Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday named Rep. Bennie Thompson chairman of a newly created House Select Committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
“I take the work of the committee seriously and look forward to making sure that the American people and people around the world know exactly what happened.” Thompson said.
— Bennie G. Thompson (@BennieGThompson) July 1, 2021
The House voted 222-190 to create the committee on Wednesday. Just two Republicans voted with Democrats to support its formation — Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.
Pelosi moved to establish the committee after Senate Republicans blocked the formation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 attack.
The bill to create the bipartisan commission passed through the House in May with support from 35 Republicans, including Mississippi Rep. Michael Guest. However, the bill was blocked by Senate Republicans, including Mississippi Sens. Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith. The final 54 to 35 Senate vote fell six votes shy of the 60 votes needed to prevent a procedural filibuster.
The unsuccessful bill, modeled after the commission that studied the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was the result of bipartisan negotiations between Thompson and the Homeland Security Committee’s Republican ranking member, Rep. John Katko of New York.
“Our bipartisan, good-faith proposal was met with a filibuster. Now that Senate Republicans have chosen to block the formation of an independent commission, it falls to the House to stay the course and get the answers they deserve,” said Thompson.
The earlier commission would have been composed of 10 members, with both parties appointing half of them. Proponents said it was necessary for Congress to acquire a full understanding of the deadliest attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812.
For the House Select Committee, Pelosi has appointed eight of the thirteen members. House minority leader Kevin McCarthy can nominate the remaining five members “in consultation” with Pelosi, meaning the speaker could veto his selections.
Pelosi also took the unusual step of making a Republican one of her appointees: Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Cheney has been the most vocal critic of former President Trump within the Republican ranks, and was ousted from her leadership post for criticizing Trump.
“Since January 6, the courage of my party’s leaders has faded. But the threat to our Republic has not,” Cheney wrote in a statement released prior to Wednesday’s vote. “On an almost daily basis, Donald Trump repeats the same statements that provoked violence before. His attacks on our Constitution are accelerating. Our responsibility is to confront these threats, not appease and deflect.”
McCarthy reacted angrily to Cheney accepting the position, and has not committed to nominating Republican members. Pelosi filling eight of the seats means they have a quorum, and the work of the committee can continue regardless of whether or not McCarthy participates.
“I was shocked that she would accept something from Speaker Pelosi,” McCarthy said. “It would seem to me, since I didn’t hear from her, maybe she’s closer to her than us.”
In addition to Cheney and Thompson, Pelosi appointed:
Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Administration Committee;
Representative Adam Schiff of California, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee;
Representative Pete Aguilar of California
Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida and a leader of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition;
Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland; and
At the beginning of the pandemic, Tikisha Garrison lost her job as a freight analyst but continued to work her second job as a dispatcher for a commercial shredding company.
She dipped into her savings to keep making rent payments. But as the pandemic has dragged on, it has become harder to get the rent checks in on time, landing her two months behind on her rent and putting her at risk for eviction.
The federal eviction moratorium, which began March 27, 2020, was most recently extended to the end of July, but federal officials have indicated that this will be the last extension.
The single mother of three applied to the Rental Assistance for Mississippians program at her landlord’s recommendation, but over a month after submitting her application, she still has not heard back.
“I’m not the one to use public assistance, I always work. I never reach out for it,” Garrison said.
Her most recent experience shook her faith in the system. “And the one time I needed it, I got scammed.”
But what might feel like a racket to Garrison is really the bureaucratic backlog of an unprecedented amount of assistance being dispensed by a state agency with initially only five employees to distribute it.
By June 28, the Mississippi Home Corporation, the agency administering RAMP, had obligated just $3 million or 1.7% of its $186 million allotment from the December 2020 COVID-19 stimulus bill.
Two counties also received $7 million each, of which NBC News reported that Harrison County had paid out more than half, while Hinds County had just reached $500,000, or about 7%.
Other states are struggling too. Louisiana has obligated $8.8 million or 3.5% of its allotment as of June 22, and Alabama has obligated $1.5 million or 0.6% of its allotment as of May 31.
Mississippi Home Corporation Director Scott Spivey told Mississippi Today the large windfall of funding means that, unlike usual, a lack of resources isn’t the issue. Instead, administering the large pot of money is like “drinking from a firehose.”
