Mississippi Today

This midterm party flip is not playing well for Republicans

Published

2 years ago

December 14, 2022

This midterm party flip is not playing well for Republicans

by Adam Ganucheau, Mississippi Today
December 14, 2022

BILOXI — Most voters would say that a politician switching parties in the middle of a term is the ultimate betrayal of their trust.

Elected officials are, indeed, entrusted by voters to make decisions for them based on a set of shared, usually partisan principles. District lines are drawn, laws are passed, and judicial opinions are written to honor this cornerstone of American democracy. It’s intended to ensure all people are adequately represented in our government — one of the most important ideals to everyday Americans who feel that trust is their only connection with the leaders who serve them.

That’s why a midterm flip-flop at any level feels like a blindside to those who live within those representatives’ districts. The feeling is especially fresh on the minds of many East Biloxi residents this week.

Biloxi City Councilman Felix Gines recently had one word for his recent flip from the Mississippi Democratic Party to the Mississippi Republican Party: relief. But many constituents in his ward are using much different words for his decision: disappointment, anger and, yes, betrayal.

Gines is the latest in a string of Democratic defections as state party dysfunction continues to cede power to Republicans. Mississippi Republicans wield immense political influence at the state, local and federal levels thanks, in large part, to flips.

But this latest conversion has turned more heads than usual because of its racial dynamics: Gines is the first GOP pick-up since state Republican Party leaders announced an initiative to attract Black candidates.

“Coming into a predominantly Black district and making a bold change like this will allow people to not take their vote for granted,” Gines told Mississippi Today in a lengthy interview last week. “So often, we’ll give our votes away for whatever reason. Well who’s going to be best for our community? That’s what it’s got to come down to. This bold move will serve as a wake-up call to not just the Black community, but all communities across the state. And particularly in Biloxi.”

He was right about at least one thing: His constituents here in Biloxi are wide awake following his party switch — just not in the way he was hoping.

About 20% of Biloxi’s 50,000 residents are Black. Gines was elected as a Democrat to the city council to represent East Biloxi, a predominantly Black neighborhood. For years, he has been the city’s only Black elected official — the beneficiary of the codified notion that all Americans should be adequately represented in government.

Civil rights history in Gines’ district runs deep. A series of wade-ins at Biloxi Beach in the 1960s helped integrate the Mississippi Gulf Coast and make it a vacation destination for Southern Blacks — a reality that continues to bolster the local economy. The main stretch of Highway 90 along the beach is named in honor of Dr. Gilbert R. Mason, who led the wade-ins and fought his whole life for voting rights and equal representation in government. Murals and other visible signs of the area’s commitment to political activism remain, and the Biloxi NAACP chapter is among the most active in the state.

Needless to say, Gines’ decision to pledge allegiance to the virtually all-white Mississippi Republican Party is not sitting well with many of his constituents.

“The Republican Party is the party that is everything anti-Black,” said Bill Stallworth, a community leader who formerly held Gines’ city council seat. “It’s the party of Strom Thurmond, of the Southern Strategy, of policies intended to keep Black folks down. To win, they’ve redrawn lines, disenfranchised so many voters and created lies about massive voter fraud. The effects are real, and they are deep.”

Putting Gines’ party switch bluntly, Stallworth said: “If we have to start throwing away our principles, if this is what we have to do to get elected, maybe we shouldn’t get elected.”

Gines told Mississippi Today no one factor led him to flip. When asked how he squared many of the modern Republican Party’s policies and principles that have worked against Black people, he harkened back to 19th century America.

“I’ve been using the term ‘going back home’ because this was once the party of Blacks,” Gines said. “Blacks once called the Republican Party the party of Lincoln. Look at the history: the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment. When you start talking about civil rights and freedom, one of the first groups to push civil rights in America was the Republican Party. Now what it’s become versus what it was is two different things.”

When pressed about the more modern policies of the Republican Party, Gines deflected and said, “I don’t think that there’s anything that everyone believes in 100% in either party.” When asked which Republican Party platforms he agreed with, he mentioned just one theme.

“I grew up in a conservative household,” he said. “There were 11 kids, and we had to stretch a dollar. My dad knew how to budget his household. If he didn’t budget his household right, his kids would’ve had to go without. That is what we call true conservative living. Fiscal responsibility. That jumps right out.”

He did not directly answer a question about whether he felt he had properly managed the city of Biloxi’s spending during his previous two terms as a Democrat.

