That whooshing sound you’ll soon hear coming from High Street is no cause for alarm. It’s just all the oxygen being sucked out of the Capitol by next year’s legislative bugaboo: school choice, or private school vouchers, or “education freedom,” depending on your worldview.

A pattern has firmed up nicely with Mississippi’s Legislature under the current Republican House and Senate leadership. And so far, this pattern has tended to gum up the works and kill off many initiatives at the Capitol. This year, it resulted in the Legislature accidentally passing a flawed, sea-change tax cut bill and ending its regular session without being able to pass a state budget.

The pattern:

House Speaker Jason White and his closest adherents, months out from the coming year’s legislative session, announce their main priorities and get to work with hearings and forums, to set the market when lawmakers gavel in in January. 

And these House priorities always include at least one doozy: Medicaid expansion White’s first year, then eliminating the income tax, and now, school choice. 

Meanwhile Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and his Senate leaders react to the House’s pre-session maneuvering with something along the lines of, “Um … yeah. We’ll take a look at all that. We’re not so sure we want to do that … but, we’ll see, maybe.”

Per the new pattern, Hosemann, usually well after White has announced the House priorities and with much less actual groundwork or public-facing hearings and such, comes out with something of a Senate priorities list.

And as the session nears, White and Hosemann don’t just appear like they’re from different political parties, but from different planes of existence.

Hosemann said he wants to focus on student absenteeism, raising teacher pay and the lack of affordable housing for first-time homebuyers (even though it’s unclear what the state, or state taxpayers, can do about that).

White said he wants an omnibus education reform package to reshape the state’s K-12 education system, with school-choice initiatives to allow public money to be spent on private schooling at the front and center of any plan.

White, by his own account, said he’s continuing to push “bold and uncomfortable” initiatives.

So far over the last few years, Hosemann has appeared to be the one most uncomfortable with White’s bold initiatives. 

And whatever the opposite of bold is, that’s how the Hosemann Senate priorities and out-of-session strat-e-gery come across. They’ve mostly been playing defense, parrying the House’s thrusts. They’ve been so busy being against what the House comes up with, they’ve had trouble figuring out stuff they’re for.

One longtime senator recently asked jokingly whether White could go ahead and provide the major themes he plans for the next few sessions so they could start fighting early.

The school-choice debate promises to overshadow the entire coming legislative session or, as mentioned above, sap all the oxygen from other issues – health care, infrastructure, you name it. During the 2025 session, the House-Senate standoff over income tax elimination killed much other legislation, including the state budget.

Is school choice the most pressing, clear-and-present issue facing Mississippi? That’s a fair question, but under the new legislative paradigm, it doesn’t matter. It’s the one about to get all the focus.

And it will likely suck up the most oxygen at the Capitol in 2026.