In roughly the first 12 weeks since the program began accepting applications on March 29 of this year, just over 1,000 out of 5,518 completed RAMP applications had been approved for assistance as of June 25, with more than 17,000 applications started.
Spivey did say that the program is beginning to operate more quickly and is now approving about 100 applications a day.
The quasi-governmental Mississippi Home Corporation, created by the state Legislature in 1989, has had a difficult time administering the program because roughly 85% to 90% of applications contain some issue or error that requires manual clean-up or some additional documentation.
“We hoped we would be further along than this, quite frankly. We’ve had some delays with software. We’ve had two different changes in treasury regulations since we started the program, and those have been welcomed changes,” Spivey said. “They’ve kind of tried to make it easier for states to distribute money, but that still causes us to have to keep changing the way we do things. Especially at the beginning of the process, when you’re changing the process, that interrupts it.”
John Sullivan of Enterprise Community Partners, a national housing advocacy nonprofit, said the Mississippi program for rental assistance was not going well, but that these types of programs are not going particularly well anywhere across the country. National reporting has also highlighted these issues in California, Colorado, and Georgia.
“All around the country what you’re seeing is all of these programs are very slow-moving,” Sullivan said. “I think that’s a key component as to why the Biden administration extended the eviction moratorium for another month — to give states a little more time to get this money on the ground so people don’t get evicted.
“I’m very glad they did that. It would be a shame to lift the eviction moratorium when there are millions of people around the country that haven’t been able to access the rental assistance, and there’s so much money out there. The assistance is there for them. The money is available for them. It’s just a matter of processing the applications, which is always going to be time-consuming.”
While the previous June 30 expiration date for the federal eviction ban heightened anxieties for renters who have not been able to get help from RAMP, the moratorium was never the airtight protection for renters who struggled to pay their monthly bills as some believed. Landlords have continued to file evictions throughout almost the entirety of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Garrison’s landlord has not indicated that they will imminently file for eviction, but she knows of other people getting evicted after 2 months without payment. She has pulled money out of her 401k to be able to make payments if an eviction gets filed but is worried about what will happen to her credit score that she has worked to build.
“As a single mom, I can’t sleep at night not knowing what’s about to happen,” Garrison said.
Renee McClinton, a Southaven resident who also lost her second job due to the pandemic, has also not received any communication from the RAMP program two months after filing her application.
“After two months, you lose some type of hope … there’s no updates saying ‘we’ll get to you on this date’ or letting you know where you are on the list. There needs to be some type of changes on how they communicate with tenants,” McClinton said.
McClinton received a letter from her landlord that they were going to begin eviction proceedings on the same day that she submitted her RAMP application, but the paperwork had not been filed yet the last time she called the Justice Court.
Both McClinton and Garrison have called the RAMP office several times, repeatedly being told to just keep checking the application portal.
“I’m not looking for a handout, I just need some help,” McClinton said.
Spivey said the federal government does not allow rental assistance applicants to self-certify their income, meaning they must provide some documentation, such as tax returns, to prove they earn under the set threshold. Spivey said the frequent application issues, often stemming from the documentation requirements, have created a bottleneck for the five people tasked with processing applications for the Mississippi Home Corporation.
People who earn under 50% of the average median income are given priority, which means their applications are moved up the line. Spivey said they thought that prioritizing people earning under 50% would speed things up for people with the greatest need, but it has really just contributed to the bottleneck since a majority of the applications they are receiving are under that 50% threshold.
This element of the program structure has also meant that people who earned over 50% of the average median income kept getting pushed back to the end of the line, which Spivey said was the cause of the long wait times experienced by the tenants Mississippi Today spoke to.
Garrison said that while she appreciated they were working to make assistance available, she felt that the application didn’t fully consider other costs that affect her income, including her car note and how dependents affected her income.
Sullivan, who has experience working with federal disaster relief grants from Hurricane Katrina, emphasized the need for increased administrative processing power, into dozens of employees processing applications.
“It’s an extremely labor intensive process,” he said.
The Mississippi Home Corporation has recentlyset up a call center with 15 full-time employees and contracted with Balch & Bingham, providing 96 more people to process applications, in an effort to address these issues.
It is also likely that more people need help from the RAMP program than have currently applied. Sullivan explained that having an online-only application can limit the number of people that apply, since many low-income people may not have regular internet access or be savvy with uploading the variety of documentation required.
