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After leading the charge to overturn Roe v. Wade and outlaw abortion in Mississippi, Republican leaders promised to address the inevitable fallout and prioritize support to pregnant women and babies.

Yet many bills filed this legislative session to strengthen the social safety net, fund child care for low-income parents and increase access to resources like contraceptives have all died before lawmakers had a chance to vote on them.

While debate rages over the most visible piece of legislation to improve outcomes for expectant moms, postpartum Medicaid coverage, the help pledged by Mississippi’s politicians in the wake of Roe extends far beyond health care. It considers financial and economic stability, improved public assistance policies, family stabilization, streamlined adoption processes and more.

Gov. Tate Reeves has called this an “ambitious new pro-life agenda.” Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who historically defended Mississippi’s abortion ban in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization before the U.S. Supreme Court, described her mission to “support the whole life and the whole woman.” Speaker of the House Philip Gunn called it “an opportunity to lead the nation in protecting, promoting, and supporting life.”

The programs and initiatives, many of them at the discretion of the Legislature, aim to ensure that women who feel unprepared to become mothers are supported and have access to resources to successfully care for their child. They also try to address the reality that these unwanted or unplanned pregnancies and births could result in more children in the state’s plagued foster care system, without homes or families.

For Republicans, these goals are met by funding private pregnancy centers, typically faith-based organizations focused on anti-abortion advocacy as opposed to professional social work; cracking down on child support enforcement; and making it easier for people who do not want to be parents to give up their children for adoption.

More Democratic lawmakers and family advocates believe these objectives would be better accomplished by expanding Medicaid; reforming the state’s welfare agency; increasing workforce development and workplace protections for women; and funding more child care vouchers for low-income parents. Most of this legislation died without a vote, including more than 15 bills introduced to expand Medicaid.

There is one niche but impactful policy change that both Reeves and advocates for low-income families support: to remove the child support enforcement requirement within the child care voucher program. Mississippi’s Child Care Payment Program, which provides child care vouchers to low-income working families, is funded by the annual federal Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and administered by the Mississippi Department of Human Services. Mississippi’s child care block grant was about $94 million in 2023.

The Legislature has not proposed legislation to do this, but legal experts say that because the requirement is not mandated by state or federal statute, Mississippi Department of Human Services could make the rule change on its own.

Reeves has also thrown his support behind new child care tax credits, increased corporate tax credits for crisis pregnancy centers and a special partnership with an adoption agency called Lifeline Children’s Services.

“We must be willing to prove that being pro-life is not simply being anti-abortion,” Reeves said on the Paul Gallo Show on conservative talk radio network SuperTalk on Jan. 11. “Because of that we’ve initiated a very aggressive new pro-life agenda in our state. We’ve proposed establishing child tax credits for child care, increasing the first of its kind across America pregnancy resource center tax credit. We want to partner with Lifeline Children’s Services to ensure that we’re helping the moms and newborn babies.”

Mississippi Today compiled and analyzed more than 60 pieces of legislation that could satisfy politicians’ stated post-Roe agenda. Twenty-six were still alive by early February after the first round of legislative deadlines for general bills.

Access to resources

Republicans are looking to crisis pregnancy centers as the primary support system for women facing an unplanned pregnancy.

House Bill 468, introduced by Gunn, R-Clinton, would increase an existing tax credit for corporations who donate to pregnancy centers from an annual aggregate total of $3.5 million to $10 million. While lawmakers have not taken action on the bill, it remains alive because it is considered a revenue bill, which lawmakers don’t have to take up until a Feb. 22 deadline.

The tax credit, which Gov. Reeves supports, was initially created by legislation last year. 

Only centers that align themselves with the statewide organization Choose Life Mississippi, run by ardent anti-abortion activist Terri Herring, are eligible for the tax credit. But the companies that benefit from the program are a mystery – the Mississippi Department of Revenue does not release a list of those that claimed the credit.

Reeves also supports direct taxpayer contributions to these centers.

House Bill 983, which died in committee, would have created the Pregnancy Resources Grant Program under the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services to award competitive grants to crisis pregnancy centers. A separate appropriations bill to fund the CPS grant program, House Bill 1546, is still alive.

Senate Bill 2781 would create the Mississippi Access to Maternal Assistance Program within the Mississippi State Department of Health. The program would serve as a resource hub, coordinating and promoting information about services for expectant mothers, such as adoption assistance, child care, domestic abuse protection, early intervention, food, clothing, job training and placement, paternity, parenting skills, prenatal and postpartum care. That bill is still alive.

Other bills to actually pump resources through the health department, instead of just coordinating them, died. House Bill 1085 and House Bill 506 would have required a nurse practitioner to be present at each of the county health departments weekly to provide contraceptive supplies, either for free or on a sliding fee scale. House Bill 1263 would have required county health departments to provide free menstrual hygiene products. House Bill 1372 would have added a line item to the health department’s budget for funding to the Child Advocacy Centers, community-based resource centers for children and mothers experiencing abuse, which have recently faced large budget cuts. None of these bills received noticeable attention.

Economic health

Opponents to legal abortion have also acknowledged the need to improve the economic position of mothers, as well as people who choose to adopt.

One policy that national advocates have recommended for years – a state Earned Income Tax Credit – would provide an income boost to low-income working Mississippians. State Auditor Shad White, who investigated the welfare scandal, supports the tax credit and said the state could use welfare funds to implement the program at no new cost to the state.

“Economists agree that EITCs are one of the best ways to improve the economy and help working people,” White wrote in a column last year. “The EITC would directly attack a critical problem facing the state. More people working means stronger families, more tax revenue, and a better economy. Policymakers should put money into the hands of working people and get Mississippi moving forward.”

The Mississippi Legislature has routinely ignored any legislation to start offering a state Earned Income Tax Credit, which models an existing tax credit on the federal side.

House Bill 321 and Senate Bill 2897, both authored by Democrats, are the two Earned Income Tax Credit bills before the Legislature this year. 

Other bills introduced by Republicans to create tax credits for child care and adoption expenses might have an easier road ahead this session.

House Bill 130, House Bill 322 and Senate Bill 2898 would provide a new income tax credit to parents for child care expenses. 

“As long as we have an income tax, we should use it to incentivize the responsible raising of children,” Reeves wrote in his budget recommendation. “These policy changes are tangible ways to reduce the costs of raising a family in America today.”

