Mississippi Today
Mississippi Democrats vote to remove leader, appoint new one in wild emergency meeting
In a rare and dramatic emergency meeting, the Mississippi Democratic Party's 80-member executive committee voted Thursday night to remove its leader and appoint a new one in the middle of a major election year.
After attendees spent more than an hour screaming over one another, threatening lawsuits, and lobbing personal accusations about fellow party officials, 46 of the party's 80 committee members voted to remove Chairman Tyree Irving following several days of public calls for his ouster.
A few minutes later, committee members voted to elect state Rep. Cheikh Taylor of Starkville as permanent chairman of the party.
The rare midterm removal and replacement of a major party boss comes in a key statewide election year as Democrats up and down the ballot are vying to wrangle any little bit of power back from Republicans, who have dominated every level of state politics this century. In election years, party leaders often guide political strategy and programming in addition to leading fundraising efforts.
Calls for Irving's removal began on June 26 after Mississippi Today published Irving's emails that included a nasty personal attack of the No. 2 leader of the state party. In response, some party officials said they feared Irving's unprofessionalism could jeopardize a $250,000 donation from the national Democratic Party as they called for his removal.
READ MORE: Emails from Democratic party boss prompt calls for removal
Irving then announced on July 2 that he was resigning as chairman effective July 22. But dozens of executive committee members who had already been working for days to call an emergency meeting to remove him from office immediately moved forward with those plans, scheduling the special meeting for Thursday night.
The stated purpose of Thursday's emergency meeting, according to documents shared with Mississippi Today, was to “address the long standing and repeated actions of malfeasance and misfeasance of the Chair of the Mississippi Democratic Party.”
But the drama Thursday commenced even before the 7 p.m. meeting began.
At 5 p.m., Irving emailed every executive committee member and rescinded his resignation. That move came after a couple days of backroom accusations and whispers that Thursday's emergency meeting had been called improperly.
Still, the 7 p.m. emergency meeting went on as scheduled. The meeting, held virtually on Zoom, devolved immediately into chaos following an opening prayer. Even for the Mississippi Democratic Party's typically crazed meeting standards, the drama on display Thursday evening was extreme.
One committee member, while votes were being counted, loudly exclaimed: “This is a shame, a charade, a joke.” Amid more than half an hour of screaming and unintelligible bickering among dozens of committee members at one time, one committee member's comment came through clearly on the Zoom feed: “This (Irving's ouster) is a lynching.” Another moment, as leaders were trying to determine who made a motion, someone piped up: “The devil made that motion.”
Several times during the meeting, Irving, a former Mississippi Court of Appeals judge, threatened to file lawsuits. At least once, he said he'd file a defamation lawsuit. Another time, he said he'd file a suit for “lack of due process.”
When asked to vote on whether or not to remove himself from office, Irving replied: “This meeting is illegal, and I won't vote in an illegal meeting.” (He later clarified that he wanted to be marked down as voting “no.”)
After the 46 members of the committee voted to remove Irving from his seat, they then moved on to choosing his replacement.
Taylor, a second-term state representative from Starkville and executive director of a nonprofit that serves residents of the Golden Triangle, was nominated by several committee members to be their new chair. The only other nominee submitted was Irving, who minutes before had been removed from that exact role.
When asked by the committee's secretary if he was voting for himself or Taylor, Irving replied: “My vote is to make you a defendant.” The secretary did not reply to Irving and continued moving down the roll and counting votes.
After he was elected chairman, Taylor took the floor to make some remarks. He first thanked Irving for his service: “It's thankless work, and he served this party for three years.” Taylor then talked about his priorities as chairman.
“More than anything else, I'm a faithful and concerned Democrat,” Taylor told committee members. “I'm here to ensure that finances and resources flow to the state of Mississippi. This could be for us, as Mississippians, a very transformative time … I commit to all of you that we work well with laser focus on these important upcoming elections … I look forward to serving all of you.”
Taylor closed his remarks with a not-so-subtle reference to the events of the past few days.
“I commend all of you for taking the hard stances and doing this hard work,” he said. “Let's always be sure we keep the party above individuality. If we can do that, we can go into the elections with our heads held high and spread resources around to support all our candidates.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
2024 Mississippi legislative session not good for private school voucher supporters
Despite a recent Mississippi Supreme Court ruling allowing $10 million in public money to be spent on private schools, 2024 has not been a good year for those supporting school vouchers.