The size of the rental shortfall in Mississippi was originally estimated, in a September 2020 report, to be $159M-$225M by January of 2021, but as the pandemic has continued, these numbers are more difficult to calculate.
“There are too many variables to come up with decent estimates at this point,” Sullivan said. “Many renters with back due rent have been formally and informally evicted, racked up huge credit card bills, used stimulus funds, borrowed money from family, cut back on other necessary expenses, etc and so it is hard to say what amount of back due rent exists now that could be paid by the program.”
Unlike the previous rental assistance program for which Mississippi received $18 million last summer, RAMP currently applies to a large swath of tenants with past due rent. For one, the program raised the eligible income limit from people earning 50% of the area’s median income to 80%. In Hinds County, families of four qualify if they earn under $56,700, instead of the previous $35,450.
Also unlike the previous $18 million, this funding does not require landlord participation in the process if it cannot be obtained. Previous funding required landlords to apply on behalf of tenants. While the current program does attempt to make the payment directly to the landlord/utility provider, if they are not willing to participate, funds can be given directly to tenants to pay their rent.
Jeremiah Smith of the 662 Tenants Union, which operates a tenant emergency support hotline, said that landlords have been largely uncooperative with RAMP applications, preferring to evict in a majority of cases he’s witnessed. He also said that around half of the people that call them trying to get rental assistance have not heard anything back yet from the RAMP program.
Of the applications that have been fully processed, RAMP has approved 83% of applicants for assistance.
The December 2020 COVID-19 stimulus bill said funds could be reclaimed if 65% of a state’s allotment had not been spent by the end of September 2o21, but further guidance from the treasury department indicated they would not be quick to utilize this power. Spivey said that the September 2021 spending deadline is not realistic.
The American Rescue Act, passed in March of 2021, set aside another $155 million for rental assistance in Mississippi, but this money has more lenient spending deadlines and will be available through 2025.
Spivey said renters who apply for the assistance and qualify for it will receive it — eventually.
“The government has done the right things so far in providing assistance to help renters and extending moratoriums so they can stay in their homes,” Sullivan said, “[We’re] really just hoping that landlords can be as patient as possible during this process, because the money will eventually flow out into communities, to landlords, and to renters. It’s just a matter of time.”
To apply for rental assistance through the RAMP program, visit ms-ramp.com. If you live in Harrison County, you may also contact the Open Doors Homeless Coalition at 228-604-8011. For rental assistance in Hinds County, visit hindsrentalaid.com or call 601-514-0137.
After 129 years of playing college baseball — mostly high quality baseball — Mississippi State claimed its first national championship in any team sport Wednesday night. The Diamond Dogs body-slammed defending national champion Vanderbilt 9-0, as more than 20,000 Bulldog fans roared their approval. State fans cheered, they chanted, they clapped, they high-fived, they hugged, they sang, they danced.
Rick Cleveland
And some cried.
The last few days, they have painted Omaha, a 13-hour drive from Mississippi, solid maroon.
The 2021 Bulldogs have accomplished what so many Bulldog legends — and so many splendid Mississippi State teams — could not. Will Clark and Rafael Palmeiro, Thunder and Lightning, couldn’t do it. The great Ron Polk, in two stints as State’s coach, couldn’t do it. John Cohen couldn’t do as a player or a coach – but he did as an athletic director. He hired the guy who finally did it: Chris Lemonis.
These Bulldogs all did it. They endured COVID-19. They came back from losing three straight to Arkansas, two of three to lowly Missouri and then two straight in the SEC Tournament. They got hot at the right time, winning an NCAA Regional, a tough Super Regional with Notre Dame and their half of the CWS bracket where they had to be tradition-rich Texas twice.
They came back from losing their first game of this CWS Championship series by an 8-2 score to Vandy. As their coach Chris Lemonis has said so many times here lately: “Nothing comes easy for this team. We keep fighting.”
He added to that postgame Wednesday. “We’re the last ones standing,” Lemonis said. “It’s a special night for all of us. There’s gonna be a big party tonight.”
They won the national championship with their 50th victory of the year. They finished 50-18.
These Bulldogs will be talked about for decades. Some may have reached legendary status already.
Decades from now State fans will talk about how Will Bednar came back on three days rest and pitched six innings of no-hit baseball against the defending national champions. They’ll talk about how Landon Sims almost preserved the no-hitter. They’ll talk about the sharp-fielding Bulldogs played error-less, sometimes spectacular defensive baseball for the entire College World Series.
