OurTupelo

New Census means it is time to draw new maps.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Map Drawing Time appeared first on Mississippi Today.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said last week that Mississippi could provide his Democratic Party another seat in future elections.

Ezra Klein, in his New York Times podcast, asked Schumer how Democrats could add senators like Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from conservative-leaning West Virginia. In response, Schumer rattled off several states that were winnable for Democrats.

“Mississippi, 38% of the vote is African-American, if we could get that vote up a little bit and then Jackson becomes a little more moderate because the people are moving in from tech and other jobs, I wouldn’t cross that off the map,” Schumer said.

TRANSCRIPT: Read Klein’s entire interview with Schumer here.

Schumer was Senate minority leader in 2020, when Democrat Mike Espy faced Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

During the race that culminated in a 10-point Hyde-Smith victory, Espy publicly chastised national groups including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — which, as majority or minority chair, Schumer wields great influence over — for its lack of investment into his campaign. That lack of investment was such that Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic congressman from Mississippi, leaned on Schumer to take a closer look at Espy’s race.

“They don’t think a Black man in Mississippi can win,” Espy said in 2020 of the lack of early support from national Democratic organizations.

By the end of the 2020 race, the DSCC and the Democratic National Committee had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the campaign and diverted some other financial, field, polling and organizational support.

Still, Espy and other critics said the national organizations’ priorities need to change to include political infrastructure building in off years, not just in years when candidates are on the ballot.

“They’ve been doing it so long because they’ve been doing it so long,” Espy said in 2020 of the national organizations. “There is less polling here because there is less polling. You’re ignored here until you prove your own viability, but it’s hard to prove your viability if you’re ignored … In Mississippi we have a legacy of disinvestment. If the national party, the DSCC, had been putting in $5 million, or $10 million in off years, we’d have a competitive party now — the best data, an army of door knockers. But the Mike Espy campaign (had to build that infrastructure) since 2018 because we had no choice.”

READ MORE: Espy finally landed support from national Democrats in 2020 Senate race. Was it too late?

The post Schumer says Democrats can add a Senate seat in Mississippi appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Moderating comment sections on news websites is a dreadful task. Newsrooms across America have struggled to figure it out, and we’re officially admitting we’re among them.

Central to our mission is inspiring civic engagement. We think critically about how we can foster healthy dialogue between people who have different ideas, beliefs and perspectives about the state we love. We believe that conversation — raw, earnest talking and listening to better understand each other — is vital to Mississippi’s future. But not at the expense of others.

Unfortunately, we just don’t have the staff resources to consistently ensure informed, productive, respectful dialogue in the comments section of our website.

Beginning today, comments will be disabled on all articles on Mississippi Today’s website. We encourage you to continue to engage with us and each other on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages — all of which will very much remain active. You’ll also notice a new website feature below each of our articles: a link to our new “Letter to the Editor” page. Those comments will go straight to my inbox, and I vow to respond to them accordingly and share them with the appropriate Mississippi Today staffers.

Please let us know if you see hateful dialogue regarding any of our journalism. And as always, we welcome feedback or criticism of our work and decisions. Reach out to me any time at adam@mississippitoday.org.

Keep talking with and listening to each other. And please, be kind to each other.

The post Why we’re disabling comments on Mississippi Today’s website appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Senate Corrections Chair Juan Barnett, D-Heidelberg, talks with Mississippi Today’s Geoff Pender and Bobby Harrison about the state’s high incarceration rates and efforts to give more people being held in prison an opportunity for parole. Barnett explains why he works so hard on efforts to ease sentencing guidelines even after his father was murdered.

Listen here:

The post Podcast: New law makes more Mississippians eligible for parole appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Mother’s Day appeared first on Mississippi Today.

In 2001, House Speaker Tim Ford of Baldwyn supported the plan of fellow Democrats to place much of suburban Jackson in a congressional district with northeast Mississippi.

Explaining the congressional redistricting effort featuring the Tupelo to Jackson district, Ford off-handedly dubbed it “the tornado plan” because of the way it looked on the map. Ford’s intent was not to sabotage the plan, and most likely opposition to the plan would have been intense regardless of what it was called, but the “tornado” moniker stuck and not in a good way.

