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The purposefully broken lawmaking process in Jackson 

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2 years ago

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The purposefully broken lawmaking process in Jackson 

by Adam Ganucheau, Mississippi Today
January 16, 2023

Note: This analysis was first published in Mississippi Today’s weekly legislative newsletter. Subscribe to our free newsletter for exclusive early access to legislative analyses and up-to-date information about what’s happening under the Capitol dome.

Think back to grade school and Mississippi civics lessons about our representative form of government. The steps of passing laws at the state level are simple, uniform and designed to give voters — not the representatives they elect — all the power:

  1. Voters of all backgrounds and viewpoints in every area of the state elect lawmakers to represent their interests in Jackson.
  1. Those lawmakers join their colleagues at the Capitol once a year to partake in a very detailed lawmaking and budgeting process designed to give everyone an equal shot at passing or debating bills.
  1. That lawmaking process is completely open to the public, ensuring complete transparency and that those representatives are, indeed, representing the voting public’s interests — that nothing untoward is happening behind closed doors.
  1. Bills are passed into law based on a majority vote (or three-fifths vote for spending bills), ensuring that at least a majority of people across Mississippi have a true representative say in the lawmaking process.

What a great way to do the public’s business, right? Unfortunately, in Mississippi, this civics lesson is nothing more than a farce — a bright-eyed fantasy about how things perhaps should work. Many understand how broken the legislative process has become in Washington, but it’s arguably worse in Jackson.

The reality is that it’s never worked the way we’ve been taught. And a progressively more broken system of lawmaking has been implemented over the past 12 years by Republican legislative leaders who, with sweeping rules changes and unchecked power grabs, have created the grandest illusion in state politics: that our old civics lesson is reality.

Here’s how lawmaking really works inside your state Capitol:

  1. Voters in every area of the state do elect lawmakers, but the districts are carefully drawn by Republican leaders every 10 years to ensure that only Republican voters’ beliefs are represented at the Capitol — that a GOP supermajority (three-fifths of both the House and Senate) have votes to pass any bill they want and can maintain complete power in Jackson. This doesn’t just suppress the ideals of Democrats across the state, but it also hurts Republicans who represent more moderate or more conservative districts than the GOP establishment leadership.
  1. The specific lawmaking process still on the books has been completely tossed aside for a newer, unwritten process. Are you a Democratic lawmaker? You’re completely powerless inside the Capitol and your views mean nothing. Are you a Republican representing a more moderate district with voters who disagree with a lot of things the most conservative party leaders believe? You’re even more powerless at the Capitol. Major pieces of legislation typically aren’t unveiled until the eleventh hour, and Republican leaders use hard deadlines to give rank-and-file members of both parties virtually no time to read or understand what they’re voting on. If they don’t vote with leadership, the leadership will punish them by further shutting them out of the process.
  1. The brunt of the lawmaking process is nearly exclusively conducted behind closed doors, meaning voters are usually unaware of what business their elected representatives are truly conducting. If anyone in the general public wants to know what ideas or proposed legislation their city council members, their mayor or even their state governor is writing or sharing with colleagues, they can request and receive those records. But not state lawmakers, who have long exempted themselves from their own public records laws. What’s worse, a recent Ethics Commission opinion says that lawmakers are not bound to the Open Meetings Act, a state law that mandates elected officials conduct public business in public. House Republicans have, for years, unabashedly met behind closed doors to debate and even vote on major legislation that they’re then expected to pass in public a few minutes later. Senate leaders, too, have gotten used to operating in secrecy in recent years, particularly during the conference committee process late in the session when the most important bills are debated by just six lawmakers behind closed doors.
  1. Bills are, indeed, passed into law based on a majority vote (or three-fifths vote for spending bills), but Republicans in both chambers are often expected to vote “yea” even if they don’t know what is in the bills. Typically the biggest, most impactful bills are rushed — stuffed down the throats of rank-and-file lawmakers of both parties who were purposefully kept out of the writing and debating process. In effect, even the majority of Mississippians represented by that Republican majority could not get adequate answers about bills from their representatives if they tried. And if they’re really being honest, many Republican lawmakers would admit after voting bills into law that they didn’t agree with the bill’s premise or wish they would have had more time to better understand the effects.

Don’t just take it from me. Take it from a two-term Republican lawmaker who recently announced his retirement and has decided to get honest with his constituents about what the Mississippi Legislature has become.