Just a few hours after he announced the party flip, there were broad talks of unseating Gines. For more than a week now, callers to WJZD owner Rip Daniels’ popular radio show “It’s a New Day” have blistered Gines for his party switch.

“Felix Gines’ values are just the same as all Republicans trying to move up — that is, they’re out for themselves,” Gwen Catchings, a retired professor and business owner who lives in Gines’ district, told Mississippi Today. “They’re willing to sell their soul to the devil in order to get where they want to go. What they fail to realize is that once you go down that slippery slope, you’ve lost all your integrity.”

The recent effort of GOP officials to attract Black elected officials may have flipped Gines, but it could prove difficult to sustain come election time. While generations of Black Mississippians have fought and even died for better representation, Mississippi has never elected a Black candidate to statewide office. No legislative Republican is Black, and virtually all of the state’s Black elected officials are Democrats or independents.

GOP officials, though, say they will double down on their currently held values to try to appeal to a more diverse set of candidates.

“We know our plans and policies to reduce inflation, lower taxes, cut wasteful spending, secure our borders, invest in national defense, and restore American energy are appealing to all Americans,” Mississippi GOP Chairman Frank Bordeaux said in a statement. “We’re taking that message to communities where Republicans have not traditionally been as successful in order to recruit, train, and elect a more diverse group of candidates and bring thousands more freedom-loving Mississippians into our party. Felix Gines making the decision to join our party is a major win for us.”

But Black voters in Gines’ district do not appear moved to join him in the Republican Party — “the party of Donald Trump and insurrectionists,” as Daniels recently put it on his radio show.

“I know Dr. Gilbert R. Mason is turning over in his grave today,” Catchings said of Gines’ GOP flip. “If the Republican Party really wants to do something for Black folks in Mississippi, it wouldn’t be important if Felix Gines or anyone else was Republican or Democrat. They would already be doing it. If they didn’t do it while he was a Democrat, they aren’t going to do it when he’s a Republican. It’s just so obvious. Why should we fall for that? What we have is just like Georgia and Herschel Walker. The white folks have found them a Black boy. That’s all this is, and we aren’t going to fall for it.”

Dr. Gilbert R. Mason led the Biloxi Beach wade-ins and fought his whole life for voting rights and equal representation in government.

In 2019, Gines ran as a Democrat for a Biloxi-based House of Representatives seat as a Democrat. He came within about 150 votes of unseating incumbent state Rep. Randall Patterson, a Republican who himself was a Democrat until he flipped to the Republican Party midterm in 2014. Gines decried the lack of support from the Mississippi Democratic Party in the 2019 race and blamed his loss on state party dysfunction.

When Mississippi Today asked if Gines planned to run for that House of Representatives seat in 2023, this time as a Republican, he let out an extended laugh before responding, “Right now, my job is to serve my constituents and do the best I can to serve them. But I won’t rule out any future runs.”

Patterson told Mississippi Today on Dec. 13 he had not yet decided whether he’ll run for a sixth term in the House, but he praised Gines for “having a good heart” and “doing a good job as Biloxi councilman.”

Regardless of Gines’ future plans, many of his council ward’s constituents are fuming. Stallworth, who served on the Biloxi City Council for 10 years and lost to Gines in the 2013 Democratic primary, said he was approached several times by the Republican Party with incentives to flip.

“All I had to do for more power was give up my integrity, to be loyal to the party, to be loyal to the money,” Stallworth said of those offers. “I didn’t do it because I’d rather be loyal to principles and to what my God says to be. I don’t plan on losing my soul. My integrity is the last thing I’ve got, and I’d fight with everything in my power to maintain that. I don’t have a lot to leave my children. But if I can leave them with a sense of integrity and honesty and fair play, if I can give them that, I will have done well.”

Stallworth continued: “I don’t mind anyone being a Democrat or Republican, but I do mind people being liars and cheats. I’d say that to Mr. Gines or any other politician. You’ve got to be honest with yourself at the end of the day. Anything less than that just isn’t acceptable.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate

Published

11 hours ago

April 2, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:34:00

by Michael Goldberg, Mississippi Today
April 2, 2025

Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.

House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.

The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.

Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.

“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”

Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.

“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”

The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.

The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.

The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.

People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.

The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.

“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.”

If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.

Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.

Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.

The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature.

During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube.

As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.

“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget

Published

11 hours ago

April 2, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:13:00

by Taylor Vance, Mississippi Today
April 2, 2025

The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.

Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.

The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend.

House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session.

“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.”

But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.

The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.

The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass.

Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget.

“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said.

The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.

But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.

The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.

The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session.

But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget.

On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.

If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later.

“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said.

If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

Amount of federal cuts to health agencies doubles

Published

13 hours ago

April 2, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 14:48:00

by Gwen Dilworth, Mississippi Today
April 2, 2025

Cuts to public health and mental health funding in Mississippi have doubled – reaching approximately $238 million – since initial estimates last week, when cancellations to federal grants allocated for COVID-19 pandemic relief were first announced.

Slashed funding to the state’s health department will impact community health workers, planned improvements to the public health laboratory, the agency’s ability to provide COVID-19 vaccinations and preparedness efforts for emerging pathogens, like H5 bird flu.

The grant cancellations, which total $230 million, will not be catastrophic for the agency, State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney told members of the Mississippi House Democratic Caucus at the Capitol April 1.

But they will set back the agency, which is still working to recover after the COVID-19 pandemic decimated its workforce and exposed “serious deficiencies” in the agency’s data collection and management systems.

The cuts will have a more significant impact on the state’s economy and agency subgrantees, who carry out public health work on the ground with health department grants, he said.

“The agency is okay. But I’m very worried about all of our partners all over the state,” Edney told lawmakers.

The health department was forced to lay off 17 contract workers as a result of the grant cancellations, though Edney said he aims to rehire them under new contracts.

Other positions funded by health department grants are in jeopardy. Two community health workers at Back Bay Mission, a nonprofit that supports people living in poverty in Biloxi, were laid off as a result of the cuts, according to WLOX. It’s unclear how many more community health workers, who educate and help people access health care, have been impacted statewide.

The department was in the process of purchasing a comprehensive data management system before the cuts and has lost the ability to invest in the Mississippi Public Health Laboratory, he said. The laboratory performs environmental and clinical testing services that aid in the prevention and control of disease.

Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney addresses lawmakers during the Democratic caucus meeting at the State Capitol in Jackson, Miss., on Tuesday, April 1, 2025. The discussion centered on potential federal healthcare funding cuts.

The agency has worked to reduce its dependence on federal funds, Edney said, which will help it weather the storm. Sixty-six percent of the department’s budget is federally funded.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pulled back $11.4 billion in funding to state health departments nationwide last week. The funding was originally allocated by Congress for testing and vaccination against the coronavirus as part of COVID-19 relief legislation, and to address health disparities in high-risk and underserved populations. An additional $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration was also terminated.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the Department of Health and Human Services Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement.

HHS did not respond to questions from Mississippi Today about the cuts in Mississippi.

Democratic attorneys general and governors in 23 states filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Tuesday, arguing that the sudden cancellation of the funding was unlawful and seeking injunctive relief to halt the cuts. Mississippi did not join the suit.

Mental health cuts

The Department of Mental Health received about $7.5 million in cuts to federal grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Phaedre Cole, president of the Mississippi Association of Community Mental Health Centers, speaks to lawmakers about federal healthcare funding cuts during the Democratic caucus meeting at the State Capitol in Jackson, Miss., on Tuesday, April 1, 2025.

Over half of the cuts were to community mental health centers, and supported alcohol and drug treatment services for people who can not afford treatment, housing services for parenting and pregnant women and their children, and prevention services.

The cuts could result in reduced beds at community mental health centers, Phaedre Cole, the director of Life Help and President of Mississippi Association of Community Mental Health Centers, told lawmakers April 1.

Community mental health centers in Mississippi are already struggling to keep their doors open. Four centers in the state have closed since 2012, and a third have an imminent to high risk of closure, Cole told legislators at a hearing last December.

“We are facing a financial crisis that threatens our ability to maintain our mission,” she said Dec. 5.

Cuts to the department will also impact diversion coordinators, who are charged with reducing recidivism of people with serious mental illness to the state’s mental health hospital, a program for first-episode psychosis, youth mental health court funding, school-aged mental health programs and suicide response programs.

The Department of Mental Health hopes to reallocate existing funding from alcohol tax revenue and federal block grant funding to discontinued programs.

The agency posted a list of all the services that have received funding cuts. The State Department of Health plans to post such a list, said spokesperson Greg Flynn.

Health leaders have expressed fear that there could be more funding cuts coming.

“My concern is that this is the beginning and not the end,” said Edney.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.