Similarly, House Bill 1268 and Senate Bill 2696, which passed the Senate, would increase tax credits for adoptive parents to pay for adoption-related expenses.

Fitch supports House Bill 505 and Senate Bill 2335, which incentivize employers to offer additional benefits to parents. House Bill 505 provides tax credits to employers who provide maternity and paternity leave for its employees and Senate Bill 2335 provides tax credits to employers who pay for their employees’ child care.

All of these are considered revenue bills, so they are still alive, awaiting the later deadline. 

Two bills to strengthen women’s standing in the workforce – the Mississippi Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and the Mississippi Paid Family Leave Act – died without consideration.

House Bill 1361 would have prohibited employers from discriminating against women because they are pregnant, and Senate Bill 2286 would have required employers with more than 50 employees to offer 12 weeks of paid leave for childbirth.

Mississippi has among the lowest wages and median household income of any state in the country. Minimum wage in the state, which follows the federal minimum wage of $7.25, has not increased since 2009.

Seven bills to increase the minimum wage – House Bill 96, House Bill 323, House Bill 583, House Bill 810, Senate Bill 2284, Senate Bill 2288 and Senate Bill 2439 – died without a vote.

Welfare policies

Following revelations about widespread abuse within Mississippi’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, or welfare, Democratic lawmakers filed several reforms to the Mississippi Department of Human Services.

Currently, Mississippi has over $100 million in TANF funds sitting idle. The department has not answered repeated questions from Mississippi Today about how it plans to use the reserve.

• House Bill 463, House Bill 774, Senate Bill 2794 would have moved tens of millions of the state’s annual TANF block grant to supplement the state’s child care voucher program, potentially providing child care to thousands of working parents who might not have it otherwise. The federal government allows states to use 30% of its block grant this way. 
• House Bill 1431, a perennial bill from Rep. Omeria Scott, D-Laurel, would have required the state to use unspent TANF funds on tuition and expenses for nursing students, simultaneously providing workforce training to low-income Mississippians and addressing the state’s nursing shortage.
• House Bill 612 would have required the welfare agency to provide transportation and child care to TANF recipients, to assist them with completing the application process and participating in the required work program.
• House Bill 613 would have limited TANF programs to serve people below 200% of the federal poverty line.
• House Bill 502 would have increased the monthly TANF cash assistance by more than $200.
• House Bill 970 would have prevented the state from using TANF funds for college scholarships to families who are not receiving TANF benefits. Historically, the state has reported its annual appropriations to the state’s scholarship programs as TANF spending in order to match the federal grant and pull down the funding. The effect of this is that money that should be going towards anti-poverty programs is actually being used to benefit middle-class families, Mississippi Today first reported in 2019.
• House Bill 971 would have loosened eligibility for TANF, removing the upfront job search requirement, which presents significant barriers to applicants.
• Senate Bill 2331 would have removed the requirement that single moms sue their child’s father for child support – the same restriction Reeves supports dismantling in the child care voucher program – in order to qualify for TANF or food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
• Senate Bill 2806 would have removed the drug testing requirement from the TANF program.

Though all of these bills died without consideration, Democratic lawmakers took the opportunity to discuss these policies when a repealer bill for the Mississippi Department of Human Services – standard legislation that comes up every few years to extend the life of an agency – reached the Senate floor Tuesday.

While presenting his amendment to the repealer bill, Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, criticized MDHS for using $30 million in TANF funds each year to supplement the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services, which he argued should be funded with state appropriations. This is just one example of how the state fails to use these dollars in the most effective way to fight poverty. 

“It’s all legal but it’s wrong,” Blount said. “And we need to fix it.”

Blount’s amendment would have moved $30 million in TANF funds to the child care voucher program. Sen. Derrick Simmons, D-Greenville, also introduced an amendment to remove the drug testing requirement for TANF applicants. Sen. Rod Hickman, D-Macon, noted the extremely low approval rate of TANF applications – as low as 2% in some years – when he introduced a bill that prohibits MDHS from denying assistance to families under 130% of the federal poverty level.

Republican senators killed all three amendments.

“The question posed by the amendments today is: In response to the biggest public scandal involving a state agency in the history of this state, what did the Legislature do? The answer expressed today is nothing. We do nothing. We make no changes,” Blount said. “That attitude is the reason we got in this problem in the first place, because it is the disregard for the politically powerless.”

Mississippi Department of Human Services Director Bob Anderson has asked the Legislature to make one important reform to the department to ensure it runs smoothly so that it can serve all eligible applicants: Remove the bureaucratic red tape created by the Medicaid and Human Services Transparency and Fraud Prevention Act, dubbed the HOPE Act, passed in 2017.

A bill this session to do this, House Bill 503, died.

Conversely, Republican lawmakers have filed bills to increase restrictions or make it harder still for low-income families to access public assistance.

Sen. Angela Hill, R-Picayune, introduced a bill to require the welfare department to include photo identification on Electronic Benefit Transfer (known as “EBT”) cards — the cards recipients use to spend their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, benefits. The bill, which died, would have prevented more than two people in the family from being able to use the card.

Two other dead bills, filed by Sen. Melanie Sojourner, R-Natchez, would have prohibited TANF funds from going to people convicted of several felonies and require TANF recipients to participate in community services.

Child support & fatherhood

“The Republican Party Platform affirms ‘our moral obligation to assist, rather than penalize, women who face an unplanned pregnancy,” reads a 2022 column in the Hill co-authored by Fitch. “At the urging of then-Treasurer Lynn Fitch, the platform that stands today supports ‘legislation that requires financial responsibility for the child be equally borne by both the mother and father.’”

The strict ban on abortion has brought renewed attention to the state’s long-troubled child support program, which provides legal services to help separated custodial parents secure court orders against the noncustodial parent for monthly child support payments. Many of the single moms in the child support program are forced into the system as a condition for receiving public assistance from the state.

The enforcement side of the program, which is run by a private contractor, then helps enforce the order by locating the noncustodial parent, establishing paternity if necessary, garnishing wages, intercepting tax refunds, and in extreme cases, suspending driver’s licenses or filing criminal charges in the case of unpaid support.

(The child support privatization contract with Young Williams has come under scrutiny in recent years for failing to require that the contractor meet certain performance-based metrics, something MDHS says it solved in its existing contract. House Bill 177 would have eliminated the contract and brought the program back in-house. It died.)

