The U.S. Department of Justice has asked to join a lawsuit challenging House Bill 1020, arguing the appointment of judges to the Hinds County Circuit Court and creation of a new separate court system in Jackson is racially discriminatory and unconstitutional.
Those appointments, which would be made by the state’s white Supreme Court chief justice, and the Capitol Complex Improvement District court shift authority of the criminal justice system away from Hinds County voters, which violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, according to the department.
“This thinly-veiled state takeover is intended to strip power, voice and resources away from Hinds County’s predominantly-Black electorate, singling out the majority Black Hinds County for adverse treatment imposed on no other voters in the State of Mississippi,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.
The federal government has an “unconditional statutory right” to intervene in litigation under a federal statute, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to intervene in cases seeking relief from alleged denial of equal protection, according to the Wednesday court motion filed by the federal government.
Intervention in the NAACP lawsuit will allow the DOJ to bring claims against Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who is a defendant in the lawsuit, and the state of Mississippi.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson, a Jackson resident who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said the DOJ’s intervention will help hold state leaders accountable for the laws they passed that undermine the vote and voices of Black Mississippians.
“When our state leaders fail those they are supposed to serve, it is only right that the federal government steps in to ensure that justice is delivered,” he said in a statement.
U.S. District Court Judge Henry Wingate will decide whether to allow the DOJ to intervene.
He has temporarily blocked HB 1020 from going into effect – specifically the appointment of four judges – until he decides whether to approve a preliminary injunction.
The defendants have argued in court hearings and documents that the intention of HB 1020 was to address violent crime in Jackson and help a backlogged court system in Hinds County.
In the Wednesday court filings, the DOJ specified that it will challenge parts of HB 1020 but not Senate Bill 2343.
A challenge to that law, which expands the boundaries of the Capitol Complex Improvement District and requires state permits to hold demonstrations by governmental buildings in Jackson, was consolidated with the HB 1020 lawsuit last month. Another challenge to HB 1020 has made it to the Mississippi Supreme Court from a lawsuit that argues the law violates the state constitution by preventing Hinds County residents from electing its circuit court judges. It also says the court created by the law doesn’t meet constitutional requirements.
Mississippians will soon see a lot more of the state’s two leading candidates for governor as Democrat Brandon Presley and Republican Gov. Tate Reeves unveiled new television ads on Tuesday.
Presley began airing his first TV ad of the 2023 campaign cycle, a minute-long video detailing the struggles his family faced while growing up poor in rural Mississippi — a common message he’s pushed throughout his campaign.
“For years my mama worked at this sewing factory,” Presley said in the ad. “She grinded out each day with hands eaten up by arthritis. Those hands prayed for us nightly and loved us always. She was our rock and never let us feel as poor as we really were.”
The ad goes on to reiterate the Democratic candidate’s support for expanding Medicaid to the working poor, reducing the sales tax on food and lowering fees for state car tags.
Brandon Presley’s new TV ad that began airing on July 11.
Given his low name ID in central and south Mississippi, television ads for Presley, who has served 15 years as north Mississippi’s utility regulator, will be crucial to his quest in trying to oust Republican Gov. Tate Reeves from office.
Reeves on the same day released his third TV ad of the year, a 30-second clip featuring one of his daughters playing soccer and touting his support for laws that bar transgender youth from competing in sporting events.
“Now, political radicals are trying to ruin women’s sports, letting biological men get the opportunities meant for women,” Reeves said. “We have to draw the line here in Mississippi, and as your governor, you know I will.”
Reeves, running for a second four-year term as governor, has used anti-trans rhetoric throughout his campaign and highlighted his efforts to prevent trans athletes from competing in women’s sports.
“You see in Mississippi we decided we’re going to let boys play boy’s sports, and we’re going to let girls play girl’s sports,” Reeves said earlier this month in Alcorn County.
The first-term governor in 2021 signed legislation into law prohibiting trans athletes from playing in women’s sports. Republican Sen. Angela Hill of Picayune authored the legislation and said at the time she did not know of any specific instances of trans athletes trying out for women’s sports in Mississippi.
Tate Reeves’ new TV ad that began airing on July 11.
