Running drush as regular user
I was able to get to the bottom of this problem.  When I ran drush in debug mode, for example "drush status --debug" it outputted an error that it could not connect to the database.  

After hours of digging for some reason on this particular cPanel server there were .my.cnf files in each user's home directory which contained mysql authentication details.  Drush was taking precedence on these credentials and in turn not able to connect to the particular Drupal install's database.  I simply did "rm -rf /home/username/.my.cnf to delete each of these hidden files, then running drush works!