Lawmakers filed several bills to tweak the child support program to, as Fitch said, “require fathers carry their equal share of the financial needs of childbearing and child-caring.”

• House Bill 6, House Bill 1046, House Bill 1083, and Senate Bill 2385 would set up procedures to allow the child support enforcement program to intercept gambling winnings for unpaid child support.
• House Bill 1114 would increase the cap of how much a person’s income goes towards child support. Currently, a person with five or more children under support orders must pay 26% of their income in child support payments. The bill would revise the law so that a person with six or more children pays 30% of their income. Reeves publicly supports this policy change.
• House Bill 320 and House Bill 1117 would revise the law so that monthly child support payments begin when a woman becomes pregnant, instead of after birth. HB 1117 would also include prenatal and post-natal expenses as part of the order.
• House Bill 1183 would require Mississippi Department of Human Services to publish the names and photos of people in child support arrearage.

All of these bills died.

The only bills to crack down on child support that remain alive are Senate Bill 2634, filed by Sen. Joey Fililngane, R-Sumrall, on behalf of Fitch’s office, and House Bill 1490 by Speaker Gunn. 

Fillingane’s bill increases the statute of limitations for criminal charges against a person who refuses to pay child support. Currently, a person can be charged with desertion of a child if they are found to have wilfully neglected or refused to pay child support while the child is under 18. The bill would increase that age to 21 and also allow for charges to be pursued for three years after the child turns 21.

A nearly identical bill in the House, House Bill 1112, died. 

Gunn’s bill requires the Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks to suspend the license of any person who has not paid child support.

“For too many families, regular and reliable child support payments can be the difference between steady meals and going hungry,” Fitch wrote in her most recent column for World News Group last week. “As four out of five custodial parents are women, too often this falls heavily on the mother. Fathers simply must be held equally responsible for their children financially. Women have borne this burden alone for too long.

Legislation that takes a more punitive approach to child support collections – which some advocates warn may lead to the criminalization of poverty – appears to reverse the national trend.

In 2016, the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement implemented a rule change that required states to enact safe guards so that before a parent is jailed for unpaid child support, there must be evidence that the parent has the funds and is willfully refusing to pay. The federal government gave states until 2022 to comply. The rule in part helps to ensure that states are following the 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Turner v. Rogers, which said states must determine whether a parent is able to pay the ordered child support before incarcerating them for nonpayment.

The 2016 rule also prohibits states from allowing child support debts to accrue while a parent is behind bars, but the practice still continues today. As a result of not complying, human services director Bob Anderson told lawmakers that Mississippi is at risk of losing its federal match for the operation of the child support enforcement program – about 66% of the program’s budget. 

To deal with this, Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, introduced Senate Bill 2082, which suspends child support arrears from accruing when a person is in prison or involuntarily institutionalized for longer than 180 days. House Bill 1215 would do the same thing. Both are still alive.

Another bill that would have offered leniency to people dinged for not paying child support is Senate Bill 2218, introduced by Sen. Hill, which would have provided temporary driver’s licenses for the purpose of employment and worship to people whose licenses were suspended due to unpaid child support. That bill died.

National child support experts have long acknowledged that a punitive approach to child support collections is not necessarily the most beneficial for families. If a father loses his license or goes to jail, for example, he might lose his job, only making it less likely he’ll be able to make the monthly payment.

“It’s a very complex question when you’re trying to force a parent to do what he or she ought to do anyway. And you can’t legislate everything, but we try to do the best we can,” said Filingane. “Let’s take the example of the driver’s license being suspended. Well, then, if you’re gonna follow the law, and you no longer have a driver’s license, how do you expect that person to get to their job to earn the money to then turn around and pay the child support? … There’s all these sometimes unintended consequences that happen.”

“And when you criminalize behavior and you end up throwing them in jail, sometimes it does the trick,” he continued. “It’s fascinating that sometimes the person who swears up and down that he or she doesn’t have a hundred bucks to their name and can’t pay it cause they just don’t have it, they end up in jail and less than eight hours later it’s paid in full.”

The state’s efforts to either force or incentivize fathers to participate in child rearing extend beyond the child support program. But information about the efficacy of those efforts is lacking.

Every year for the last several years, Mississippi has spent anywhere from $9 million to $39 million in TANF funds on grants to “Fatherhood and Two Parent Family Formation” programs, according to federal reports, but the department does not provide much information about what those programs entail, nor does it gather any records to show what outcomes the programs achieved. 

House Bill 1146, authored by Rep. Becky Currie, R-Brookhaven – the lawmaker who introduced the abortion ban that overturned Roe v. Wade – would have created the “Mississippi Fatherhood Initiative Fund” to distribute grants to local organizations providing parenting resources to fathers. The bill died.

Auditor White has placed a heavy focus on “fatherlessness” in recent months, releasing a report that aimed to demonstrate the cost of one-parent households on Mississippi taxpayers. One example: the report estimates that 50% of the state’s prison population are men who come from “fatherless” homes, and the state spends $180 million annually to incarcerate them. (A bill to provide workforce training to inmates, House Bill 640, died).

The report lays out the purported problem – positioning “fatherlessness” as the root cause of societal ills associated with poverty, as opposed to the other way around – but the proposed solutions are sparse. 

White makes one recommendation: expand the JROTC military program in high schools across the state.

“Countless studies prove our communities and families — along with the average taxpayer —  would benefit from strong, engaged fathers and father figures in the lives of Mississippi’s children,” the report reads. “One program interrupting the cycle of fatherlessness is the Junior Reserve Officer’s Training Corps (JROTC).”

White points to the 100% graduation rate of students in the program. The cost of expanding the program to all high schools is $185 million, according to White’s separate 2020 report on JROTC. There has been no legislation introduced this session to do this.

But there have been bills – House Bill 1360, House Bill 1413, House Bill 1414 and House Bill 1419 – to implement various high school dropout prevention and academic performance improvement programs in struggling districts. They all died without consideration.

Reeves supports at least one initiative in this arena: Placing career coaches in high schools across the state. His workforce cabinet began the program last year with $8 million in pandemic relief funding. Reeves recommends doubling it.

“These coaches will especially be directed toward low-income areas, helping to inspire young Mississippians with the abundance of pathways available for fulfilling careers,” Reeves said.

House Bill 274, authored by Speaker Gunn, would provide $12 million to the Office of Workforce Development, called Accelerate MS, to fund more coaches. The bill is still alive, awaiting the appropriations deadline.

