Mississippi Today Editor-at-Large Marshall Ramsey sits down the one and only Malcolm White. White and Ramsey talk about this year’s Hal’s St. Paddy’s Parade, which will be held on March 23, 2024 with the theme of Telling the Mississippi Story. This year’s Grand Marshal will be Walt Grayson. The pair discuss what the future holds for Mississippi’s own party that’s a wonderful mix of St. Patrick’s Day parade and Mardi Gras. What does it take to put on a parade and keep it going? Malcolm tells it all.
A large majority of House members voted on Thursday to approve a plan that creates a process for people previously convicted of some nonviolent felony offenses to have their voting rights restored — the first of such a vote in Mississippi in more than a decade.
The House voted 96-11 to pass House Bill 1609, a bipartisan proposal to automatically restore suffrage to people convicted of nonviolent disenfranchising felonies after they’ve completed the terms of their sentence.
“It lets folks, five years after they’ve finished their sentence and satisfied all conditions, restore their rights … for folks that have cleaned their life up and gone straight,” House Speaker Jason White, R-West, told Mississippi Today. “It’s not about rewarding that, but it’s about recognizing it and placing them on that better path.”
Under the Mississippi Constitution, people convicted of any of 10 types of felonies lose their voting rights for life. Various opinions from the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office expanded the list of disenfranchising felonies to 23.
White, the first-term speaker, tasked House Constitution Committee Chairman Price Wallace, R-Mendenhall, and House Judiciary B Chairman Kevin Horan, R-Grenada, with coming up with a feasible plan to restore suffrage to some people convicted of nonviolent felons.
The House measure would allow people convicted of nonviolent offenses such as bad check writing and theft to regain their suffrage if they have not been convicted of another felony for five years after completing their sentence and paying any outstanding fines.
But people convicted of murder, arson, armed robbery, carjacking, embezzling more than $5,000, rape, statutory rape, bribery, perjury, human trafficking and voter fraud would still lose their voting rights for life.
Rep. Kabir Karriem, D-Columbus, has filed legislation for years to restore voting rights to people convicted of felony offenses, but it never gained major traction at the Capitol. Karriem called the bill’s passage a “historic moment” and thanked Republican leaders for working with him on the proposal.
“I think this bill restores hope as it makes its way through the process,” Karriem said. “It gives folks who have walked around with a scarlet letter on their chest for so long who have paid their debt to society a sense of hope.”
About 37,900 names are on the Secretary of State’s voter disenfranchisement list as of Jan. 29. The list, provided to Mississippi Today through a public records request, goes back to 1992 for felony convictions in state court.
That number, however, may not be fully accurate because no state agency tracks people once they are struck for the voter rolls. Studies commissioned by civil rights organizations in 2018 estimated between 44,000 and 50,000 Mississippians were disenfranchised.
The practice of stripping voting rights away for life from people originated in the 1890 Constitution, when white supremacist leaders intentionally tried to disenfranchise Black Mississippians or keep them out of elected office. With a justice system fully on their side, the white leaders at the time chose to include crimes they believed Black people were more likely to commit.
Rep. Cheikh Taylor, D-Starkville, who is also the current chairman of the Mississippi Democratic Party, said that while the practice has racist roots, he believes the bill’s passage debunks the notion that only Democrats and people of color are convicted felons.
“People suffer from these conditions in every village and hamlet in the state of Mississippi in all of our districts — and not just minority districts,” Taylor said.
The current process to have someone’s suffrage restored is burdensome. It requires a lawmaker to introduce a bill on an individual’s behalf, and two-thirds of lawmakers in both legislative chambers must agree. A person can also seek a gubernatorial pardon, though no executive pardon has been handed down since Gov. Haley Barbour’s final days in office in 2011.
The bill now heads to the Republican-majority Senate, where it may receive a frosty reception. The 52-member Senate on Wednesday voted 29-23 to reject a separate bill that would restore Second Amendment rights to people previously convicted of nonviolent felony offenses.
Senate Bill 2626 did not address voting rights, but it could serve as a barometer for how the Capitol’s upper chamber will address the House’s suffrage restoration proposal.
Sen. Jeremy England, R-Vancleave, said he voted against the proposal because he didn’t know enough information about the legislation, but he was open to reconsidering his vote.
“I’m sure even I have constituents who served their time … and would like to have this right restored,” England said.
Senators held the bill on a procedural motion, meaning they could debate the issue again at a later time and change their minds.