In a harrowing Jan. 10 email to his constituents, GOP state Rep. Dana Criswell wholly concedes that the secretive process from House Republican leadership has stripped power from the public. The purpose of Criswell’s email, in fact, is to ask the public to help him and his Republican colleagues read bills because they aren’t given enough time. Seriously. Here’s how his email begins:

A common complaint among legislators is a lack of time to actually read bills. The tactic used by leadership in nearly every legislative body is to overwhelm legislators so they don’t know what is in the bills. This leaves legislators simply following leadership and voting however they are told. One term used in the Mississippi House is “vote bottom right.” If you look at the voting board in the House, you will see “Speaker” at the bottom right. Many legislators simply look at what the Speaker is doing and vote with him.

When faced with over 2,500 bills during the 3 month legislative session, committee chairmen who refuse to provide agendas for bills being considered and a Speaker who regularly suspends the rules and brings up bills for a vote in hours instead of days, legislators are left voting for bills they have never read. Unfortunately, a large majority of legislators just don’t care because they are too busy going to dinner and living the high life off of a lobbyist to spend time reading bills and making informed decisions. But there are a few of us who believe it is our job to be informed and make the best decision possible before casting our vote.

When I first arrived at the Mississippi legislature, I was determined to read bills and know what I was voting for or against. I spent hours every night reading bills that were assigned to my committees only to find out the chairman wasn’t considering any of the bills I had read.

Experience helped me prepare. I learned to eliminate some bills authored by Democrats that were never going to pass and I learned to speed read bills by finding the underlined portions which indicate new language to a code section of law. But none of this solved the problem and completely helped me make informed decisions.

So, I made an agreement with a couple of other legislators to divide the bills among ourselves. We would meet once or twice a week to discuss and inform each other about the bills we had read. While this method helped, we were still behind and found it impossible to read everything we needed to read. I’m pretty sure one of us made a statement similar to, “Reading these bills is a full-time job.”

– GOP Rep. Dana Criswell in a Jan. 10, 2023, email to his constituents.

Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, in his first term as president of the Senate, deserves credit with all this. He sees the broken system clearer than anyone. He inherited a Senate in 2020 that had been ruled for the previous eight years by now-Gov. Tate Reeves, who worked alongside current Speaker of the House Philip Gunn to create this more extreme way of doing things.

Since Hosemann took office, though, he’s implemented several changes to increase transparency like live-streaming committee meetings, halting closed door Senate Republican Caucus meetings that had become commonplace under Reeves’ leadership, and asking Senate committee chairs to publicly post their agendas at least 24 hours in advance. Hosemann has publicly floated reforms to the rushed budgeting process, the absolute epitome of the backwards process laid out above, when no more than six Republican lawmakers decide how to appropriate $7 billion in one single weekend every year.

Despite Hosemann’s best efforts, Senate leaders are still operating in the secretive system that Reeves helped build and are still having to contend with Gunn and his House leaders’ open flaunting of the old civics lesson.

Democrats, of course, have no voice whatsoever in the lawmaking process. For decades now, they’ve decried this system and have filed numerous bills to improve legislative workflow and transparency. But proof positive of their complete lack of influence: In the past 12 legislative sessions, none of those bills have even been considered or debated in Republican-led committees, let alone passed into law.

The losers of this broken system, of course, are everyday Mississippians. Because only a handful of Republican lawmakers have all the power, there’s no space for compromise or productive debate of legislation that affects every single resident for generations to come. Because these leaders operate and thrive in secrecy, Mississippians cannot know the true intentions of the ones in power, and there’s no way of knowing which lobbyists or out-of-state interest groups may have direct influence over what gets passed into law.

And, in turn, Mississippians cannot make truly informed decisions at the polls every four years.

So the brokenness continues. And it continues. And it continues. And it continues.

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

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On this day in 1961

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4 hours ago

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November 22, 2024

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mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2024-11-22 07:00:00

Nov. 22, 1961

Credit: Courtesy: Georgia Tourism & Travel

Five Black students, made up of NAACP Youth Council members and two SNCC volunteers from Albany State College, were arrested after entering the white waiting room of the Trailways station in Albany, Georgia. 

The council members bonded out of jail, but the SNCC volunteers, Bertha Gober and Blanton Hall declined bail and “chose to remain in jail over the holidays to dramatize their demand for justice,” according to SNCC Digital Gateway. The president of Albany State College expelled them. 

Gober became one of SNCC’s Freedom Singers and wrote the song, “We’ll Never Turn Back,” after the 1961 killing of Herbert Lee in Mississippi. The tune became SNCC’s anthem. 

After her release from jail, Gober joined other students, and police arrested her and other demonstrators. Back in the same jail, she sang to the police chief and mayor to open the cells, “I hear God’s children praying in jail, ‘Freedom, freedom, freedom.’” 