Baby drop off, foster care, and adoption

After the Dobbs ruling, health professionals in Mississippi estimated that the state should prepare itself to handle an additional 5,000 births each year. There are already about 4,000 kids in the state’s foster care system – which is still under a decades-long federal court settlement because of its failure to properly care for kids in its care.

Reeves proposes several measures he believes will alleviate issues caused by unplanned births, including increasing the amount of time a parent is allowed to “drop off” a baby without facing consequences; increasing subsidies to adoptive parents; and making modest budget increases to the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services to hire more personnel and reduce adoption backlogs.

The court settlement, referred to as Olivia Y, has required Mississippi to periodically increase the public subsidy foster families receive to care for foster children. But the state failed to make similar increases to the adoption subsidy, meaning families are facing a scenario where it makes more financial sense to foster than to adopt.

“It creates an artificial incentive for courts to keep children in state custody for the sole purpose of making sure that family has adequate funding to take care of the child,” Child Protection Services Commissioner Andrea Sanders said at a Legislative appropriations hearing last month.

She asked for an additional $12 million appropriation to fund increases to the adoption subsidy, as recommended by Reeves.

House Bill 510 would create versions of a “Foster Parents Bill of Rights and Responsibilities,” adding several provisions to existing statute that give foster care parents the opportunity to participate in various areas of the child’s care, including communicating with the child’s school, doctors, guardian ad litem, and others. The Senate version of the bill, Senate Bill 2191, which died, would have also required the court to notify the attorney general’s office when changes to a child’s long-term care plan occur.

House Bill 533, which is alive in the house, and Senate Bill 2611, which died, were introduced to ease requirements for parents seeking adoption in hopes to hasten the process. Instead of a compulsory home study before a child is placed for adoption, the bills would leave it up to a judge to determine if a home study is necessary. Additionally, Gunn’s House Bill 1342 would create the “Board of Trustees of the Mississippi Adoption Licensure Authority” to regulate adoptions in the state and add new adoption procedures to state statute.

Senate Bill 2377 would enact the Mississippi Safe Haven Law, adding exhaustive measures to the existing statute, spelling out step-by-step the process for a parent to relinquish her child to an emergency medical services provider. This law, as well as House Bill 244, would increase the age a baby may be relinquished from seven days to 30 days. House Bill 1318, which passed the full house, takes this a step further, increasing the age to 90 days. If enacted, Mississippi would have one of the most lenient Safe Haven Laws in the nation with the exception of New Mexico (90 days) and North Dakota (one year), according to a 2021 Charlotte Lozier Institute analysis.

House Bill 634, which died, would have removed the age limit altogether and added “baby box” to the list of allowed drop-off destinations. 

Children removed from their families often face challenges into adulthood. A bill to waive tuition at state schools for foster or adopted children, House Bill 127, died.

The Legislature still has time to find the additional appropriations requested by CPS. But lawmakers face an even bigger budget question if it ever wants to stop using its federal TANF grant to fund the foster care agency – a financial maneuver that has prevented the state from being able to pull down unlimited dollar-for-dollar federal matching funds offered by the 2018 federal Family First Prevention Services Act.

Study Group on Women & Children

Several bills during the 2023 session came out of the Senate Study Group on Women, Children and Families, chaired by Sen. Nicole Boyd, an outspoken proponent of postpartum Medicaid extension.

Senate Bill 2781, Senate Bill 2898, Senate Bill 2696, Senate Bill 219 and Senate Bill 2377, described above, originated from the study group.

The group, which examined a broad range of issues affecting Mississippi families, also resulted in the following legislation, all of which remains alive:

• Senate Bill 2167: Create the Mississippi Early Intervention Pilot Project at Mississippi State University’s TK Martin Center and create an Early Intervention Task Force to work on issues related to early childhood screenings and therapeutic services for children.
• Senate Bill 2384: Create the Mississippi Task Force on Foster Care and Adoption to study and make recommendations for improving state laws related to foster care and adoption.
• Senate Bill 2485: Revise qualifications for personnel under the Early Intervention Act for Infants and Toddlers to address shortages.
• Senate Bill 2192: Clarify circumstances under which a presumed father cannot further contest paternity.

Finally, a bill to repeal Mississippi’s abortion ban and put the issue to a statewide vote, House Bill 1385, died.

The post Republicans vowed a robust post-Roe agenda. Here’s how it’s going. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The state Senate on Thursday kept alive a measure that would reinstate Mississippi voters’ right to bypass the Legislature and put issues on a statewide ballot.

Lawmakers stripped out an earlier provision that would have given the Legislature power to veto or amend citizens’ initiatives before they go before voters. They also removed red tape that would have, among other things, required the daunting task for initiative sponsors to get 10 signatures each from the state’s more than 300 municipalities.

READ MORE: Mississippi Supreme Court strikes down ballot initiative process

But the proposal, as it stands now, would make getting an initiative on a ballot a more difficult task, requiring about 240,000 voter signatures to get something on the ballot, compared to about 107,000 under the state’s previous initiative process. Last year attempts to reinstate voters’ initiative rights died when the House would not agree to the Senate’s demands for more signatures.

“If I had my way, I’d have a higher percentage (of signatures required),” Senate Accountability Chairman John Polk, R-Hattiesburg, told his colleagues Thursday.

Polk was tasked by Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann with handling ballot initiative legislation this year and last, but has not appeared very enthusiastic about giving voters back the right to sidestep the Legislature in making policy. Polk has described the ballot initiative process as “dangerous.” On Thursday during Senate debate he decried the “debacle” that nearly happened when voters enshrined a medical marijuana program into the state constitution, only to have the state’s high court strike it down.

In 2021, the state Supreme Court in a ruling on litigation against citizen-led creation of a medical marijuana program, ruled Mississippi’s ballot initiative, and the program, invalid. Lawmakers last year created a medical marijuana program. But despite public outcry and legislative leaders promising to reinstate voter ballot initiative rights, it failed in the final days of the legislative session last year.

The current Senate Bill 2638 and accompanying Senate Concurrent Resolution 533 — which would have to be approved by voters in November if it’s passed by lawmakers — would give Mississippi voters the right to change or create state law, not amend the constitution as the previous ballot initiative allowed.