Senate Judiciary B Chairman Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall, and Sen. Rod Hickman, D-Macon, told Mississippi Today that they plan on working with their colleagues to address their concerns and reiterate what the legislation aims to accomplish.
“I think some people just didn’t understand what the bill was trying to actually do,” Fillingane said. “If you’ve completed the terms of your sentence, it was nonviolent, you haven’t committed another crime for five years, then what’s the problem?”
Mississippi Today is inviting college juniors and seniors with a passion for journalism to apply for summer internships.
The Mississippi Today reporting internship provides aspiring journalists the opportunity to work in a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom, and learn a multitude of skills that will prepare them for a career in mission-driven, public service journalism.
We are looking for interns who can easily jump into daily news and enterprise coverage — including reporting on critical topic areas such as government, healthcare, education, justice and climate — alongside our seasoned reporting staff.
Ideal candidates will have experience reporting and writing on deadline and an interest in learning more about data analyzation, reader engagement and trust building.
“Internships serve a vital role in an aspiring journalist’s development,” said Debbie Skipper, Justice and Special Projects Editor at Mississippi Today. “While university and college journalism and mass communications programs offer a firm foundation, nothing prepares a student for a professional career like on-the-ground reporting and working in an atmosphere surrounded by experienced journalists. And, selfishly, we need to prepare the next generation of journalists to provide the reporting necessary to keep the public informed.”
Among past interns is Alex Rozier, who has been Mississippi Today’s data and environmental reporter since 2017.
“Mississippi Today’s internship threw me right into the mix of local reporting, something that was hard for me to find just coming out of college,” Rozier said. “At a lot of other journalism internships, you get stuck doing data entry or transcribing interviews. But here I was immediately getting assigned stories to do by myself. Even though I was new to the state and much greener than my colleagues, I felt treated like an actual reporter, and like I was actually needed to fill holes in our reporting.
The paid, 10-week internship runs June 3 through August 12. Interested candidates can apply here. Deadline to apply is Friday, April 5. Additional questions? Contact HR Director Dylan Penny at dpenny@deepsouthtoday.org.
Lawmakers in Mississippi are moving to protect in vitro fertilization, but state Agriculture Commissioner, Baptist preacher and outspoken anti-abortion advocate Andy Gipson is calling it “the greatest assault on the cause of life that we’ve seen in Mississippi in a long time.”
Gipson, also an attorney and former longtime lawmaker, posted a video statement on social media Thursday morning, saying “Don’t let anybody tell you it’s IVF. IVF is already legal in Mississippi, perfectly legal.”
But IVF was “perfectly legal” in Alabama until an Alabama Supreme Court decision called it into question mid-February.
House Bill 1688, authored by Medicaid Chairwoman Missy McGee, R-Hattiesburg, outlines reimbursement for community health workers. But after a Feb. 16 Alabama Supreme Court decision declaring frozen embryos are children threatened IVF and other procedures there, McGee was successful in adding an amendment to the bill that would protect the right to assisted reproductive technology in Mississippi.
In Alabama, the IVF came under question when a couple pursued litigation after an unauthorized person got access to a storage room in a fertility clinic and accidentally dropped a dish of frozen embryos on the floor, destroying them. After weeks in limbo as fertility clinics shut their doors and paused treatment, Alabama has since passed legislation to protect the procedure that allows couples facing infertility to create families.
The series of events caused enormous public outcry across the aisle.
“There is nothing more pro-life than trying to conceive a child,” McGee said on social media and again in a recent committee meeting.
Gipson said in his statement the bill was modeled after a federal Democrats’ bill which, he said, created a precedent for “back door abortion and possible cloning and selling of ‘genetic materials of humans.’” But the bill does not mention either.
In the committee meeting where she added the amendment, McGee said the amendment aims to protect families who are trying to have a baby, protects individual rights to their genetic material and protects the provider in performing or assisting in IVF. There is an enforcement section which states that an individual or a provider may sue the state if they have been prevented from receiving or providing the procedure.
“The direction things have been going in the nation, especially with all that’s happening in Alabama has been a big concern to a lot of folks,” McGee said. “… there is really nothing more pro-life than a family trying to conceive a child that’s having difficulty in doing so and we want to protect those rights for our Mississippians who are going through that process.”
The measure passed unanimously with no debate in committee. It is expected to be brought to a full House vote before the March 14 deadline.