And so many of them — especially the younger ones — will talk about how they were here when it happened. How they helped will their heroes to victory.
In Starkville, they call it the Dude Effect. They brought it here to what they now call Dudy Noble North. The effect is real. It encourages State players to achieve feats they might not otherwise achieve. It causes skilled players on the other team to bobble the ball on plays they normally make in their sleep.
It surely causes people around the nation who are tuning in to ESPN to wonder: Who cares this much about college baseball?
Mississippi people, that’s who.
Bednar was nails, sharp ones. After a shaky start in the first inning when he walked two batters and needed a double play to get out of the inning, he dominated Vanderbilt. Get this: He retired the last 15 batters he faced. His fast ball was good. His slider was devastating. Vandy couldn’t touch it, and they couldn’t lay off of it either.
Conversely, State stuck to its obvious plan of attack against Vanderbilt pitching hero Kumar Rocker, a legend himself. They “spit on” Rocker’s hard-breaking slider that often looked like a strike before dipping out of the strike zone. They waited on his fastball — in the strike zone — and then made him pay.
Rocker lasted 4.1 innings, 92 pitches. Rowdey Jordan laced Rocker’s first pitch — the first of the game — into right field for a ringing single. He scored later in the inning on Luke Hancock’s sacrifice fly.
The tone of the game was set.
State added two more runs in the second, two more in the fifth, when they chased Rocker from the game. All the while, State fans got louder and louder and louder. In the seventh inning when both Logan Tanner and Kellum Clark clobbered home runs, you literally could not hear your own voice. It was that loud, like the fourth quarter of a really close SEC football game.
When Sims recorded the last out, State players rushed the field, celebrating in a sure-enough ‘Dog-pile around pitchers’ mound. They had done it. At last. And you know what dear ol’ Jack Cristil would have said: “You can wrap this one up in maroon and white.”
Here in Omaha, on June 30, 2021, Mississippi State’s Bulldogs and their legions of fans did just that.
Thousands of Bulldog fans, most dressed in maroon, have descended on Omaha and taken over TD Ameritrade Park. (MSU Athletics)
OMAHA — In Cincinnati, Jeff Brantley, the former Mississippi State and Major League pitching standout, has kept up with his Bulldogs during commercial breaks while he broadcasts Cincinnati Reds games.
“In between innings. Every game,” Brantley said Wednesday morning from Great American Stadium in Cincinnati, where he was preparing for another game. “Last night it looked like a home game at Dudy Noble. It’s what State fans do.”
In Richmond, Va., Tuesday night, ex-Bulldogs Jake Mangum tore off his Binghamton Rumble Ponies uniform after a 5-2 victory over the Richmond Flying Squirrels, so he could watch State play Vanderbilt in Game 2. The two-hour rain delay in Omaha unexpectedly allowed Mangum to watch every inning. He ate it up.
Rick Cleveland
Here, in Omaha, State fans have packed the motels and hotels at outrageous prices, taken over entire taverns, gobbled down famous Omaha beef and yelled themselves hoarse at TD Ameritrade Park. Most made the 13-hour drive to get here, and some have been here for 10 days. Many came without tickets and have paid exorbitant prices for those.
Mississippi State fans really are a college baseball phenomenon.
“Don’t you just love the passion?” Mark Keenum, the school’s president and a 50-year Diamond Dog fan, said Wednesday, a few hours before State was to play Vanderbilt for the national championship.
“The love our fans have for Mississippi State and Mississippi State baseball is remarkable,” Keenum said. “It’s in our blood. I am just so proud to see so many thousands of our fans here to support our team We are a family, a loyal family, and we want to celebrate together.”
Mark Keenum, left, poses with one of State’s Tuesday night baseball heroes, Preston Johnson. (Photo by Sid Salter)
As a student at State — he graduated in 1983 — Keenum says he “drug a rig” out behind the left field fence at the old Dudy Noble Field and rarely missed a game. He was a grad student in 1985 when Brantley, Will Clark, Rafael Palmeiro were the nation’s No. 1 team for much of the season but couldn’t quite get it done here in Omaha.
“We’ve never won the national championship,” Keenum said. “We’ve never won a team championship in any sport — lots of individual championships but no team championships. We’ve come so close but never quite have gotten over the hump. Here we are on the cusp, so close, and our people want to see it. They want to be part of the history.”