READ MORE: Senators keep watered-down ballot initiative bill alive, vow to improve it

The current version also would reinstate the Legislature’s right to offer alternative measures to anything citizens put on a ballot. Lawmakers in the past have used this to try to confuse the issue and defeat citizen initiatives, including with the medical marijuana Initiative 65.

Supporters of voter initiative rights have questioned the veracity of legislative efforts to reinstate them.

“There are legislators in here who say they are for the ballot initiative who are for it,” said Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson. “And there are legislators in here who say they are for the ballot initiative who are not really for it. We’re about to find out soon where people really are, when we see if we get a legitimate, workable ballot initiative process … We need to be straight with people that we mean it.”

Sen. Barbara Blackmon, D-Canton, offered an amendment that would have stripped the Legislature’s power to offer alternative initiatives. The amendment failed.

“We ought to be able to trust people, your constituents, have the ability to think for themselves and that they have a brain,” Blackmon said.

Polk warned that out-of-state interests can spend large amounts of money and harness social media campaigns to co-opt the ballot initiative process and force policy that is not truly grassroots.

Rep. Angela Hill asked Blackmon, “Was our country founded as a constitutional republic or a direct democracy?” making the point that the U.S. and Mississippi’s government is based on representation by elected leaders, not mob rule or en masse voting on most policy issues.

Blount pointed out that Mississippi voters had initiative rights for 30 years before the Supreme Court invalidated it, and only seven initiatives were brought to ballot, and only three passed.

“The fear is that this process is going to be abused,” Blount said. “… That fear is misplaced.”

Senate Concurrent Resolution 533 passed the Senate on Thursday, the deadline for floor action to keep it alive, 43-4. Polk said he expects there will be much more work on the issue between House and Senate before a final version is struck.

The post Restoring Mississippi ballot initiative process survives legislative deadline appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Brett Favre, the NFL legend who has become publicly ensnared in the sprawling Mississippi welfare scandal, sued state Auditor Shad White and national sports media figures Shannon Sharpe and Pat McAfee for defamation.

White, whose investigation of welfare misspending led to 2020 criminal charges of six people, is one of the most prominent officials to publicly discuss the scandal. Several times in recent months, White has criticized Favre’s involvement in the scandal and even got into a tense social media back-and-forth with the Hall of Fame quarterback.

Attorneys for Favre, who has not been charged with any crime related to the scandal, argued in the new lawsuit that White has “made egregiously false and defamatory statements” in several media appearances.

“Shad White, the State Auditor of Mississippi, has carried out an outrageous media campaign of malicious and false accusations against Brett Favre — the Hall of Fame quarterback and native son of Mississippi — in a brazen attempt to leverage the media attention generated by Favre’s celebrity to further his own political career,” reads Favre’s complaint, filed in Hinds County Circuit Court on Feb. 9.

Favre’s complaint against White continues: “By shamelessly and falsely attacking Favre’s good name, White has gained national media attention he previously could have only dreamed of, including appearances on television shows on CNN and HBO, a popular ESPN podcast, as well as interviews for print and online media. None of these national media outlets would have paid White the slightest attention had he not been attacking Favre. White himself acknowledged this, admitting that his own wife was “shocked” by his appearance on the ESPN Daily Podcast.”

Favre also specifies that he’s suing White, not the state of Mississippi, and that he’s seeking damages from White as an individual, not from Mississippi taxpayers.

White’s office released a statement shortly after the lawsuit was filed on Thursday.

”Everything Auditor White has said about this case is true and is backed by years of audit work by the professionals at the Office of the State Auditor,” White’s spokesman Fletcher Freeman said. “It’s mind-boggling that Mr. Favre wants to have a trial about that question. Mr. Favre has called Auditor White and his team liars despite repaying some of the money our office demanded from him. He’s also claimed the auditors are liars despite clear documentary evidence showing he benefitted from misspent funds. Instead of paying New York litigators to try this case, he’d be better off fully repaying the amount of welfare funds he owes the state.”

Favre also sued media figures Shannon Sharpe and Pat McAfee, who each have popular national platforms to discuss sports news and analysis, for defamation.

“You got to be a sorry mofo to steal from the lowest of the low,” Sharpe said on his television show “Skip and Shannon: Undisputed” on Sept. 14, the day after Mississippi Today broke a story revealing that when Favre discussed receiving funding from a welfare-funded nonprofit director, he asked if the public would find out.

“Mississippi is the poorest state in our country — its citizens,” Sharpe continued. “So if they’re the poorest state, Brett Favre is taking from the underserved. You made $100 plus million in the NFL. And to talk about, ‘Well, he didn’t know.’ This is what Brett Favre texted: ‘If you were to pay me, is there any way the media can find out where it came from and how much?’ If you’ve got to ask this question, ‘Is there any way the media can find out?’, you already know you’re doing something wrong.”

Mississippi Today’s 2022 “The Backchannel” investigation revealed how Favre received welfare funds for several projects, including funding for his startup pharmaceutical company.

Never-before-seen text messages showed former Gov. Phil Bryant discussed Favre’s proposal to build a new volleyball stadium — construction ultimately funded with welfare funds. Prosecutors have called the project a scheme to defraud the government.

Mississippi Today’s reporting found that Favre traded on his own fame and connections to secure a financial bailout from the state of Mississippi.

In the course of Favre’s dealings with state officials on behalf of the pharmaceutical venture or the volleyball stadium, Favre proposed: giving Bryant and nonprofit founder Nancy New shares in the company in exchange for their help; buying the former welfare director John Davis a F-150 Raptor; and convincing New and Davis to pay off a more than $1 million commitment he made to USM.

READ MORE: ‘You stuck your neck out for me’: Brett Favre used fame and favors to pull welfare dollars

Favre himself received a $1.1 million payment from the welfare-funded charity under a vague promotional gig, which White claims included event appearances that Favre never attended. Favre has since returned the funds.

In addition to the new defamation suit, Favre continues to fight civil charges Mississippi Department of Human Services has filed against him and several others in an attempt to recoup the misspent welfare funds. The suit alleges Favre should be on the hook for over $7 million that he allegedly helped funnel away from people in poverty.

Click here to read Favre’s lawsuit against Auditor Shad White.

Click here to read Favre’s lawsuit against Shannon Sharpe.

Click here to read Favre’s lawsuit against Pat McAfee.