The divide between the Senate and the House over how to fund public education — specifically local school districts — intensified dramatically on Thursday, setting the stage for a potentially contentious remainder of the 2024 legislative session.
On Thursday, the Senate passed its public school funding plan with no senator voting no and two voting present. The Senate plan would update the long-standing Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP) that features an objective formula to determine the amount of money schools needs for their basic operation.
The House leadership, conversely, passed its plan on Wednesday. While it is still supported by a strong majority of the House, it lost support after its initial approval on Wednesday, when just 13 members voted against it. But on Thursday, during a vote on a procedural motion to send the bill to the Senate, 36 members voted against it.
Before the vote on the procedural motion, Rep. Robert Johnson, D-Natchez, the chamber’s minority leader, blasted the House Republican leadership in a fiery speech for providing members with what he said was incorrect information on the bill when it was debated Wednesday in the chamber. He said the Legislative Budget Office told him that the numbers used to determine the cost of the program and how much money each school district received were not developed by the staff of the Legislative Budget Committee as House leaders had told the chamber on Wednesday.
He said as far as he knew, the numbers in the House plan were “pie in the sky.”
“I don’t mind anybody having a good idea,” Johnson said. “I don’t mind anybody coming up with a new plan. But if I am going to rely on the information presented to me, ask me to vote on something and I ask a question, I don’t think it is right to misrepresent information to me.”
House Education Chair Rob Roberson, R-Starkville, the primary author of the House bill, called it a “miscommunication” and that the numbers that the Legislative Budget Office staff verified were from publicly available data from the Mississippi Department of Education.
Speaker Jason White, R-West, said during a news conference Thursday that he respected the Senate, but indicated that basing funding on an objective formula was a non-starter. He said the House plan placed an additional $240 million into public education and that it was more equitable for poor students than the plan passed by the Senate.
But Senate Education Chair Dennis DeBar, R-Leakesville, said on Thursday that the Senate plan, which will increase education funding by about $210 million, was based “on real numbers” compiled with the assistance of the Department of Education.
Plus, he said, “I think it is extremely important we have an objective formula that everyone (every school district) can run and know what they are going to receive,” adding that an objective formula “provides accountability for us.”
DeBar is hoping with the changes in the Senate plan that the Legislature would choose to fully fund the formula each year. The formula has been fully funded only twice since 2003. And past House leaders have tried to replace the MAEP because they said it cost too much money.
The House plan would create an advisory committee composed of education professionals to make a recommendation to the Legislature of how much money schools needed.
During debate in the Senate and the House on Thursday, there was specific mention of three advocacy groups working on the House rewrite plan: Mississippi First, Empower Mississippi and the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. Two of the groups, Empower and Mississippi Center for Public Policy, are vocal supporters of vouchers, while Mississippi First has been a charter school proponent. Some public education advocates oppose charter schools that are not held to the same laws and regulations as traditional public schools.
DeBar pointed out the three groups began working in January on a plan similar to the House proposal. House leaders said they have communicated with Mississippi First, but did not know the other groups were involved. Plus, Roberson added he was willing to work with everyone.
For the first time since 1953, Mississippi would not rely on an objective funding formula to determine the amount of money local schools needed under legislation that overwhelmingly passed the House by an 95-13 margin on Wednesday.
Under the “Investing in the Needs of Students to Prioritize, Impact and Reform Education” (INSPIRE) Act, a group of eight local superintendents and employees of the state Department of Education would make a recommendation to the Legislature every four years on how much state money should go to local school districts.
The INSPIRE Act, if it is agreed to by the Senate, would replace the Mississippi Adequate Education Program. MAEP was passed in 1997 to replace the Minimum Education Program that was passed in the early 1950s as the primary source of state funding for local school districts.
The Minimum Program provided funds to local school districts based primarily on the number of teacher units they needed. Under MAEP, that process was changed to provide funds per student, referred to as the base student cost. MAEP defines the base student cost as the amount of money spent in an efficiently run “adequate” school district to educate a child. Districts receive their base student cost times their average attendance. And an important caveat in MAEP is that poor districts receive more per student than do more affluent districts.
House Education Committee Vice Chair Kent McCarty, R-Hattiesburg, who spent about an hour and a half answering questions on the bill Wednesday, told House members that INSPIRE was much more equitable than the MAEP.
“We have a bill that puts more of an emphasis on equity than anything you have ever seen,” said House Education Chair Rob Roberson, R-Starkville, who is the primary author of the legislation.
