Mississippi Today
House passes ballot initiative proposal that would prevent voters from using it to change abortion ban
Mississippians would be prevented from placing an initiative on the ballot to change the state's strict anti-abortion laws under a proposal passed Wednesday by the House of Representatives.
House Concurrent Resolution 11, which is still several legislative steps from becoming law, would give citizens the ability to gather signatures to propose new state laws or change existing laws, but it bans them from placing an issue on a statewide ballot about abortion.
The proposal barely passed the House. The measure required two-thirds of the chamber to support it, and 119 members participated in the vote, meaning 80 yea votes were required for it to pass.
“That unborn child, that's who we're trying to protect,” said House Constitution Chairman Price Wallace, a Republican from Mendenhall.
Rep. Cheikh Taylor, a Democrat from Starkville and the Mississippi Democratic Party chairman, said limiting the scope of what types of initiatives can be proposed was undemocratic and muting the voice of voters.
“Don't let anyone tell you this is just about abortion,” Taylor said. “This is about a Republican Party who thinks they know what's best for you better than you know what's best for you. This is about control.”
Taylor and House Minority Leader Robert Johnson III, a Democrat from Natchez, attempted to amend the legislation to remove the abortion prohibition, but their efforts were defeated by Republicans who have a supermajority in the chamber.
The House's proposal now heads to the Senate for consideration, where its fate remains uncertain. Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, the leader of the Senate, said on Jan. 9 at a Stennis Institute and Capitol Press Corps event that he believes there should be few restrictions on what topics citizens can propose.
The Senate killed a similar House bill last year.
“To me, it seems like if we're going to do a ballot initiative that had enough people sign onto it and they really thought the Legislature was not doing their job, then you ought to have a pretty clean ballot initiative,” Hosemann said. “If we're doing one and you can't do a ballot on any of these things, then why are you doing it at all?”
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated a person's constitutional right to an abortion, Mississippi's so-called “trigger law” went into effect that banned abortion in most instances.
But after the nation's highest court ruled in 2022 that state governments have the authority to set abortion laws, voters in several conservative-run states elected to protect abortion access.
“In recent elections that have happened since Roe v. Wade was overturned, they decided to elect their conservative leaders that they have, but they also want to preserve or increase a woman's right to choose,” Rep. Lawrence Blackmon, a Democrat from Jackson, said during the debate.
Republican legislative leaders have maintained Mississippi is an ardent anti-abortion state. But in 2011, Mississippi voters overwhelmingly rejected a so-called personhood amendment that would have defined life as beginning at conception.
Speaker Jason White, a Republican from West, told reporters after the measure passed that he had “no reaction” to the fact that Mississippians previously voted down a personhood initiative because he believes the personhood initiative was “totally different” from House's effort to ban abortion proposals under the new initiative process.
“We're reinstating the initiative process,” White said. “That was in a Roe v. Wade world when that initiative was brought forward. This is a totally different world we're in post-Roe. I would just say that everything has totally changed after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision two years ago.”
Mississippians have not had an initiative process since 2021, when the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled it invalid because of a technicality over the state's congressional districts.
Besides fixing the concerns that led to the Supreme Court tossing the process out, the House's recent proposal changes the old initiative process by allowing voters to bypass the Legislature and only change general law instead of changing the state constitution.
The proposal requires organizers to gather signatures from 8% of the number of registered voters during the last governor's race, which the Secretary of State's office estimates to be around 166,000.
Several House members opposed other portions of the proposal, such as giving the Legislature the authority to offer alternative amendments to appear alongside a citizen-sponsored initiative.
“Deep down in your heart, do you really think we're doing the people justice because once that initiative is done, all that hard work is done and we bring this back to you guys, and you guys can say, ‘No all our hard work was done in vain?'” Rep. Hester Jackson-McCray, a Democrat from Horn Lake, asked.
Rep. Fred Shanks, a Republican from Brandon who led the debate in support of the proposal, told the members that his primary concern was to pass an initiative proposal that the House could use to negotiate with the Senate.
“We are just trying to get a vehicle to the Senate,” Shanks said.
The Senate has not voted on an initiative restoration measure that originated in its chamber, and it has until April 2 to pass the House proposal out of a Senate committee.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Podcast: The controversial day that Robert Kennedy came to the University of Mississippi
Retired U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Edward Ellington talks with Mississippi Today's Bobby Harrison and Geoff Pender about former U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy's speech at the University of Mississippi less than four years after the riots that occurred after the integration of the school. Ellington, who at the time headed the Ole Miss Speaker's Bureau as a law school student, recalls the controversy leading up to the speech.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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https://www.biloxinewsevents.com/?p=359978
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1961
MAY 20, 1961
A white mob of more than 300, including Klansmen, attacked Freedom Riders at the Greyhound Bus Station in Montgomery, Alabama. Future Congressman John Lewis was among them.
“An angry mob came out of nowhere, hundreds of people, with bricks and balls, chains,” Lewis recalled.
After beating on the riders, the mob turned on reporters and then Justice Department official John Seigenthaler, who was beaten unconscious and left in the street after helping two riders.
“Then they turned on my colleagues and started beating us and beat us so severely, we were left bloodied and unconscious in the streets of Montgomery,” Lewis recalled.
As the mob headed his way, Freedom Rider James Zwerg said he asked for God to be with him, and “I felt absolutely surrounded by love. I knew that whether I lived or died, I was going to be OK.”
The mob beat him so badly that his suit was soaked in blood.
“There was nothing particularly heroic in what I did,” he said. “If you want to talk about heroism, consider the Black man who probably saved my life. This man in coveralls, just off of work, happened to walk by as my beating was going on and said ‘Stop beating that kid. If you want to beat someone, beat me.' And they did. He was still unconscious when I left the hospital.”
To quell the violence, Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent in 450 federal marshals.
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.
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