when seeking solutions to problems that affect every American or Mississippian. What they should do, however, is choose their words carefully when publically disagreeing with each other. They must realize that the Republican movement is more important than any of them and that when they disagree violently, they do damage to the movement that is the last great hope to preserve America as we have known it – the land of the free and the home of the brave. I recall the words of none other than the venerable Governor Haley Barbour at a “note-burning party” we had a few years back when we paid off the debt on our Republican Party headquarters building in Jackson. On that occasion he said: “Governors come and go; the Party goes on forever.”