The Mississippi Division of Medicaid removed 29,000 Mississippians from its rolls, marking the first wave of disenrollments as the agency reviews eligibility of its beneficiaries after the end of pandemic-era protections.
As disenrollments continue, the leader of an organization tasked with serving as one of Medicaid’s community partners doesn’t think the agency is doing enough to get the word out about redeterminations.
Roy Mitchell is the executive director of the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program, an organization aimed at improving health policies in Mississippi that was chosen as a community partner for Medicaid in increasing public awareness about redeterminations.
Mitchell’s organization has received materials from Medicaid to spread the word about redetermination, but he thought there would be more coordination between the two groups.
Instead, communications with Medicaid have been sparse, he said.
“Even though we’ve enlisted in this, we get emails maybe once a month,” Mitchell said. “Right now, communications with the community and advocates should be stronger than it’s ever been. Now is not the time to go radio silent in the middle of this complex process that could have grave health and financial consequences for Mississippi families.”
Division of Medicaid spokesperson Matt Westerfield did not respond to Mississippi Today’s questions about the amount of emails, letters and other forms of outreach that have been disseminated since the inception of the agency’s “Stay Covered” campaign to bring awareness to the end of the federal COVID-19 emergency and ensuing redeterminations. He also did not answer questions about the demographic breakdown of the people who were disenrolled or how many people the Mississippi Division of Medicaid estimated would ultimately lose coverage in total.
Mississippi Today also asked Medicaid Executive Director Drew Snyder for a sit-down or phone interview with a Medicaid employee who could answer questions about the unwinding process. Snyder did not respond by the time of the story’s publication.
Mississippi is one of only three states that does not have Medicaid online accounts as of January 2023, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Medicaid is a federal-state program that provides health insurance for low-income people. State Medicaid agencies, which administer the program, were prohibited by federal law from removing people from its rolls starting March 2020 during the COVID-19 public health emergency.
Mississippi Medicaid enrollment increased by 187,894 people, or 26%, from March 2020 to June of this year, the agency said in a press release Monday.
In Mississippi, long one of the poorest states in the nation, last month was the first time in Medicaid’s history that its rolls went over 900,000.
The agency in April began examining the records of 67,695 Mississippians whose coverage would be up for review in June. It found that 29,000, or 43%, were no longer eligible. That’s about 3% of the agency’s total June enrollment.
Many of them could be children — kids in low-income families make up more than half of Mississippi’s overall Medicaid beneficiaries.
About 60% of the 29,000 who were removed from Medicaid’s rolls had remained insured during the pandemic because of the extended eligibility rules, according to the agency.
In its press release, Medicaid said if beneficiaries believe they have been disenrolled in error, they can appeal the determination. If disenrolled because beneficiaries didn’t provide information required to remain enrolled, once that information is provided, that coverage may be reinstated.
Westerfield said people whose membership could be not automatically re-enrolled were mailed renewal forms in mid-April. They had 30 days to complete and return that paperwork — if they didn’t, they were disenrolled, and have 120 days to be reconsidered without a new application.
Mississippi Medicaid’s “Stay Covered” campaign used outreach efforts including postcard mailing, text and email blasts and flyers to inform Mississippians about the redeterminations and the importance of updating their contact information.
Mitchell has been monitoring the disenrollment process closely and said awareness could be aided by “genuine interaction” and collaboration between Medicaid and its community partners.
As an increasing number of Mississippians are disenrolled, Mitchell said it will put further stress on the state’s already-strained hospital system, especially in a non-expansion state such as Mississippi.
One report puts a third of the state’s rural hospitals at risk of closure, and Republican state leaders have long opposed expanding Medicaid to the working poor.
“More Mississippians will join the ranks of the uninsured,” Mitchell said. “And a lot of people may not know their eligibility status until they show up to a provider, and that’s a concern.”
Redeterminations will continue for a year. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that up to 24 million people nationally could lose Medicaid coverage during the unwinding.
Over 100 middle and high school students visited the University of Mississippi Medical Center for a program aimed at attracting Black men to health care fields.
Mississippians convicted of certain felonies have few options to regain their voting rights — a standard practice in most other states — after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up a case attempting to end the lifetime ban on voting.