Under the bill, there would be a base student cost — $6,650 — which is about $800 less than MAEP if fully funded. But the schools would receive significantly more money than the $6,650 per student for children who are deemed as needing additional funds to be educated, such as poor students, special needs students and others. In the end, the total funding for the new House plan would be slightly less than the total funding for MAEP if fully funded.
But MAEP has been fully funded only twice since 2003, and McCarty said there is no appetite by House leaders to fully fund MAEP this year. Many legislative leaders have complained in recent years that the state could not afford full funding while saying at other times the formula was outdated and too complex to fund.
McCarty pledged that the INSPIRE Act would be fully funded this year — an additional $240 million for education — or he would vote against it later in the session. Rep. Bryant Clark, D-Pickens, said he feared that in the future, lawmakers would not fund INSPIRE just as they have not fully funded MAEP.
In the end, Clark voted present along with 13 others. The school district in his home county of Holmes, one of the poorest counties in the state, would receive about 25% in funding more than it received for the current year. Clark said he was torn on the bill.
“When you look at the bill, it has a lot of good things that would benefit my area – providing more help for low income students,” he said. But he added he is concerned that the bill leaves it up to people instead of an objective formula to determine the amount of money school districts receive, and that in future years the current funding levels would not continue.
Some wealthy districts, such as Rankin and Madison counties, will receive less funding under INSPIRE.
Rep. Jill Ford, R-Madison, said she voted for the legislation because she thought it was a better funding formula and that the reduction for her county would be phased in over three years. Plus, she said, Madison is getting the new Amazon Web Services data center that will add to its tax base.
“I think we will be all right.” she said.
Rep. Fred Shanks, a Republican who represents Rankin County, said he thought by the time that the three-year phase-in of the cut to his school district is complete, growth in funding in the formula would offset the reduction.
The House bill now moves over to the Senate, where it faces a Republican leadership that appears to this point more intent on tweaking and fully funding MAEP than scrapping the current formula and passing a new one.
Mississippi Today is seeking an energetic and enthusiastic student to spend a summer in our newsroom as part of our paid internship program.
Mississippi Today immerses students in journalism with real-world work, training and connection-building with working journalists.
Interns have the exciting opportunity to pursue reporting in the field, to learn the systems and tools used by media professionals and to serve as a critical part of our community news team.
Areas of focus for interns may include reporting, writing, photography, social media and videography.
Internships are offered for a 10 week period starting on June 3, 2024 through August 9, 2024.
We welcome students from a broad range of majors and areas of focus. Applicants must be able to demonstrate strong communication skills, both verbal and written.
Interns often have the opportunity to pursue work in the field, and are responsible for their own transportation to news assignments. Knowing your way around Mississippi is a plus, but not required.
Interested candidates should apply below. Be sure to include a copy of your resume and any clips you have available.
Requirements:
Current College student (junior or senior preferred)
Laptop that can be used for writing assignments
A valid driver’s license, and proof of insurance, is required.
Mississippi Today is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity at our company. We encourage applications from all qualified candidates, regardless of race, religion, national origin, gender, age, disability, or veteran status.
Inflamed by lack of investigation or enforcement of what he claimed were flagrant campaign finance violations by his opponent, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann after winning his reelection primary last summer vowed to push for reform.
Secretary of State Michael Watson, who said his hands were legally tied on dealing with such complaints, also vowed to push for reform and more authority for his office to police the flow of money into Mississippi politics.
On Tuesday the Senate Elections Committee moved forward a bill authored by Elections Chairman Jeremy England, R-Vancleave, one of Hosemann’s top lieutenants. The “omnibus” bill would give Watson’s office more power, add transparency for voters, increase penalties and fines and allow the secretary of state’s office to sidestep the AG’s office if it refuses to go after bad actors (which has been the current AG’s MO).
But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in the Senate Elections Committee viewed the measure with a gimlet eye. They immediately axed its main transparency component, and added a “reverse repealer” to it, ensuring it cannot be passed into law as is. Only then did they send it along to the full Senate.
Mississippi lawmakers have long been loathe to expose themselves to transparency or strict ethics, lobbying or campaign finance rules and enforcement. The Legislature, for example, exempts itself from the open records and meetings laws it forces on others in government.
Mississippi’s campaign finance laws and reporting requirements are lax, and enforcement is nearly nonexistent. These laws have been piecemealed over many years, and the resultant hodgepodge is a confusing, often conflicting set of codes.
