At some point during the quickly approaching 2026 session of the Mississippi Legislature, House Speaker Jason White will meet behind closed doors with his two-thirds Republican supermajority and ask those members to vote for some form of school choice legislation to provide public funds to private schools while requiring little to no accountability and oversight.

It is the modus operandi of White to meet on the public’s business, including expending public funds, behind closed doors before taking pivotal issues to the full House for debate and a final public vote.

But in the 2026 legislative session, which begins in early January, White could be meeting behind closed doors without the hammer he has previously possessed.

The leadership of the Legislature has long held the hammer over members’ political heads of the so-called special projects bill that is routinely one of the last items passed at the end of each session. The bill provides funds – often totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars – to pay for projects back home. 

Members who buck the leadership on key votes run the risk of not having their town’s main street repaved or lights placed on their local baseball field. Such projects are routinely funded via a single line tucked in a bill totaling hundreds of pages where scores of other similar local projects are included. The projects bill is normally closely overseen by House Ways and Means Chairman Trey Lamar, who is one of White’s closest allies.

It is normal to see members, with eyes squinting, perusing the massive bill, looking for their project as the legislation is unveiled during the final hours of the session. 

It is important to understand that for many legislators – especially House members – that special project is more important than phasing out one-third of the state revenue stream as they did with a big tax cut in the 2025 session or sending public funds to private schools with no accountability mechanism as is being proposed in 2026.

But the process of passing the tax cut last year might have changed the dynamic. The fight over reducing the revenue stream over time by one-third was so contentious between the House and Senate that the special projects bill did not pass. It got caught up in the battle.

After arguing all session about the tax cut, which eventually passed in a flawed form, the Senate refused to take up a special projects bill. After such a large cut, Senate leaders said the state could not afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on special projects.

So, it is possible, maybe likely, that some House members who opposed the landmark tax cut legislation voted for it, anyway, with the understanding they would get a special project.

They didn’t, though.

Could that occur again in the 2026 session as a result of a heated debate over whether to spend public funds on private schools?

Would the Senate leadership have the gumption to eschew a special projects bill again? After all, senators like special projects, too.

And would rural House members in areas of the state where there are no private schools of any note vote to take public funds that could be going to their local district and send their taxpayers’ money to a private school in some metropolitan area that their students have no way of attending?

This session, those issues might be debated. The initial discussion, though, will be in a closed-door meeting of the two-thirds Republican supermajority of the Mississippi House.