Indeed, the moniker helped galvanize opposition.

The political landscape of the state was much different in 2001, though in hindsight the writing already was on the wall portending the rise of the Republican Party and fall of the Democratic Party.

As a result of the 2000 Census, Mississippi’s number of U.S. House seats was reduced from five to four — not because the state lost population but because it did not grow as much as other states. Legislators faced the difficult task of redrawing the districts, knowing they would be forced to pit two incumbent U.S. House members against each other.

Legislators could not complete the task after the 2000 Census. And legislators also failed to draw congressional districts based on the population shifts found by the 2010 Census. In both 2000 and 2010, the federal judiciary ended up drawing the districts.

Now, 10 years later, legislators again face the task of redrawing House districts. The preliminary census data was released last month. Both Senate Pro Tem Dean Kirby, R-Pearl, and Rep. Jim Beckett, R-Bruce, who are heading up their chambers’ redistricting efforts, have said they intend for the Legislature, not the courts, to redraw the congressional districts — early in the 2022 session.

They will not have much time. The qualifying deadline for candidates to run for the U.S. House is March 1.

Like in 2000 and 2010, Mississippi will have four U.S. House members. The state is not losing a U.S. House seat even though it was one of only three states to lose population, according to early census data.

In 2000, Mississippi’s five U.S. House members were Democrats Gene Taylor of the 5th District on the Gulf Coast; Ronnie Shows of the 4th District, which stretched from Jackson into southwest Mississippi; Bennie Thompson of the 2nd District, who was the state’s sole African American member representing most of the Delta; and Republicans Roger Wicker of the 1st District in north Mississippi; and Chip Pickering of the 3rd District, which included parts of the Jackson suburbs and much of east Mississippi.

The consensus was that Pickering and Shows would be thrown into the same district — in part because they had less experience than some of the other members and in part for the sake of the compactness of the districts.

Democrats, who controlled both the state House and Senate in the form of Speaker Ford and Lt. Gov. Amy Tuck, reasoned that it made sense to move the Republicans in high voter turnout Jackson suburbs in Madison and Rankin counties from Pickering to Wicker.

Democrats reasoned that the tornado plan would result in the re-election of Thompson and Taylor for their side and put the incumbents Shows and Pickering in a toss-up district. On the other hand, people from northeast Mississippi feared the tornado plan could make Wicker, a Tupelo resident, vulnerable to a Republican from the Jackson suburbs.

At any rate, Tuck, though a Democrat, would not go for the tornado plan.

The result was a November special session where the two redistricting chairs, Rep. Tommy Reynolds and Sen. Hob Bryan, essentially did nothing other than call meetings where they rejected each other’s offers on behalf of their leadership and then regaled those in attendance with their vast knowledge of literature, ranging from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams to Faulkner to the Bible.

After seven days, the House leadership opted to end the special session. The Senate stayed in session, knowing that if one chamber refused to go home the other would be forced to return.

But then Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, Mississippi’s last Democratic governor, stepped in to conclude the session based on a constitutional clause that said the governor could end the session if the two chambers could not agree.

With the Legislature not able to complete its task, the courts, both on the state and federal levels, got involved in a complex process that involved multiple high profile attorneys. The end result was a plan that looked nothing like a tornado where Pickering easily defeated Shows.

In 2003, Tuck, facing anger from Democrats, ran and won re-election as a Republican. In 2010, Taylor lost to Republican Steven Palazzo, leaving the Democrats with one U.S. House member: Thompson.

The upcoming effort to redistrict the House is not expected to result in such dramatic changes.

The post Task of redrawing U.S. House districts not as daunting as in 2000 appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A political time bomb is ticking in Greenville, and the explosion could transform the state’s public education environment for decades to come.

Last Monday and Tuesday, between 13-20 bus drivers for the Greenville Public School District — some of the lowest paid employees in one of the most under-resourced school districts in one of the most under-resourced regions of America — skipped work to protest reduced pay and what they called poor work conditions.