No matter what happens tonight, Keenum said this State baseball team has made its mark — and so have this team’s fans.
“There’s no doubt, athletics puts a university on the forefront in a huge way,” Keenum said. “The exposure Mississippi State is getting here is wonderful. We couldn’t afford to buy this exposure. People tune in and see the passion of our people and watch them having so much fun. It’s like a three-hour commercial.”
This is part three in a five-part series about Philip Gunn’s influence in changing the Mississippi state flag. Read part one here, read part two here, and read more about the series here.
Speaker of the House Philip Gunn was watching his son play baseball in Louisiana on June 20, 2020, when he got a call from Rep. Jason White, the second highest-ranking House member and a top lieutenant of Gunn’s.
“Mr. Speaker, you’re never going to believe who I just got off the phone with,” White told Gunn.
White paused a beat and said, “Karl Oliver,” referring to the House Republican who famously wrote in 2017 that public officials who wanted to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces “should be lynched.”
“He’s in,” White said.
That was the first moment Gunn genuinely believed he might be able to secure the House votes necessary to change the state flag, and it was a signal the progress he was making inside the building was beginning to match the fervor that was growing outside the building.
Earlier that week, things looked significantly less promising. Gunn committed to a bipartisan group of House members who wanted to change the flag that he would take the temperature of his Republican caucus. Long the most prominent Republican official to publicly call for changing the flag, Gunn didn’t think at the time he could whip anywhere close to the votes necessary to pass a flag bill.
But as rallies over racial inequality raged across the state and nation, Gunn believed there was a window of opportunity, so he dispatched his three most trusted allies — Rep. White, Rep. Trey Lamar, and his former chief of staff Nathan Wells — to begin having conversations with House Republicans.
“We expressed some concerns,” Lamar said of the assignment. “We had to counsel him and say, ‘Look, there is an unknown out there if we push this hard.’ Can we push this hard and get the votes? It was doubtful at that time. It wasn’t a very positive outlook at all. But outside just that, we didn’t know what Philip’s speakership looks like on the back end of any effort. You know, you force House members into taking this vote, you may have issues when the next speaker’s race comes up, or even before then. There may be some problems there, and it was one of those things that we wouldn’t be doing our job as advisors, you know, in his inner circle, if we didn’t make him aware of that.”
The first few conversations the group had with House Republicans did not go well. Gunn said he began feeling discouraged, and there was little movement inside the Capitol between June 11, the day Gunn committed to asking around his caucus, and June 17.
The lack of movement inside the building that week certainly did not match the mounting pressure outside the building. The public at large had joined the chorus of activists who had been leading the charge in demanding that leaders remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag. Dozens of local leaders of Mississippi cities and counties made public their opposition to the old flag. Business leaders had begun publicly calling for a change, and several lobbyists who represented those leaders were pulling lawmakers aside in the Capitol hallways making their cases.
Public polling was released that showed Mississippians were warming to the idea of a change. Even NASCAR had announced that week it was banning the Confederate battle emblem from its racetracks.
“I know it must have looked promising from the outside, but inside, we were still such a long ways off,” Gunn said. “It didn’t feel like a productive few days.”
A critical turning point was June 18, when the Southeastern Conference publicly announced it would not allow Mississippi schools to host SEC championship events until the flag was changed. Before the SEC statement, Gunn believed he had 12 Republican votes to change the flag — well shy of the roughly 40 he needed.
Lamar, a former Ole Miss football player, had long shared privately that he would be willing to vote to change the flag. Shortly after the SEC released its statement on June 18, Lamar issued a statement of his own on social media.
In doing so, Lamar called to change the flag and became Gunn’s first major committee chairman to publicly take that stand.
“The SEC statement certainly was not the reason I wanted to change the flag, but it provided the opportunity for me to come out publicly,” Lamar said. “The reason was that it was just the right thing to do. I believe in my heart that it was the right thing to do because there were fellow Mississippians that were hurt by its depictions in the way that hate groups had co-opted it. Those with hate in their hearts had co-opted this symbol and still others refused to deny themselves… and refused to put their other fellow human beings before themselves over a piece of cloth. You know, that’s the reason to change the flag.”
Lamar’s statement went viral nationally. House colleagues blew up his phone — some supportive, some questioning why he’d taken the step — and he wasn’t sure if the statement would help the leadership’s efforts to whip the votes.
