U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator. A member of the Republican Party, he served Mississippi as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1973 to 1978. He then served in the U.S. Senate from 1978 until his retirement in 2018, at which point he was the tenth longest-served member in that body's history. Cochran headed the Senate Agriculture Committee from 2003 to 2005, and was chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee from 2005 to 2007, and then again from 2015 to 2018. Considered a moderate conservative in his time, Cochran was known to work across the aisle with Democrats. A determined advocate for his home state, he helped secure federal funds for Mississippi after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He supported the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act that was vetoed by President George W. Bush in 2006, and voted against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act which passed into law in 2010. In 2013, during a period with an increased volume of mass shootings and heightened debates about the Second Amendment, Cochran voted against a measure proposed by Senator Joe Manchin to expand background checks for gun purchases. Cochran, who was given an A+ rating by the National Rifle Association, was among fifty-seven senators who voted to undo the NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007, which Cochran believed infringed upon the constitutional rights of people with mental illnesses and disabilities to own firearms. Toward the end of his career, he endorsed American withdrawal from the Paris Agreement aimed at restricting climate change, and joined colleagues in requesting that President Donald Trump preserve the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and modernize it for the twenty-first century economy. In August 2018, four months after Cochran stepped down from the Senate due to diminished health, a federal courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi, was renamed for him.