As far as anyone knows, this was the first organized work stoppage in Mississippi public schools since 9,429 teachers walked out in a 1985 strike, after which lawmakers passed the demanded pay increases but also enacted one of the nation’s most stringent strike laws.

Lawmakers that year made it explicitly illegal for school employees to strike in Mississippi. They drafted the law as broadly as possible to include pretty much any excuse that teachers — including bus drivers, in this case — could use.

The consequences for the Greenville bus drivers, clearly written out in state law, are grave: They could be fired and would never be able to work in any public school district in the state again. Several of the drivers have indicated to Mississippi Today in recent days they did not know the extent of the state law before they went on strike, and school officials said on Thursday that several of the drivers tried to retroactively claim they were sick for the two days of the strike.

Dorian Turner, the attorney for the Board of Trustees of the Greenville Public School District, said in a Greenville Public School District board meeting on Thursday afternoon that she had been gathering facts about what, exactly, happened last week. And despite the bus drivers’ claims about not knowing state law, she said that what occurred last week was, indeed, a strike.

“It looked to me that what we had was a situation where the bus drivers had gone on strike, and that was activity that was illegal,” Turner told the Greenville school board on Thursday. “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you’ve probably got a duck on your hands. They may or may not have known that doing that was an illegal activity, but that was the effect of all those employees deciding not to come to work.”

The meeting then quickly devolved into confusion, with board members talking over each other and lobbing accusations. Some members questioned whether what the bus drivers did even constituted a strike by legal definition, and the board president blamed the director of transportation for allowing the work stoppage.

The board members appeared oblivious to the state laws at hand, including ones that could affect them personally. The strike law passed in 1985 clearly states that school board members themselves are responsible for reporting the names of those who striked to the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office. For each day that those names are not reported by the board to the state, the individual board members and school administrators can be fined between $100 and $250. Turner did not disclose that provision to the board during the Thursday meeting, though Greenville Superintendent Debra Dace at one point said during the meeting that she had a list of the drivers who went on strike.

“Before we send these names to the AG’s office, we want to be sure,” Jan Vaughn, the president of the board, said during the meeting. “There’s a misdemeanor, a large fine, maybe even jail time. So I want to be clear about this before we take any action.”

The board ended the Thursday meeting by taking no action. The next board meeting is scheduled for May 27. If the names were not reported to the state until that day, every school board member in the Greenville Public School District could face fines of $8,000 each, according to the strike law.

Turner told Mississippi Today in an email she was not authorized to speak to reporters without permission from the board or the superintendent. Vaughn, the board president, has not returned multiple requests for comment since last week. A spokesperson for the district and superintendent did not respond to questions from Mississippi Today by Friday morning.

There is little legal precedent in the state that dictates what may happen next. The Greenville board obviously must make decisions about if, how and when to report the names of the bus drivers to the Attorney General’s Office. If that happens, it’s unclear how Attorney General Lynn Fitch may handle the case.

State Auditor Shad White, who earlier this year issued a demand for a return in taxpayer money to a University of Mississippi professor who participated in a nationwide walk-out, told Mississippi Today he is unsure if his office will investigate.

“The state law is clear: public employees in Mississippi cannot strike,” White said in a statement. “My role, if there was a strike, is to ensure that striking employees were not paid while on strike. My assumption here is that the drivers were not paid while they were not driving, though we haven’t looked into it.”

For years, attorneys and advocates both in Mississippi and outside the state have been clamoring to challenge the constitutionality of the state’s strike law. But without legal standing to make such a challenge, they’ve had nothing to do but wait. The Greenville bus drivers may have, perhaps inadvertently, kicked that door wide open.

Many have argued the merits of the strike law being struck down in Mississippi. The state’s public school teachers are the lowest paid, on average, in the nation. While teacher pay is often the most discussed issue at hand, behind the frustration of many school teachers is a long history of broken political promises and little meaningful action to support the very teachers that politicians often boast as critical to the future of the state.