School-choice supporters were hopeful during the 2024 legislative session, with new House Speaker Jason White at times indicating support for vouchers.
But the Legislature, which recently completed its session, did not pass any new voucher bills. In fact, it placed tighter restrictions on some of the limited laws the state has in place allowing public money to be spent on private schools.
Notably, the Legislature passed a bill that provides significantly more oversight of a program that provides a limited number of scholarships or vouchers for special-needs children to attend private schools.
Going forward, thanks to the new law, to receive the vouchers a parent must certify that their child will be attending a private school that offers the special needs educational services that will help the child. And the school must report information on the academic progress of the child receiving the funds.
Also, efforts to expand another state program that provides tax credits for the benefit of private schools was defeated. Legislation that would have expanded the tax credits offered by the Children's Promise Act from $8 million a year to $24 million to benefit private schools was defeated. Private schools are supposed to educate low income students and students with special needs to receive the benefit of the tax credits. The legislation expanding the Children's Promise Act was defeated after it was reported that no state agency knew how many students who fit into the categories of poverty and other specific needs were being educated in the schools receiving funds through the tax credits.
Interestingly, the Legislature did not expand the Children's Promise Act but also did not place more oversight on the private schools receiving the tax credit funds.
The bright spot for those supporting vouchers was the early May state Supreme Court ruling. But, in reality, the Supreme Court ruling was not as good for supporters of vouchers as it might appear on the surface.
The Supreme Court did not say in the ruling whether school vouchers are constitutional. Instead, the state's highest court ruled that the group that brought the lawsuit – Parents for Public Schools – did not have standing to pursue the legal action.
The Supreme Court justices did not give any indication that they were ready to say they were going to ignore the Mississippi Constitution's plain language that prohibits public funds from being provided “to any school that at the time of receiving such appropriation is not conducted as a free school.”
In addition to finding Parents for Public Schools did not have standing to bring the lawsuit, the court said another key reason for its ruling was the fact that the funds the private schools were receiving were federal, not state funds. The public funds at the center of the lawsuit were federal COVID-19 relief dollars.
Right or wrong, The court appeared to make a distinction between federal money and state general funds. And in reality, the circumstances are unique in that seldom does the state receive federal money with so few strings attached that it can be awarded to private schools.
The majority opinion written by Northern District Supreme Justice Robert Chamberlin and joined by six justices states, “These specific federal funds were never earmarked by either the federal government or the state for educational purposes, have not been commingled with state education funds, are not for educational purposes and therefore cannot be said to have harmed PPS (Parents for Public Schools) by taking finite government educational funding away from public schools.”
And Southern District Supreme Court Justice Dawn Beam, who joined the majority opinion, wrote separately “ to reiterate that we are not ruling on state funds but American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds … The ARPA funds were given to the state to be used in four possible ways, three of which were directly related to the COVID -19 health emergency and one of which was to make necessary investments in water, sewer or broadband infrastructure.”
Granted, many public school advocates lamented the decision, pointing out that federal funds are indeed public or taxpayer money and those federal funds could have been used to help struggling public schools.
Two justices – James Kitchens and Leslie King, both of the Central District, agreed with that argument.
But, importantly, a decidedly conservative-leaning Mississippi Supreme Court stopped far short – at least for the time being – of circumventing state constitutional language that plainly states that public funds are not to go to private schools.
And a decidedly conservative Mississippi Legislature chose not to expand voucher programs during the 2024 session.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1925
MAY 19, 1925
Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska. When he was 14, a teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up and he answered that he wanted to be a lawyer. The teacher chided him, urging him to be realistic. “Why don't you plan on carpentry?”
In prison, he became a follower of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. In his speeches, Malcolm X warned Black Americans against self-loathing: “Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind?”
Prior to a 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca, he split with Elijah Muhammad. As a result of that trip, Malcolm X began to accept followers of all races. In 1965, he was assassinated. Denzel Washington was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of the civil rights leader in Spike Lee's 1992 award-winning film.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
On this day in 1896
MAY 18, 1896
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation on railroads or similar public places was constitutional, forging the “separate but equal” doctrine that remained in place until 1954.
In his dissent that would foreshadow the ruling six decades later in Brown v. Board of Education, Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote that “separate but equal” rail cars were aimed at discriminating against Black Americans.
“In the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens,” he wrote. “Our Constitution in color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law … takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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