Mississippi avoided a partial government shutdown today when lawmakers finally hammered out Tuesday — in the 11th hour — most of the state’s budget.

School districts, state agencies and Medicaid recipients may be wiping their brows today, but taxpayers should be a little nervous over the bum rush of a special session, in which almost $6 billion was allocated in three days.

Even though the budget process was unprecedented in its length, there’s a good chance that most of the state’s lawmakers couldn’t spell out the details of everything they approved. By the end, they just wanted to be done with it.

The protracted budget discussions, which included several recesses, initially were a legitimate reflection of the state’s financial uncertainty. Lawmakers and Gov. Haley Barbour had to gauge the seriousness of the economic downturn and figure out how much help they would get from the federal stimulus plan that Congress had hurriedly cobbled together.

After a while, though, justifiable procrastination became nothing more than a political game of chicken between Gov. Haley Barbour and House Democrats.

In the end, the House flinched, and Barbour largely got his way on the most contentious issues.

He was successful in restoring a hospital tax to help fund Medicaid without unduly tying his hands to make cuts in the program in the event of future shortfalls.

He also got a 25-cent tax enacted on smaller cigarette companies that have not been required to pay more than $100 million every year to Mississippi in settlement money from a 1990s lawsuit against Big Tobacco.

Barbour’s insistence on this tax was a curious turnabout for the Republican governor, who for years had opposed efforts to raise Mississippi’s ridiculously low 18-cent-per-pack excise tax on all cigarettes, regardless of brand. The state upped that rate to 68 cents in May, and the additional 25 cents on off-brand cigarettes is designed to make all brands cost roughly the same. The major tobacco companies pushed for this separate tax increase on their smaller competitors. It’s probably no coincidence that Barbour was once on Big Tobacco’s payroll as a lobbyist.

Whatever the governor’s motivations during the budget standoff, from a purely political standpoint, he demonstrated that he is unmatched when it comes to getting the Legislature to bow to his wishes.