The post Brett Favre sues Auditor Shad White, national media figures for defamation regarding welfare scandal appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A House bill that would allow elected municipal officials to be recalled during the middle of their terms, through a combined effort of the governor and the voters, was voted down Thursday in a surprise rebuke of the proposal.

Rep. Shanda Yates, an independent from Jackson and the only white member of the capital city’s House delegation, filed the bill in response, she said, to constituents asking her if there was a mechanism in state law to recall elected officials.

Opponents have argued that the legislation specifically targeted Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, who has been at intense public odds with Gov. Tate Reeves and other state and legislative leaders.

Black members of the House argued during the debate on Thursday that Yates’ bill was a continuation of multiple proposals pending this legislative session intended by white state elected officials to strip power from the leaders of Jackson — or at the very least treat the capital city differently than other municipalities in the state.

Earlier this week, there was a four-hour debate over legislation that created a separate court in Jackson, the largest city in the state and Blackest major city in America, where the judges would be appointed instead of elected like most other judges in the state.

“When you see things woven in the fabric of racism, all there can be is a racist blanket,” said Rep. John Hines, D-Greenville. “We are better than this.”

A sizable number of House Republicans voted with Democrats, who are in a minority, to defeat Yates’ recall proposal 53-60 on Thursday.

READ MORE: ‘Only in Mississippi’: White representatives vote to create white-appointed court system for Blackest city in America

Yates said when she researched existing state law after getting questions from constituents, she found a little known and little used provision that allows for the replacement of county officials. Her bill would have amended that law to include municipal officials.

She argued there are mechanisms that allow the removal of all elected officials in the state except for municipal officials. When it was pointed out to her earlier this session the proposal would allow voters to recall municipal officials, but not state officials, including legislators, she told Mississippi Today she would not have a problem allowing for the voter recall of legislators.

But no effort to change the bill to include legislators was made when it was debated and ultimately defeated Thursday. Rep. Tommy Reynolds, a Democrat from Water Valley, wanted to amend the bill to remove the governor from having a role in the removal and leave it solely to voters, but Speaker Philip Gunn said his amendment was offered too late.

“If we wanted to do (recall) for everybody, that would be good, too,” Reynolds said.

Yates’ bill would have given the governor the authority to establish a panel to decide if a recall should occur if 30% of the voters signed a petition in support of a recall.

READ MORE: Rep. Shanda Yates’ controversial recall bill doesn’t include lawmakers. A Senate bill does.

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The state Senate on Thursday unanimously approved a program to give grants to Mississippi’s struggling hospitals, but the amount of money for the proposed grants is yet-to-be determined as the measure heads to the House.

“This is still a work in progress,” Senate Medicaid Chairman Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, told colleagues. “We are waiting on more information from the Hospital Association … We were initially looking at $80 million. Hospitals say they would like $230 million. We want to know what their situation was prior to COVID, what happened during it, and what their plans for the future are, so we don’t end up back in the same place. Before they come asking for a pot of gold from the Legislature, we want to know what they will do with it and what they will be doing for the future.”

Senate Bill 2372, the Mississippi Hospital Sustainability Grant Program, is headed to the House, but with many details yet to be worked out, including how much of the state’s remaining federal pandemic relief money would be used. House Speaker Philip Gunn has said he supports helping hospitals with American Rescue Plan Act money, of which the state has about $400 million remaining.

Data from January shows 28 rural hospitals, or about 38%, are at risk of closing, with 19 at risk of immediate closure, putting Mississippi fourth in the nation for percentage of rural hospitals at near-term risk of closure. The latest report is somewhat better than a previous one, that 38 rural state hospitals were at risk of closure. But health officials say the state — which has long struggled to provide health care for its people — still faces a crisis.

READ MORE: ‘Slightly more breathing room’: Fewer rural hospitals at risk of closure, but threat still looms

There was brief debate on the measure Thursday before the Senate passed it.

Sen. Rod Hickman, D-Macon, said he supports the help for hospitals, but questioned how it will be administered and what agency would oversee it. “I just want to be sure it’s administered properly,” he said.

The bill says the Health Department would administer it, but Blackwell said that is still a matter to be worked out.

Sen. Angela Hill, R-Picayune, questioned why Mississippi hospitals need a state bailout.

“During COVID, we saw a lot of money infused into hospitals,” Hill said. “I just can’t see the math where they’re in worse shape now. All that money was poured in here during COVID and now they’re broke.”

The grant program the Senate approved Thursday is one of several bills Hosemann announced at the legislative session’s start last month to address the health care crisis.

Hospitals, doctors, and other health experts have long advocated for Mississippi to join 39 other states and accept federal money to expand Medicaid coverage to the working poor. Hospitals struggle in part from eating costs of treating poor people with no health coverage, and expansion would provide Mississippi about $1 billion a year in federal funds.

Hosemann has said he’s open to discussing expansion, but Gunn and Gov. Tate Reeves oppose it, and all bills proposing expansion are now dead this legislative session.

READ MORE: Every Medicaid expansion bill dies without debate or vote

Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, spoke to expansion on the Senate floor before Thursday’s vote.

“You can put $100 million in this (hospital grant) account, and have $100 million,” Blount said. “Or you can put $100 million in this account and have $1 billion. That’s the choice you are making.”

Other measures pending for Hosemann’s hospital plan would:

• Change “anti-trust” laws and other state legal barriers to “collaboration and consolidation” of hospitals in Mississippi.
• Create a nurse student loan repayment program for those who agree to work in Mississippi hospitals, an effort to address a statewide nursing shortage estimated at 3,000 nurses. Lawmakers created a program last year, but glitches in the law prevented the program from going into effect.
• Provide $20 million in grants for community colleges, universities and other programs that train nurses and other health workers. Hosemann said many programs have long waiting lists and shortage of faculty and equipment. The proposed program, also using ARPA money, would provide 75% of the grants to community colleges, and the remainder to universities or other programs.
• Provide more money for hospital residency and fellowship programs with ARPA money. Hosemann said residency and fellowship programs in medical or surgical specialty areas have been shown to help retain doctors in areas where they do their residencies or fellowships.

The post Senate approves grants for struggling Mississippi hospitals appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Jackson’s problems are both real and serious — the water crisis was easily one of the biggest failures of government I’ve seen in my career. Crime is frightening and affects everyone in Jackson. It’s sad seeing a wonderful city struggle under the weight of all its issues. But I also know that the people who are cheering HB 1020 and other state takeover efforts would be mad as an over-caffeinated hornet if the Federal Government came down and took over the Department of Human Services because of the TANF scandal (also a massive failure of government.)