The nation’s highest court, by a 7-2 vote in late June, refused to hear a Mississippi lawsuit arguing that the state’s lifetime ban on voting for people convicted of certain felonies was unconstitutional. Racist white lawmakers in 1890 who wrote the provision into the current Mississippi Constitution said plainly that they adopted it to keep African Americans from voting.
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Mississippi case, the state remains in the minority as one of fewer than 10 to impose a lifetime ban on voting for people convicted of felonies.
It also appears efforts to remove the ban through the courts have been exhausted. Legal advocates who have long been fighting the Jim Crow provision are now turning their focus to the only viable solution left: the legislative process.
“At a time when most states have repealed their disfranchisement laws, we need to remove from Mississippi’s Constitution this backward provision that was enacted for racist reasons,” said Vangela M. Wade, the president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice, which helped craft the lawsuit that was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Here in the 21st Century, just and reasonable minded people must not allow this outdated relic of the 19th Century to stand or define a new Mississippi. The Legislature now has the duty to begin the repeal process.”
The most obvious way to repeal the lifetime ban is to amend the Mississippi Constitution. There is currently one way to amend the Mississippi Constitution: the Legislature, by a two-thirds vote of both the House and Senate, must pass a resolution proposing a change. Then, voters on a statewide ballot must approve that change.
Florida voters recently approved a repeal of that state’s lifetime ban on people convicted of felonies being able to vote. But in Florida, the proposal to repeal the lifetime ban was done through a voter ballot initiative instead of through the Legislature.
Mississippi, though, no longer has an initiative process, which allows voters to gather enough signatures to bypass the Legislature and place an issue directly on the ballot. Mississippi’s voter initiative was struck down by the state Supreme Court in 2021, and the Legislature, despite repeated promises from its leaders, has refused to pass a resolution to restore the process.
There is a way for disenfranchised voters to have their voting rights restored under the current Mississippi Constitution. But that process is rarely used and incredibly cumbersome. The Legislature, by a two-thirds vote, can restore voting rights. Historically, the Legislature has restored the rights one person at a time by passing individual resolutions. But there appears to be a consensus that legislators could pass one bill enacting rights for a large group of people. In the 1940s, for example, legislators passed a bill restoring voting rights for people convicted of felonies who served in World War II.
Additionally, the governor can restore voting rights. But both current Gov. Tate Reeves and his predecessor, Phil Bryant, have refused to grant any pardons.
In other states, governors have restored voting rights to large groups of people in a single order. It is not clear whether a Mississippi governor could do the same, and such a gubernatorial effort might face a court challenge.
All said, there is no indication that the current Republican leadership is interested in restoring voting rights on a large basis to people convicted of felonies. Since they took control of both chambers of the Legislature and the Governor’s Mansion in 2012, Republicans have been reluctant to restore voting rights.
In 2022, the Legislature did pass a bill to clarify that people who had certain primarily non-violent convictions expunged would regain the right to vote. But Reeves vetoed the bill, and legislators made no effort to override the veto.
Years ago, efforts were made to reach a compromise. Under the current legal system, people convicted of certain serious crimes, such as selling drugs or sexual assault of minors, do not lose the right to vote and can even continue to vote while incarcerated. On the other hand, people convicted of what many would consider lesser crimes, such as writing a bad check, lose their right to vote forever.
To address that disparity, some lawmakers over the years proposed banning all people from voting while they were in state custody, but allow them to vote once they finished their sentences. None of those bills, however, have been adopted.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a blistering dissent arguing the Supreme Court should take up the case challenging the constitutionality of the Mississippi provision.
In response, Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens said he would take steps when possible to ensure people did not lose their voting rights.
“My office will seek to protect the accused’s voting rights, where possible, when making charging decisions,” Owens said in a news release. “If a person is accused of a disenfranchising crime, and a parallel charge is available that does not affect his or her voting rights, my office will proceed on the parallel charge. I challenge other district attorneys across the state to join me in taking up Justice Jackson’s charge and adopt similar policies to protect our citizens from discriminatory disenfranchisement.”
Those crimes placed in the constitution where conviction costs a person the right to vote are bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, forgery, embezzlement, bigamy and burglary. The framers of the constitution did not include murder and rape as disenfranchising crimes, though they were added years later. More recently, the list has been expanded through opinions of the state Attorney General to include modern day crimes that matched those included in the 1890 Constitution.