Gunn later said that Lamar’s post inspired several House Republicans to come on board.
“Trey (Lamar) was with Rep. Nick Bain and Rep. Jody Steverson that night he released the statement, and he reported back to me the next morning that the two of them were on board,” Gunn said. “So as far as I knew, I previously had 12 (Republican) votes. Bain and Steverson made 14. So it felt like it was starting to move a little bit.”
The next day, on June 19, the NCAA released a statement that it would ban postseason championships and tournaments — including college baseball and softball regionals — from Mississippi until the state flag came down. Gunn said his sergeants had gotten a couple more soft commitments that day, but they still could only feel certain of 14 Republican votes — about two dozen fewer than needed.
Then the next day, June 20, the probability came into clearer focus with the news that Oliver had flipped.
“So Karl (Oliver) calls and says, ‘I’ve been talking to my wife, talking to my daughters, I don’t want them to be disappointed in me and I don’t want them to be embarrassed by me,’” Gunn recalled.
That reasoning from Oliver echoed the charge Gunn shared with the entire Republican caucus in an unplanned, emotional speech just a few days before on June 11.
“After we got Karl, I’m starting to think that this thing’s got a chance,” Gunn said. “And then we began to get word that others may be on board.”
Gunn hung up with White, and still watching his son at the baseball field in Louisiana, he dialed Shawn Parker, the newly elected president of the Mississippi Baptist Convention. Gunn, a former Baptist deacon himself, knew that public support from religious leaders could only help his effort to swing more Republican House votes.
“He’d been on the job for three months at that point, and all of a sudden this gets dumped in his lap. He’s a preacher, he just wants to share the gospel. He ain’t worried about politics,” Gunn said, laughing at the wild nature of the moment. “I told him it would be a big help if he could publicly support changing the flag, and he immediately agreed.”
While certainly a big ask, Parker had some cover. In 2016, the Southern Baptist Convention had passed a resolution urging the discontinued use of the Confederate battle flag in their churches — a decision that made headlines in Mississippi and across the nation.
Gunn, who in 2016 was serving as a trustee of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was among the thousands of Baptist leaders who voted to pass that resolution at the convention.
“We had already been working on possibly issuing some kind of statement when Philip (Gunn) called,” Parker told Mississippi Today. “But there was probably some sense of apprehension in all of our minds, and his call was a great source of encouragement for us to continue moving forward. I appreciated his determination.”
After the call with Parker, Gunn called Ligon Duncan, the chancellor of Reformed Theological Seminary in Clinton and a nationally prominent Presbyterian leader. Duncan, like Parker, told Gunn he would also issue a public statement in support of changing the flag the next week.
Gunn traveled home from his son’s Louisiana baseball tournament that weekend feeling confident that the momentum was pushing them forward and that he would be able to whip the remaining necessary votes.
But on the morning of Monday, June 22, Gunn got a call from Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann that reminded him how fragile the moment was and that a single misstep could halt the progress made inside the Capitol. Gunn knew he needed to act quickly and decisively to keep it from falling apart.
Part four of the Mississippi Today’s series will publish on July 1, and part five will publish on July 2.
Three of Mississippi’s four congressmen either voted against or say they oppose legislation passed by the U.S. House to remove all Confederate monuments from the United States Capitol.
Although there are multiple on display, the vote has unique implications for Mississippi since it is the only state in the nation that displays at the U.S. Capitol two statues of Confederates: Jefferson Davis and James Zachariah George. Davis was a slaveowner and president of the Confederacy, and George was a lead architect of the 1890 state Constitution that stripped voting rights from nearly 150,000 Black Mississippians. Neither man was born in Mississippi.
The Mississippi statues were placed in 1931 after they were approved by the state Legislature in 1924. Congress in 1864 authorized each state to donate and display two statues at the Capitol of citizens “illustrious for their historic renown or for distinguished civic or military services.”
Reps. Steven Palazzo of the 4th District in south Mississippi and Trent Kelly of the 1st District in north Mississippi voted against the bill that passed 285-120 Tuesday. Rep. Michael Guest of the 3rd District, which is primarily central Mississippi and parts of southwest Mississippi, said he did not vote because he was delayed in returning to Washington, D.C., because of the funeral of a family friend, but would have voted no.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, who represents a large part of western Mississippi and is the state’s only African American and Democrat in Congress, voted with all other Democrats in the U.S. House to remove the monuments.
