Mississippi Today
AG Lynn Fitch offers no new details on Chris McDaniel campaign finance complaints
NESHOBA COUNTY FAIR — Weeks after Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann's campaign filed a complaint over discrepancies with his main opponent's campaign donations, the state's chief law enforcement official is still largely silent over what her office is doing about the allegation.
Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch said very little to reporters at the Neshoba County Fair on Wednesday about what her agency is doing with ongoing questions about how state Sen. Chris McDaniel is funding his campaign for lieutenant governor.
“We're certainly reviewing everything, and everything is under investigation,” Fitch said. “We're certainly looking at any violations that have been brought to us.”
When pressed if she meant her agency is actively investigating the GOP state senator, Fitch walked her comment back and clarified that neither McDaniel nor his campaign representatives were under active investigation.
READ MORE: Chris McDaniel's reports deny accurate public accounting of campaign money
The allegations against the Jones County legislator, in part, stem from a political action committee McDaniel created. A secretive Virginia dark-money nonprofit corporation sent $475,000 to the PAC, and the PAC funneled $465,000 of those funds to his campaign account.
State law limits corporate donations to $1,000 per year to a candidate or PAC, so the contribution appears to be $474,000 over the state's legal limit.
After reporters and politicians raised questions about the discrepancy, McDaniel and the PAC eventually returned the money to the dark money group, and he shut down the PAC.
But, by his campaign's own reporting, McDaniel's now-defunct PAC did not return $15,000 of the over-state-limits money, and he has offered no substantive explanation for what happened to it.
McDaniel outright denied to the press on Wednesday that he violated any of the state's campaign finance laws and rejected any notion that any campaign donations were unaccounted for.
“I'm not the treasurer, but that's not accurate,” McDaniel told reporters about unaccounted money.
READ MORE: Hundreds of thousands of dollars unaccounted, questionable in McDaniel's campaign report
However, he appeared to tacitly acknowledge his campaign skirted the state law on accepting more than the legal limit from a corporation, but he believes the state law is unconstitutional.
The four-term senator said the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 ruling declaring federal campaign caps on corporations unconstitutional could extend to similar caps on the state level.
“Just to avoid the protracted legal fight and have the money perhaps locked up in court for nine months, we sent it back,” McDaniel said. “There's no crime they commited; there's nothing wrong that's been committed. It's perfectly legitimate, it's perfectly transparent.”
The questionable campaign finance report has emerged as an issue between the firebrand senator and Hosemann, but the question of how fervently prosecutors should enforce the law has boiled over to the attorney general's race.
Fitch's Democratic opponent, Greta Kemp Martin, called the attorney general's muted response a “failure” and said if she were serving as the chief attorney for the state, she would have fast-tracked Hosemann's complaint to the top of the agency's agenda.
“I think that complaint filed by Lt. Gov. Hosemann should have been given priority,” Kemp Martin said. “There should have been an investigation. The AG is the only one with clear authority to enforce campaign finance laws.”
Mississippi's campaign finance laws are a confusing, often conflicting patchwork that the Legislature has piece-mealed over the years into the state code books without providing explicit clarity for who can and cannot enforce the law.
As the state's top law officer, Fitch runs the only state agency with clear authority to investigate and prosecute campaign finance violations.
At one point on Wednesday, Hosemann and Fitch near the storied Founder's Square Pavilion passed by one another on the porch of one of the infamous cabins at the fairgrounds. But Hosemann, running for a second term, declined to address if he thought Fitch's office was doing enough to investigate his own complaint.
Instead, he warned if prosecutors allowed McDaniel's actions with campaign donations to go unchecked, it could be a precursor that future candidates would disregard other state laws.
“In the future, every time you have a candidate, you don't know who bought them off,” Hosemann said. “That's not the law, and I'm going to be surprised if there are not clarifications early in the (legislative) session about campaign finance reform.”
READ MORE: Chris McDaniel, Lynn Fitch show that Mississippi might as well not have campaign finance laws
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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.
Did you miss our previous article…
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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.
Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.biloxinewsevents.com/?p=359301
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