Certainly not making matters easier is the fact that public education advocacy groups, whose thousands of members often suggest going on strike, have been handcuffed by the strike law themselves and are now left to sit on the sidelines while the Greenville situation unfolds. 

The law passed in 1985 explicitly prohibits “teacher organizations” from doing anything to “promote, encourage or participate in any strike against a public school district, the State of Mississippi or any agency thereof.” During the 1985 strike, board members of the Mississippi Association of Educators, the local affiliate of the National Education Association that is still active in advocacy work today, were fined and received two-day jail sentences for the organization’s role in the strike (although the board members did not actually have to serve the jail time after cooperating with court orders).

What happens in the days to come is unknown. But eager onlookers — both the ones who are speaking up and the ones who legally cannot — realize this moment could prove pivotal to the state’s educational future.

Meanwhile, the Greenville bus drivers, who all along just wanted to be paid fairly and treated better by school district leaders, are caught in a grim reality. Their bosses, the same ones who ignored their pleas for better pay and treatment during the pandemic and pushed them to organize a work stoppage, appear poised to report their names to the state’s top prosecutor.

Fair or not — constitutional or not — the law is working exactly how lawmakers in 1985 intended.

READ MORE: Background of Mississippi’s strict law that forbids educators from striking.

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A pending decision by the Mississippi Supreme Court could end citizen efforts to put several issues on the statewide election ballot for voters to decide.

Efforts are ongoing to gather signatures for six initiatives that among other things allow people to vote on legalizing marijuana for recreational use and restoring the 1890s flag as the official banner of the state, complete with the Confederate battle emblem as part of its design.

But those two efforts and others could be stopped by the state’s highest court. The nine-member Supreme Court is currently considering a lawsuit filed by the city of Madison and Mayor Mary Hawkins Butler trying to prevent a medical marijuana initiative approved by voters in November 2020 from going into effect. The lawsuit maintains the language in the Constitution requiring the signatures to place an issue on the ballot be gathered from five congressional districts makes initiative efforts invalid since the state as of the 2000 Census has only four districts.

The court ruling potentially could make it impossible for the signature-gatherers to meet the mandates of the Constitution.

Other ongoing initiatives that could be impacted by the court ruling would:

• Limit the terms of appointed and elected officials in the state to two terms.
• Allow no-excuse, in-person early voting.
• Expand Medicaid to cover primarily the working poor.
• Replace the 1890s state flag, with its Confederate battle emblem, with the Hospitality Flag, formerly called the Stennis Flag.

The Legislature retired the 1890s flag in June, and voters selected a new state flag in November that includes a Magnolia and the phrase “In God We Trust.”

Even though the old flag has been removed, Kendra James, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s office, said the initiative to replace the old flag will be active until August. Initiative sponsors have one year to gather signatures once the process of agreeing to the language for the initiative is finalized.

An effort also continues to give voters an opportunity to vote on restoring the old flag. A recent news release from an organization called “Let Mississippi Vote” said 20,000 signatures had been gathered through April for the initiative that would give voters four options to choose from for a state flag.

The four options are the old flag, the new flag approved in November by voters, the Hospitality Flag, and the bicentennial banner.

Dan Carr, a Gulf Coast pastor and founder of Let Mississippi Vote, said the initiative sponsors have until Dec. 12 to gather the required number of signatures — about 106,000 total. To place the issue on the 2021 ballot, the required number of signatures would need to be gathered, verified and delivered to the Legislature 90 days before the start of the 2022 session in January. If the process is completed later in the year, it would be placed on the 2023 ballot.

“I don’t think we will be finished before November,” Carr conceded.

Carr and other initiative sponsors are hoping their efforts are not stopped by the Supreme Court.

If the Supreme Court does rule that the initiative process is invalid because of the requirement to gather signatures from five congressional districts that no longer exist, it most likely would take a two-thirds vote of the Legislature and then approval by voters in a general election to correct the language. That most likely means the initiative process could not be fixed before November 2022 if the Legislature voted in the 2022 session to correct the language.

READ MORE: Is the Mississippi ballot initiative working as intended?

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