On social media, Thompson said he voted for the legislation because “statues of those who served in the Confederacy or supported slavery or segregation should not have a place of honor in the U.S. Capitol.”
In the past, Mississippi’s Republican members of Congress said they believe it should be up to the states to decide the monuments representing them in the U.S. Capitol.
“I would be opposed to the federal government ordering or dictating Mississippi to remove those statues,” Guest has said in the past.
Mississippi’s two U.S. senators, Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith, both Republicans, have made similar comments.
Wicker told WJTV last summer, “It would be a mistake for Congress to remove statues placed in the U.S. Capitol by Mississippi or any state. In my view, such an overreach would be counterproductive to the healthy conversations on race happening across the country. Under federal law, state governments are solely responsible for selecting and replacing the statues that represent their states.”
Other southern states, such as Arkansas and Florida, are taking steps to remove from the U.S. Capitol monuments tied to slavery or the discrimination of African Americans.
OMAHA — Baseball players call it “spitting on” a pitch. They are not talking about tobacco juice.
To spit on a pitch is to let it go by. To not chase a breaking ball out of the strike zone. Just watch it. Spit on it. Wait for a better pitch in the zone.
Rick Cleveland
What is essential for Mississippi State tonight in order to win a national championship: Spit on Vanderbilt pitcher Kumar Rocker’s wicked sliders, which often break down and out of the strike zone. Make him throw his 96 mph fastball in the zone. Then, tee off.
Easier said than done.
Said State coach Chris Lemonis Tuesday night after State trounced Vandy 13-2, when asked about Rocker: “One of the keys is to grind him out and make him throw his breaking stuff in the zone. A lot of his breaking stuff is out of the zone. So for us to have good at bats, we have to be locked in, to make him work, which is what we do. That’s usually our goal anyway, but with Kumar Rocker it definitely is. Like I said, he’s one of the best to ever pitch in college baseball.”
Rocker won 14 games and lost just three for Vandy this season. He struck out a whopping 173 in 117.2 innings. Opponents bat just .164 off him. When State faced him on April 23 in Nashville, Rocker was dominant. He pitched the entire nine innings, gave up only three hits and one earned run in a 6-2 Vandy win. Rocker struck out eight Bulldogs. He threw 109 pitches. Simply put, State didn’t spit on enough on those Rocker breaking sliders.
Rocker is not invincible. Ole Miss beat him in Oxford. Arkansas got him in the SEC Tournament, making him throw 86 pitches in just 3.1 innings. The Razorbacks spit on that slider breaking out of the zone, walked four times and bunched five hits to score five runs off Rocker in a 6-4 victory.
The Bulldogs have had no such luck with Rocker. Here, in the 2019 College World Series, they faced him and managed only one run over six innings in a critical 6-3 loss in a winner’s bracket game.
Rocker, like State’s projected starter Will Bednar, will be going on short rest. Rocker threw 111 pitches over six innings in a 3-1 victory over a depleted North Carolina State team on Friday. Rocker got the win but the Wolfpack made him work, extending at bats and getting into the Vandy bullpen.
That’s the State goal tonight. And that’s what Mississippi State hitting coach Jake Gautreau preaches all the time: Make the pitcher work, don’t help him, spit on breaking balls — and for that matter, fastballs — out of the zone. When you see State batters fist-bump their own chests when they get two strikes, that’s what that means: Grind it out, make the pitcher work, extend the at bat and get that pitch count higher and higher.
Starting Thursday, people holding many professional licenses — including public school teachers — in good standing in other states can move to the Magnolia State and take a job or hang out a shingle.
House Bill 1263 would require most of Mississippi’s occupational licensing boards, agencies and commissions to issue licenses to people who hold a current license in good standing from another state and have been licensed at least a year. There are some exceptions, such as physicians and attorneys, but it covers dozens of other professions, such as accountants, cosmetologists, dentists, nurses, pharmacists, psychologists and veterinarians.
Gov. Tate Reeves at a press conference this week thanked the bill’s author, state Rep. Becky Currie of Brookhaven, and Sen. Kevin Blackwell of Southaven for the bill’s passage. Reeves said the measure is “a loss for governmental bureaucracy and red tape,” that will help Mississippi attract residents and jobs.