Albany State suspended another student, Bernice Reagon, after she joined SNCC. She poured herself into the civil rights movement and later formed the Grammy-nominated a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock to educate and empower the audience and community. 

“When I opened my mouth and began to sing, there was a force and power within myself I had never heard before,” a power she said she did not know she had. 

Other members of the Freedom Singers included Cordell Reagon, Bernice Johnson, Dorothy Vallis, Rutha Harris, Bernard Lafayette and Charles Neblett. On the third anniversary of the sit-in movement in 1963, they performed at Carnegie Hall. 

“This is a singing movement,” SNCC leader James Forman told a reporter. “The songs help. Without them, it would be ugly.” 

Today, the Albany Civil Rights Institute houses exhibits on these protesters, Martin Luther King Jr. and others who joined the Albany Movement.

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

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Mississippi Today

IHL deletes the word ‘diversity’ from its policies

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20 hours ago

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November 21, 2024

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mississippitoday.org – Molly Minta – 2024-11-21 14:32:00

The governing board of Mississippi’s public universities voted Thursday to delete the word “diversity” from several policies, including a requirement that the board evaluate university presidents on campus diversity outcomes.

Though the Legislature has not passed a bill targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in higher education, the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees approved the changes “in order to ensure continued compliance with state and federal law,” according to the board book. 

The move comes on the heels of the re-election of former President Donald Trump and after several universities in Mississippi have renamed their diversity offices. Earlier this year, the IHL board approved changes to the University of Southern Mississippi’s mission and vision statements that removed the words “diverse” and “inclusiveness.”

In an email, John Sewell, IHL’s communications director, did not respond to several questions about the policy changes but wrote that the board’s goal was to “reinforce our commitment to ensuring students have access to the best education possible, supported by world-class faculty and staff.”

“The end goal is to support all students, and to make sure they graduate fully prepared to enter the workforce, hopefully in Mississippi,” Sewell added.

On Thursday, trustees approved the changes without discussion after a first reading by Harold Pizzetta, the associate commissioner for legal affairs and risk management. But Sewell wrote in an email that the board discussed the policy amendments in open session two months ago during its retreat in Meridian, more than an hour away from the board’s normal meeting location in Jackson.

IHL often uses these retreats, which unlike its regular board meetings aren’t livestreamed and are rarely attended by members of the public outside of the occasional reporter, to discuss potentially controversial policy changes.

Last year, the board had a spirited discussion about a policy change that would have increased its oversight of off-campus programs during its retreat at the White House Hotel in Biloxi. In 2022, during a retreat that also took place in Meridian, trustees discussed changing the board’s tenure policies. At both retreats, a Mississippi Today reporter was the only member of the public to witness the discussions.

The changes to IHL’s diversity policy echo a shift, particularly at colleges and universities in conservative states, from concepts like diversity in favor of “access” and “opportunity.” In higher education, the term “diversity, equity and inclusion” has traditionally referred to a range of efforts to comply with civil rights laws and foster a sense of on-campus belonging among minority populations.

But in recent years, conservative politicians have contended that DEI programs are wasteful spending and racist. A bill to ban state funding for DEI in Mississippi died earlier this year, but at least 10 other states have passed laws seeking to end or restrict such initiatives at state agencies, including publicly funded universities, according to ABC News.

In Mississippi, the word “diversity” first appeared in IHL’s policies in 1998. The diversity statement was adopted in 2005 and amended in 2013. 

The board’s vote on Thursday turned the diversity statement, which was deleted in its entirety, into a “statement on higher education access and success” according to the board book. 

“One of the strengths of Mississippi is the diversity of its people,” the diversity statement read. “This diversity enriches higher education and contributes to the capacity that our students develop for living in a multicultural and interdependent world.”

Significantly, the diversity statement required the IHL board to evaluate the university presidents and the higher learning commissioner on diversity outcomes. 

The statement also included system-wide goals — some of which it is unclear if the board has achieved — to increase the enrollment and graduation rates of minority students, employ more underrepresented faculty, staff and administrators, and increase the use of minority-owned contractors and vendors. 

Sewell did not respond to questions about if IHL has met those goals or if the board will continue to evaluate presidents on diversity outcomes.

In the new policy, those requirements were replaced with two paragraphs about the importance of respectful dialogue on campus and access to higher education for all Mississippians. 

“We encourage all members of the academic community to engage in respectful, meaningful discourse with the aim of promoting critical thinking in the pursuit of knowledge, a deeper understanding of the human condition, and the development of character,” the new policy reads. “All students should be supported in their educational journey through programming and services designed to have a positive effect on their individual academic performance, retention, and graduation.” 