The post Marshall Ramsey: The Helper appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The Mississippi Senate on Wednesday passed with no debate a measure that would create a program to allow armed, trained teachers in Mississippi schools.

The measure now heads to the House for consideration.

Senate Bill 2079, authored by Sen. Angela Burks Hill, R-Picayune, would create a firearms training and licensure program for teachers in public and private schools that choose to participate. Mississippi Homeland Security, under the Department of Public Safety, would establish the program, training and licensure. The bill also tasks the DPS commissioner with coming up with guidelines for dealing with school shooting situations, “so we don’t ever have a situation like they did in Uvalde (Texas).”

READ MORE: How is Mississippi responding to the threat of school shootings?

Teachers participating in the program would have to have a state enhanced gun carry permit in addition to the training and certificate from the new program. The measure provides civil and criminal protections to armed teachers in the program.

Hill said the program is modeled on those in other states, including Florida and Texas.

The bill passed the Seante with no debate, although 13 Democrats in the 52-member chamber voted against it. Sen. Angela Turner Ford, D-West Point, questioned whether there were funds available for the program. Hill responded that there would like be grants available through Homeland Security.

DPS Commissioner Sean Tindell has proposed schools pay trained armed teachers a stipend of $500 a month. Hill said the bill passed Wednesday would make that stipend optional for school districts.

A recent survey by Mississippi Professional Educators showed 64% of its members supported having properly trained educators or school staff respond to shootings. Gov. Tate Reeves also recommended such a program in his budget recommendation to the Legislature.

The Mississippi Association of Educators said its member teachers have voiced concerns about the training, guns ending up in the wrong hands, and adding more duties for teachers beyond educating.

DPS and state Department of Education officials have said having a trained school resource law enforcement officer on every campus would be the best option, but that funding or lack of local officers can hinder that.

The post Senate passes bill that would allow armed teachers in schools appeared first on Mississippi Today.

FEBRUARY 9, 1944

Alice Walker, novelist and poet, was the eighth child born to sharecroppers in Eatonton, Georgia.

During her youth, she was accidentally blinded in one eye, and her mother gave her a typewriter, which enabled her to write. She studied at Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College, receiving a scholarship to study in Paris. She turned it down to go instead in 1965 to Mississippi, where she joined the civil rights movement.

Part of her work involved taking depositions of sharecroppers, who like her parents had been thrown off the land. She and her husband, civil rights attorney Mel Leventhal, married in New York in March 1967, and when they returned to Mississippi four months later, they became the first legally married interracial couple in the state, where interracial marriage was still illegal.

They persevered through death threats, working together on the movement. Leventhal served as lead counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Walker taught history to Head Start students and became pregnant. Grief overcame her after Martin Luther King’s assassination, and she lost her unborn child. She continued to teach, showing students at Tougaloo College and Jackson State University how poetry could be used in activism.

After moving to New York, she finished her novel, Meridian, which describes the coming of age of civil rights workers during the movement. In 1983, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Color Purple, which has since been adapted in both a movie and a musical.

She has continued to champion racial and gender equality in her writing and her life.

“Activism,” she explained, “is the rent I pay for living on the planet.”

The post On this day in 1944 appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Longtime state Rep. Tommy Reynolds, a Democrat from Water Valley, successfully amended Republican-backed legislation designed to purge voter rolls to restore suffrage to military veterans who had lost their right to vote because of felony convictions.

Reynolds has in previous years filed bills to restore the right to vote to veterans who had been convicted of felonies. Those bills were never considered in committee.

But before the full House on Wednesday, Reynolds was successful in amending a bill he and other House Democrats would normally oppose to restore voting rights to members of the military.

After Reynolds’ amendment, House Bill 1310 passed on an 86-31 vote. The bill needed a two-thirds (or at least 78 yeas) vote to pass under guidelines of the Mississippi Constitution. The constitution requires a two-thirds vote of both the House and Senate to restore voting rights to those convicted of felonies. The bill now goes to the Senate unless the House Republican leadership attempts to call the bill back up to try to remove the Reynolds amendment.

The Reynolds amendment split the minority Democratic caucus. House Democrats have been working for years to change the state constitutional provision requiring a two-thirds vote of both chambers to restore voting rights to people convicted of felonies.

Some of the Democrats still voted against the bill because of the voter purge provision. But other Democrats, such as Reynolds, supported it because of the amendment restoring voting rights to veterans.

Rep. Brent Powell, R-Brandon, the original author of the bill, told House members he was “vehemently” opposed to the Reynolds amendment because it would make it a two-thirds vote to pass.

Rep. Robert Johnson, D-Natchez, the minority leader, said to Powell, “This amendment restores suffrage to veterans, people … who risked their lives for their country, and you are asking us to vote against that?”

Powell said he would be willing to consider the issue in a separate bill, but did not want it in his legislation because it raised the threshold to pass it.

“Military veterans and their right to vote is less important than you being able to remove people from the voter rolls?” Johnson asked.

The amendment passed on a voice vote. There was a loud voice vote in support of the proposal, and it appeared there would be a loud vote in opposition. But the voices of those in opposition trailed off dramatically and the speaker ruled that the amendment had been passed.

Mississippi is one of less than 10 states that do not restore voting right to all people convicted of felonies at some point after they complete their sentence. A lawsuit pending before the U.S. Supreme Court alleges the Mississippi provision is unconstitutional.

Besides restoring the right to vote to military veterans convicted of felonies, the bill would make multiple other changes to state election law, including:

• Authorizing the Secretary of State to audit county election procedures.
• Placing on an inactive voter roll those who do not vote in two consecutive federal election or one state and one federal election if they also do not respond before the next election to a card confirming they are still at the same address.

Democrats have opposed such voter purge efforts, saying that people may not vote because of multiple reasons, including not liking any candidate on the ballot. In other states with similar voter purge provisions, Democrats maintain that thousands of registered voters have been removed mistakenly from the rolls.

Reynolds also was successful in amending the bill to stipulate that people who voted in any election, including municipal elections or who responded to a jury summons also would not be subject to being placed on an inactive list.