The framers of the Mississippi Constitution said plainly in 1890 that they included those crimes because they believed African Americans were more likely to commit them. The framers also included other racist provisions to keep Black Mississippians from voting, such as poll taxes and so-called literacy tests.
Those provisions, unlike felony suffrage, were all struck down by the federal courts — not by state legislative action.
Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer and former Mississippi State and NFL football great Tyrone Keys was part of the same signing class as the late Johnie Cooks and they played together on some of State’s greatest defenses. Keys remembers his late friend and some of the greatest games in Bulldog history.
KPC Promise Hospital in Vicksburg is now closed, and the former medical director said community members are already feeling the effects.
The 35-bed, long-term care facility had leased space on Merit Health River Region’s main campus since 2018.
“It’s just been a month, but it’s already taking a toll on families,” the former medical director Dr. Torrance Green said, adding that he’s heard anecdotally that ERs and ICUs in Vicksburg are now backed up, which he directly tied to KPC Promise’s absence in the community.
KPC Promise cared for people who had been in a hospital but needed further care than is available through home care, a nursing facility or a rehabilitation center. Many of the people they served were ICU patients who were not progressing swiftly enough, Green said.
Their patients, people who needed extended pulmonary, neurological, trauma and geriatric care, received daily monitoring from a physician and 24-hour coverage by licensed nurses and respiratory therapists, which offered complex wound care, extended IV and other therapies, in addition to respiratory support.
The hospital was officially evicted on June 8.
As of January, the hospital was behind on rent by about $1 million. Despite a payment plan and two checks totaling more than half a million dollars, according to Green, the larger health system followed up on its plans to terminate the hospital’s lease.
Hospitals across the state are closing their doors, and those that aren’t are shuttering service lines and laying off staff to stay open. A report from the Center of Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform says a third of Mississippi’s rural hospitals are at risk of closure.
Green said the closure will end up costing Mississippians.
Merit’s decision to evict the hospital came as a surprise to KPC Promise CEO Kerry Goff and Green, who previously told Mississippi Today in May that it was “very disappointing.”
In a statement released in May, Goff said the hospital was looking into legal options and trying its best to stay open, while Green maintained optimism about coming to a resolution.
“I thought we would have been able to find a better resolve,” he said when reached by phone on Tuesday. “It just didn’t pan out the way we wanted it to.”
According to Alicia Carpenter, Merit’s marketing director, the hospital discharged all its patients prior to its last day in the space. Green said the last few patients they had went to Greenville, Jackson and local facilities in Vicksburg.
Carpenter also said several Promise employees accepted positions at Merit, though Green refuted that.
“The compensation packages just weren’t comparable, so a lot of them ended up having to find temporary work,” he said. “Some folks did find work at clinics in the area.”
Green, a practicing nephrologist, is now spending more time at his clinic in Flowood.
“I just think that we have to be more aggressive about increasing the accountability of our facilities to our communities,” he said. “That link used to be held with the doctors, but now that most of the physicians are employed by hospitals, that accountability has been lost.
“Until we get that back, we’re going to see a lot more of these financial decisions happen without recourse.”
U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan on House Judiciary Committee during Watergate hearings. Credit: Wikipedia
U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan, who first came to the forefront in the Watergate hearings, became the first African-American woman to deliver the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention.
In high school, she heard a career day speech by Edith Sampson, a black lawyer. Sampson’s words inspired her to become an attorney, and she attended Texas Southern University, a black college hastily created by the Texas Legislature to avoid having to integrate the University of Texas. While there, she became part of the debate team, which famously tied Harvard University debaters.
After graduating magna cum laude in 1956, she was accepted at Boston University’s law school. After graduating, she returned to Houston to open a law office in the Fifth Ward. In 1972, she became the first black woman from the South to be elected to Congress. Four years later, she told those at the Democratic National Convention, “We are a people in a quandary about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community. We are a people trying not only to solve the problems of the present, unemployment, inflation, but we are attempting on a larger scale to fulfill the promise of America. We are attempting to fulfill our national purpose, to create and sustain a society in which all of us are equal. …
“Many fear the future. Many are distrustful of their leaders and believe that their voices are never heard. Many seek only to satisfy their private work — wants; to satisfy their private interests. But this is the great danger America faces — that we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual; each seeking to satisfy private wants. If that happens, who then will speak for America? Who then will speak for the common good? …
“We cannot improve on the system of government handed down to us by the founders of the Republic. There is no way to improve upon that. But what we can do is to find new ways to implement that system and realize our destiny.”