Also excised was a policy that listed common characteristics of universities in Mississippi, including “a commitment to ethnic and gender diversity,” among others. Another policy on institutional scholarships was also edited to remove a clause that required such programs to “promote diversity.” 

“IHL is committed to higher education access and success among all populations to assist the state of Mississippi in meeting its enrollment and degree completion goals, as well as building a highly-skilled workforce,” the institutional scholarship policy now reads. 

The board also approved a change that requires the universities to review their institutional mission statements on an annual basis.

A policy on “planning principles” will continue to include the word “diverse,” and a policy that states the presidential search advisory committees will “be representative in terms of diversity” was left unchanged.

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

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Closed St. Dominic’s mental health beds to reopen in December under new management

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21 hours ago

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November 21, 2024

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mississippitoday.org – Gwen Dilworth – 2024-11-21 13:54:00

The shuttered St. Dominic’s mental health unit will reopen under the management of a for-profit, Texas-based company next month. 

Oceans Behavioral Hospital Jackson, a 77-bed facility, will provide inpatient behavioral health services to adults and seniors and add intensive outpatient treatment services next year. 

“Jackson continuously ranks as one of the cities for our company that shows one of the greatest needs in terms of behavioral health,” Oceans Healthcare CEO Stuart Archer told Mississippi Today at a ribbon cutting ceremony at its location on St. Dominic’s campus Thursday. “…There’s been an outcry for high quality care.” 

St. Dominic’s 83-bed mental health unit closed suddenly in June 2023, citing “substantial financial challenges.”

Merit Health Central, which operates a 71-bed psychiatric health hospital unit in Jackson, sued Oceans in March, arguing that the new hospital violated the law by using a workaround to avoid a State Health Department requirement that the hospital spend at least 17% of its gross patient revenue on indigent and charity care.

Without a required threshold for this care, Merit Health Central will shoulder the burden of treating more non-paying patients, the hospital in South Jackson argued. 

The suit, which also names St. Dominic’s Hospital and the Mississippi Department of Health as defendants, awaits a ruling from Hinds County Chancery Court Judge Tametrice Hodges-Linzey next year. 

The complaint does not bar Oceans from moving forward with its plans to reopen, said Archer.

A hallway inside Oceans Behavioral Hospital in Jackson, Miss., is seen on Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024, during the facility’s grand opening. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

Oceans operates two other mental health facilities in Mississippi and over 30 other locations in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas. 

“Oceans is very important to the Coast, to Tupelo, and it’s important right here in this building. It’s part of the state of Mississippi’s response to making sure people receive adequate mental health care in Mississippi,” said Lt. Governor Delbert Hosemann at the Nov. 21 ribbon cutting.

Some community leaders have been critical of the facility. 

“Oceans plans to duplicate existing services available to insured patients while ignoring the underserved and indigent population in need,” wrote Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones in an Oct. 1 letter provided to Mississippi Today by Merit Health. 

Massachusetts-based Webster Equity Partners, a private-equity firm with a number of investments in health care, bought Oceans in 2022. St. Dominic’s is owned by Louisiana-based Catholic nonprofit Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System.

Oceans first filed a “certificate of need” application to reopen the St. Dominic’s mental health unit in October 2023. 

Mississippi’s certificate of need law requires medical facilities to receive approval from the state before opening a new health care center to demonstrate there is a need for its services. 

The Department of Health approved the application under the condition that the hospital spend at least 17% of its patient revenue on free or low-cost medical care for low-income individuals – far more than the two percent it proposed. 

Stuart Archer, CEO of Oceans Healthcare, speaks during the grand opening of Oceans Behavioral Hospital in Jackson, Miss., on Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

Oceans projected in its application that the hospital’s profit would equal $2.6 million in its third year, and it would spend $341,103 on charity care.

Merit Health contested the conditional approval, arguing that because its mental health unit provides 22% charity care, Oceans providing less would have a “significant adverse effect” on Merit by diverting more patients without insurance or unable to pay for care to its beds. 

Oceans and St. Dominic’s also opposed the state’s charity care condition, arguing that 17% was an unreasonable figure. 

But before a public hearing could be held on the matter, Oceans and St. Dominic’s filed for a “change of ownership,” bypassing the certificate of need process entirely. The state approved the application 11 days later. 

Merit Health Central then sued Oceans, St. Dominic and the State Department of Health, seeking to nullify the change of ownership. 

“The (change of ownership) filing and DOH approval … are nothing more than an ‘end run’ around CON law,” wrote Merit Health in the complaint. 

Oceans, St. Dominic’s and the Mississippi Department of Health have filed motions to dismiss the case. 

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

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