The post Democrat amends GOP voter purge bill to restore voting rights to military veterans appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A white supermajority of the Mississippi House voted after an intense, four-plus hour debate to create a separate court system and an expanded police force within the city of Jackson — the Blackest city in America — that would be appointed completely by white state officials.

If House Bill 1020 becomes law later this session, the white chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court would appoint two judges to oversee a new district within the city — one that includes all of the city’s majority-white neighborhoods, among other areas. The white state attorney general would appoint four prosecutors, a court clerk, and four public defenders for the new district. The white state public safety commissioner would oversee an expanded Capitol Police force, run currently by a white chief.

The appointments by state officials would occur in lieu of judges and prosecutors being elected by the local residents of Jackson and Hinds County — as is the case in every other municipality and county in the state.

Mississippi’s capital city is 80% Black and home to a higher percentage of Black residents than any major American city. Mississippi’s Legislature is thoroughly controlled by white Republicans, who have redrawn districts over the past 30 years to ensure they can pass any bill without a single Democratic vote. Every legislative Republican is white, and most Democrats are Black.

After thorough and passionate dissent from Black members of the House, the bill passed 76-38 Tuesday primarily along party lines. Two Black member of the House — Rep. Cedric Burnett, a Democrat from Tunica, and Angela Cockerham, an independent from Magnolia — voted for the measure. All but one lawmaker representing the city of Jackson — Rep. Shanda Yates, a white independent — opposed the bill.

“Only in Mississippi would we have a bill like this … where we say solving the problem requires removing the vote from Black people,” Rep. Ed Blackmon, a Democrat from Canton, said while pleading with his colleagues to oppose the measure.

READ MORE: Hinds County forces unite against bill to create unelected judicial district, expanded police force

For most of the debate, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba — who has been publicly chided by the white Republicans who lead the Legislature — looked down on the House chamber from the gallery. Lumumba accused the Legislature earlier this year of practicing “plantation politics” in terms of its treatment of Jackson, and of the bill that passed Tuesday, he said: “It reminds me of apartheid.”

Hinds County Circuit Judge Adrienne Wooten, who served in the House before being elected judge and would be one of the existing judges to lose jurisdiction under this House proposal, also watched the debate.

Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell, who oversees the Capitol Police, watched a portion of the debate from the House gallery, chuckling at times when Democrats made impassioned points about the bill. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, the only statewide elected official who owns a house in Jackson, walked onto the House floor shortly before the final vote.

Rep. Blackmon, a civil rights leader who has a decades-long history of championing voting issues, equated the current legislation to the Jim Crow-era 1890 Constitution that was written to strip voting rights from Black Mississippians.

“This is just like the 1890 Constitution all over again,” Blackmon said from the floor. “We are doing exactly what they said they were doing back then: ‘Helping those people because they can’t govern themselves.’”

The bill was authored by Rep. Trey Lamar, a Republican whose hometown of Senatobia is 172 miles north of Jackson. It was sent to Lamar’s committee by Speaker Philip Gunn instead of a House Judiciary Committee, where similar legislation normally would be heard.

“This bill is designed to make our capital city of Jackson, Mississippi, a safer place,” Lamar said, citing numerous news sources who have covered Jackson’s high crime rates. Dwelling on a long backlog of Hinds County court cases, Lamar said the bill was designed to “help not hinder the (Hinds County) court system.”

“My constituents want to feel safe when they come here,” Lamar said, adding the capital city belonged to all the citizens of the state. “Where I am coming from with this bill is to help the citizens of Jackson and Hinds County.”

Many House members who represent Jackson on Tuesday said they were never consulted by House leadership about the bill. Several times during the debate, they pointed out that Republican leaders have never proposed increasing the number of elected judges to address a backlog of cases or increasing state funding to assist an overloaded Jackson Police Department.

In earlier sessions, the Legislature created the Capitol Complex Improvement District, which covers much of the downtown, including the state government office complex and other areas of Jackson. The bill would extend the existing district south to Highway 80, north to County Line Road, west to State Street and east to the Pearl River. Between 40,000 and 50,000 people live within the area.

Opponents of the legislation, dozens of whom have protested at the Capitol several days this year, accused the authors of carving out mostly white, affluent areas of the city to be put in the new district.

The bill would double the funding for the district to $20 million in order to increase the size of the existing Capitol Police force, which has received broad criticism from Jacksonians for shooting several people in recent months with little accountability.

The new court system laid out in House Bill 1020 is estimated to cost $1.6 million annually.

Democratic members of the House said if they wanted to help with the crime problem, the Legislature could increase the number of elected judges in Hinds County. Blackmon said Hinds County was provided four judges in 1992 when a major redistricting occurred, and that number has not increased since then even as the caseload for the four judges has exploded.

In addition, Blackmon said the number of assistant prosecuting attorneys could be increased within Hinds County. In Lamar’s bill, the prosecuting of cases within the district would be conducted by attorneys in the office of Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who is white.

Blackmon said the bill was “about a land grab,” not about fighting crime. He said other municipalities in the state had higher crime rates than Jackson. Blackmon asked why the bill would give the appointed judges the authority to hear civil cases that had nothing to do with crime.

“When Jackson becomes the No. 1 place for murder, we have a problem,” Lamar responded, highlighting the city’s long backlog of court cases. Several Democrats, during the debate, pointed out that the state of Mississippi’s crime lab has a lengthy backlog, as well, adding to the difficult in closing cases in Hinds County.

Lamar said the Mississippi Constitution gives the Legislature the authority to create “inferior courts,” as the Capitol Complex system would be. The decisions of the appointed judges can be appealed to Hinds County Circuit Court.

Democrats offered seven amendments, including one to make the judges elected. All were defeated primarily along partisan and racial lines.

“We not incompetent,” said Rep. Chris Bell, D-Jackson. “Our judges are not incompetent.”

An amendment offered by Rep. Cheikh Taylor, D-Starkville, to require the Capitol Police to wear body cameras was approved. Lamar voiced support for the amendment.

Much of the debate centered around the issue of creating a court where the Black majority in Hinds County would not be allowed to vote on judges.

One amendment that was defeated would require the appointed judges to come from Hinds County. Lamar said by allowing the judges to come from areas other than Hinds County would ensure “the best and brightest” could serve. Black legislators said the comment implied that he judges and other court staff could not be found within the Black majority population of Hinds County.

When asked why he could not add more elected judges to Hinds County rather than appointing judges to the new district, Lamar said, “This is the bill that is before the body.”

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