Her own destiny had been impacted a few years earlier when she was diagnosed with the debilitating disease of multiple sclerosis. In 1979, she stepped away from politics and began teaching at the University of Texas. She delivered the keynote address again in 1992, this time from a wheelchair. Not long after, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 1996, she died of pneumonia and leukemia. The University of Texas and Austin airport have both honored her with statues.
Monday came the news that the New York Times will disband its 35-person sports department. Over the weekend we learned the Los Angeles Times sports section will no longer contain what traditionally have been sports page essentials: box scores, standings and traditional game stories.
Both newspapers, two of the nation’s top five in circulation, will continue to cover sports, just not in the traditional newspaper format. The New York Times will integrate sports coverage from The Athletic website into the daily newspaper. The Times last year bought theathletic.com website, which employs many of the nation’s most reputable sports writers, at a price tag of $550 million. The LA Times says it will still cover sports with a more magazine-like approach. It just won’t include what were once considered the nuts and bolts of a daily sports section (i.e. box scores, standings, etc.) Let’s face it, what good are box scores if you have a 3 p.m. copy deadline?
Rick Cleveland
I can’t say either piece of news comes as a shock. Newspapers have been moving in this direction for decades, lately at increasing speed. I will say the erosion of the traditional newspaper sports page is something I could have done without.
As a child in Hattiesburg, I grew up in a family that at times subscribed to six newspapers, all delivered to our doorstep daily: the Hattiesburg American, two Jackson newspapers, two New Orleans newspapers and the Daily Herald on the Gulf Coast. My sweet mama often complained of drowning in newsprint. I learned to read by reading the sports pages. I learned to do arithmetic using the baseball box scores to compute batting averages and earned run averages. And yet that wasn’t enough sports coverage for me. As a kid, I would ride my bike to the public library to read the nation’s best sports columnists, Jim Murray in the Los Angeles Times and Red Smith in New York newspapers, including the Times.
My father was the sports editor of the Hattiesburg American when I was born. I later held the same position. Dad later worked at the Jackson Daily News, where I was later the sports editor as well. My brother worked for the Hattiesburg American and the Clarion Ledger. So has my son.
It is from a press box seat, 50-yard-line, I have watched the erosion of the sports pages until there is almost nothing left.
When I left the Hattiesburg American in 1978, we had a staff of five full-time sports writers and several correspondents. When I became sports editor over the Jackson morning and afternoon newspapers in 1987, we had a combined sports staff of 27 sports writers, and our sections and writers were often cited among the best in the country.
Compare then to now: The Hattiesburg American, operating in a college town and in a hotbed of high school sports, has no sports staff. Zero. None. Nada. The Clarion Ledger lists four sports writers and an intern in its directory. And they are trying to cover an entire state.
In the late 1990s, after the Jackson Daily News ceased to exist and corporate bean counters shrunk our Clarion Ledger staff down to 16, I asked to be relieved of my sports editor duties to concentrate on writing. Why? As I told my boss, I could move into my newspaper office and work 23 hours a day and not be able to produce with a staff of 16 anywhere near what we had with a staff of 27.
I cannot even begin to imagine how you would try to do it with four. You cannot.
Now then, all the news is not that awful. I can go to various websites on the Internet, often for free, and read every box score, published almost instantly after the final out (and during the games as well). The batting averages and earned run averages — not to mention OBP and WHIP are computed for me. There is still terrific beat writing available for professional sports teams and most major college teams on The Athletic website. I am a subscriber at a nominal fee. It is well worth the price. ESPN.com provides nuts and bolts sports coverage as well.
No, it is not the same, and I miss the feel of newsprint in my hands with my morning coffee. But the sports news is still available and I can read it on my cellphone.
Best news of all for this dinosaur, I still type — and some of you still read — my missives on this vital Mississippi website. For that, I am most grateful.