The measure is one of hundreds of new Mississippi laws and spending bills that take effect on Thursday, including a teacher pay raise, House Bill 852, of about $1,000 per year for Mississippi’s more than 31,000 kindergarten through 12th grade teachers and teacher assistants. The more than 100 appropriations bills that fund state agencies also will go into effect Thursday.
Most laws passed by the Mississippi Legislature take effect each year on July 1, the start of the state’s fiscal year, although some start “from and after passage,” which means immediately after the governor signs them. Others start at later specified dates. For instance, a pay raise of up to 3% for the about 26,000 state employees approved during the 2021 session will not go into effect until Jan. 1, 2022.
A look at some of the laws that take effect Thursday:
Senate Bill 2795: Centers on criminal justice reform. The new law expands parole eligibility and would allow as many as 3,000 of the state’s roughly 17,000 people now in prison to become eligible for parole within three to five years. Those convicted of violations deemed violent crimes committed without a weapon, such as simple robbery or burglary, would be eligible for parole after serving 20 years or 50% of their sentence, whichever is less. They currently have to serve 50%. And some convicted of possession of drugs or of selling drugs and those convicted of some other nonviolent crimes would be eligible after serving 10 years or 25%, whichever is less.
House Bill 1135: This bill concerns the home delivery of alcohol. The law allows home delivery of beer, wine and liquor from liquor stores and other retailers within 30 miles of the stores. Delivery would not be allowed to any “dry” areas where alcohol sales are prohibited and would be allowed only from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday, not on Sundays nor on Christmas day. Purchasers would have to be 21 or older, as would delivery drivers.
H0use Bill 196: The Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act provides women in prison with minor children more opportunity to see the children and provides additional rights for pregnant women, such as allowing a newborn to remain with the mother for 72 hours unless there are medical concerns and prohibiting invasive searches of pregnant women. The new law also would provide additional rights for all women, such as access to menstrual hygiene products.
Senate Bill 2569: This bill makes it a misdemeanor to tamper with urine samples used for testing. A third conviction could result in a felony conviction.
House Bill 277: Allows tribal identification cards to be used as identification cards for various activities, such as proving age to purchase liquor or cigarettes or to purchase lottery tickets. The new law also allows the card to be used to purchase hunting and fishing licenses and for other activities. A tribal identification card including a photo already can be used to vote.
Senate Bill 2253: Allows a concealed carry permit to be combined with a driver’s license or state-sponsored identification card.
Senate Bill 2606: The Mississippi Native Spirits Law allows liquor and wine produced in the state more leeway in its sales, such as allowing sales where it is produced, and allowing direct sales by bypassing the state’s liquor and wine warehouse.
House Bill 1139: This reverses a law passed in the 2000s during a budget crunch where businesses had to submit to the state early a certain percentage of sales tax collected in June.
Senate Bill 2621: This bill creates a task force to study domestic laws, including those surrounding divorce.
Senate Bill 2536: This law mandates that people identified as male at birth cannot participates in female sports activities.
On this week’s edition of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Today Editor-At-Large Marshall Ramsey interviews popular watercolorist Wyatt Waters.
Known for his watercolors of Southern culture, Wyatt Waters is a watercolor master who works solely on location – preferring the challenges that both plein air and watercolor present. Waters’ works have been featured in Art & Antiques, American Artist, Plein Air, and Watercolor. His artwork can be found in both private and corporate collections. A recipient of the Mississippi Governor’s Award for artistic excellence, Wyatt has had numerous solo exhibitions at museums, such as the Mississippi Museum of Art, The Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, the Meridian Museum of Art and the Jackson Municipal Gallery.
He and chef Robert St. John have collaborated on four books – A Southern Palate,Southern Palate, An Italian Palate, and most recently, A Mississippi Palate. He received the MS Institute of Arts & Letters Award for An Oxford Sketchbook and the MS Library Association Special Award for Art for his collaboration with Robert St. John, on A Southern Palate.
Additionally, Waters and St. John co-hosted Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s popular Palate to Palette series for five seasons, which chronicled their travels and culinary and artistic experiences across Mississippi and Italy.
Trading international travel for the travel trailer life, Wyatt and his wife, Kristi, are documenting their travels with Wyatt’s watercolors of the Southeast for a new book, scheduled to be released in the Fall of 2022.
All of Wyatt’s work is available through the Wyatt Waters Gallery in Clinton, Mississippi.