Hosemann said he wants an overhaul, and England’s bill covered many fronts, including creating a felony crime of perjury for willfully filing false finance reports, and a requirement that Mississippi join the modern age with candidates filing reports electronically and the secretary of state providing a publicly searchable database of campaign finance reports.
“This goes to the heart of the electoral process in this country,” Hosemann said on Monday. “Our founding fathers said the best thing we can have is an informed voter, and to have an informed voter you need to know who’s paying for what, who’s contributing to these candidates.”
Most other states, including all those surrounding Mississippi, have searchable databases of campaign contributions. For instance, a voter could type in a donor’s name and see to whom and how much that donor has given. While Mississippi’s SOS office has online campaign finance records, they are non-searchable PDFs — essentially pictures of pages — and candidates are still allowed to file paper, handwritten — even written in crayon — campaign finance reports.
Watson has advocated creating a searchable database, and lawmakers are expected to approve about $5 million in funding for a new SOS computer system. England’s bill would have required a searchable database and candidates to file electronically by 2027.
But Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, said requiring Mississippi candidates to use such technology — either filing electronic reports or filling out online report forms — would be too onerous. He said this would prevent those who don’t have computers or cannot use them from running for office. He noted many areas of the state still lack high-speed internet service.
Bryan offered a successful amendment to strip the requirement for candidates to file campaign finance reports electronically.
Bryan and others also voiced trepidation about measures in the bill to aid investigation and prosecution of campaign finance violations. The measure, England said, changed a lot of “mays” about investigation and prosecution into “shalls.” It also says the secretary of state’s office, after it reports potential violations to the attorney general’s office, can hire outside counsel, engage a district attorney or find a special prosecutor if the AG’s office refuses to act.
“We are trying to clear up gray areas,” England said. “… so we don’t have situations where we don’t know who’s responsible to do what.”
But Sen. Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall, said he fears this would amount to “shopping for a prosecutor who’s willing to prosecute … almost like fishing for prosecution.”
Bryan said, “I worry we are weaponizing the filing of complaints” against candidates.
After numerous critical questions about the measure, Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, successfully offered an amendment to add a “reverse repealer” to the bill. This says the bill repeals before it could take effect, meaning it could not be passed into law without further scrutiny and work.
“Our laws can use a tune-up from time to time, but there are a lot of questions on this,” Blount said. “Let’s just keep working on this bill.”
England said that despite the rocky start, “I think we’ll get something out this year,” even if all the proposed reforms don’t make it. As to the searchable campaign finance database like other states have, he said, “I think we will eventually see that added back, just maybe not this year.”
The House this session did not have an omnibus campaign finance reform bill, but had several smaller measures. Most died without a vote in committee with Tuesday’s deadline.
New House Speaker Jason White, who in the past has championed some campaign finance reform measures, said he is open to such legislation.
“One specific thing lots of lawmakers are talking about is how we can better enforce the laws we have on the books now,” White said recently. “Also, transparency and searchable information that is easily accessed and available to the public is another potential place we could improve.”
It would remove the state Ethics Commission from campaign finance duties. The commission, spartanly staffed and funded, had been given some oversight over campaign finance reports, but the law was unclear on its authority, and conflicted with other laws still on the books. Hosemann said the secretary of state and attorney general offices have more staff, attorneys and expertise to deal with the regulations and laws.
The bill would increase criminal penalties for willful violations of campaign finance laws from up to $3,000 and six months in jail to up to $5,000 and a year in jail. It would create a felony penalty of perjury for willfully filing false campaign finance reports. It would also increase fines and penalties for administrative violations, such as failing to file campaign finance reports timely.
It would define coordinated expenditures and electioneering, seeking to prohibit third parties spending to help candidates but claiming they are acting independently and not following contribution limits and cut down on millions in “dark money” that has begun flowing into Mississippi elections.
Would clearly define corporations and clarify that corporations both in state and out of state are limited to contributions of $1,000 a year. Recently, AG Lynn Fitch said state law is not clear on the definition of a corporation, and she opined that out-of-state corporations don’t face the $1,000 limit — contrary to decades of interpretation of Mississippi’s law and practice.
Would require candidates to list the name, address and occupation of a donor. It would also give the secretary of state authority to check reports to make sure they are complete and appear accurate. Under current law, the secretary’s office is simply a repository, and has little oversight on whether reports are accurate and complete.
