Mississippi Today
Campaign finance reform bill gets cold response; lawmakers axe transparency component

Inflamed by lack of investigation or enforcement of what he claimed were flagrant campaign finance violations by his opponent, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann after winning his reelection primary last summer vowed to push for reform.
Secretary of State Michael Watson, who said his hands were legally tied on dealing with such complaints, also vowed to push for reform and more authority for his office to police the flow of money into Mississippi politics.
On Tuesday the Senate Elections Committee moved forward a bill authored by Elections Chairman Jeremy England, R-Vancleave, one of Hosemann’s top lieutenants. The “omnibus” bill would give Watson’s office more power, add transparency for voters, increase penalties and fines and allow the secretary of state’s office to sidestep the AG’s office if it refuses to go after bad actors (which has been the current AG’s MO).
But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in the Senate Elections Committee viewed the measure with a gimlet eye. They immediately axed its main transparency component, and added a “reverse repealer” to it, ensuring it cannot be passed into law as is. Only then did they send it along to the full Senate.
Mississippi lawmakers have long been loathe to expose themselves to transparency or strict ethics, lobbying or campaign finance rules and enforcement. The Legislature, for example, exempts itself from the open records and meetings laws it forces on others in government.
Mississippi’s campaign finance laws and reporting requirements are lax, and enforcement is nearly nonexistent. These laws have been piecemealed over many years, and the resultant hodgepodge is a confusing, often conflicting set of codes.
Hosemann said he wants an overhaul, and England’s bill covered many fronts, including creating a felony crime of perjury for willfully filing false finance reports, and a requirement that Mississippi join the modern age with candidates filing reports electronically and the secretary of state providing a publicly searchable database of campaign finance reports.
“This goes to the heart of the electoral process in this country,” Hosemann said on Monday. “Our founding fathers said the best thing we can have is an informed voter, and to have an informed voter you need to know who’s paying for what, who’s contributing to these candidates.”
Most other states, including all those surrounding Mississippi, have searchable databases of campaign contributions. For instance, a voter could type in a donor’s name and see to whom and how much that donor has given. While Mississippi’s SOS office has online campaign finance records, they are non-searchable PDFs — essentially pictures of pages — and candidates are still allowed to file paper, handwritten — even written in crayon — campaign finance reports.
Watson has advocated creating a searchable database, and lawmakers are expected to approve about $5 million in funding for a new SOS computer system. England’s bill would have required a searchable database and candidates to file electronically by 2027.
But Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, said requiring Mississippi candidates to use such technology — either filing electronic reports or filling out online report forms — would be too onerous. He said this would prevent those who don’t have computers or cannot use them from running for office. He noted many areas of the state still lack high-speed internet service.
Bryan offered a successful amendment to strip the requirement for candidates to file campaign finance reports electronically.
Bryan and others also voiced trepidation about measures in the bill to aid investigation and prosecution of campaign finance violations. The measure, England said, changed a lot of “mays” about investigation and prosecution into “shalls.” It also says the secretary of state’s office, after it reports potential violations to the attorney general’s office, can hire outside counsel, engage a district attorney or find a special prosecutor if the AG’s office refuses to act.
“We are trying to clear up gray areas,” England said. “… so we don’t have situations where we don’t know who’s responsible to do what.”
But Sen. Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall, said he fears this would amount to “shopping for a prosecutor who’s willing to prosecute … almost like fishing for prosecution.”
Bryan said, “I worry we are weaponizing the filing of complaints” against candidates.
After numerous critical questions about the measure, Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, successfully offered an amendment to add a “reverse repealer” to the bill. This says the bill repeals before it could take effect, meaning it could not be passed into law without further scrutiny and work.
“Our laws can use a tune-up from time to time, but there are a lot of questions on this,” Blount said. “Let’s just keep working on this bill.”
England said that despite the rocky start, “I think we’ll get something out this year,” even if all the proposed reforms don’t make it. As to the searchable campaign finance database like other states have, he said, “I think we will eventually see that added back, just maybe not this year.”
The House this session did not have an omnibus campaign finance reform bill, but had several smaller measures. Most died without a vote in committee with Tuesday’s deadline.
New House Speaker Jason White, who in the past has championed some campaign finance reform measures, said he is open to such legislation.
“One specific thing lots of lawmakers are talking about is how we can better enforce the laws we have on the books now,” White said recently. “Also, transparency and searchable information that is easily accessed and available to the public is another potential place we could improve.”
Some highlights of Senate Bill 2575 authored by England:
- It would remove the state Ethics Commission from campaign finance duties. The commission, spartanly staffed and funded, had been given some oversight over campaign finance reports, but the law was unclear on its authority, and conflicted with other laws still on the books. Hosemann said the secretary of state and attorney general offices have more staff, attorneys and expertise to deal with the regulations and laws.
- The bill would increase criminal penalties for willful violations of campaign finance laws from up to $3,000 and six months in jail to up to $5,000 and a year in jail. It would create a felony penalty of perjury for willfully filing false campaign finance reports. It would also increase fines and penalties for administrative violations, such as failing to file campaign finance reports timely.
- It would define coordinated expenditures and electioneering, seeking to prohibit third parties spending to help candidates but claiming they are acting independently and not following contribution limits and cut down on millions in “dark money” that has begun flowing into Mississippi elections.
- Would clearly define corporations and clarify that corporations both in state and out of state are limited to contributions of $1,000 a year. Recently, AG Lynn Fitch said state law is not clear on the definition of a corporation, and she opined that out-of-state corporations don’t face the $1,000 limit — contrary to decades of interpretation of Mississippi’s law and practice.
- Would require candidates to list the name, address and occupation of a donor. It would also give the secretary of state authority to check reports to make sure they are complete and appear accurate. Under current law, the secretary’s office is simply a repository, and has little oversight on whether reports are accurate and complete.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Derrick Simmons: Monday’s Confederate Memorial Day recognition is awful for Mississippians
Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.
Each year, in a handful of states, public offices close, flags are lowered and official ceremonies commemorate “Confederate Memorial Day.”
Mississippi is among those handful of states that on Monday will celebrate the holiday intended to honor the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
But let me be clear: celebrating Confederate Memorial Day is not only racist but is bad policy, bad governance and a deep stain on the values we claim to uphold today.
First, there is no separating the Confederacy from the defense of slavery and white supremacy. The Confederacy was not about “states’ rights” in the abstract; it was about the right to own human beings. Confederate leaders themselves made that clear.
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared in his infamous “Cornerstone Speech” that the Confederacy was founded upon “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” No amount of revisionist history can erase the fact that the Confederacy’s cause was fundamentally rooted in preserving racial subjugation.
To honor that cause with a state holiday is to glorify a rebellion against the United States fought to defend the indefensible. It is an insult to every citizen who believes in equality and freedom, and it is a cruel slap in the face to Black Americans, whose ancestors endured the horrors of slavery and generations of systemic discrimination that followed.
Beyond its moral bankruptcy, Confederate Memorial Day is simply bad public policy. Holidays are public statements of our values. They are moments when a state, through official sanction, tells its citizens: “This is what we believe is worthy of honor.” Keeping Confederate Memorial Day on the calendar sends a message that a government once committed to denying basic human rights should be celebrated.
That message is not just outdated — it is dangerous. It nurtures the roots of racism, fuels division and legitimizes extremist ideologies that threaten our democracy today.
Moreover, there are real economic and administrative costs to shutting down government offices for this purpose. In a time when states face budget constraints, workforce shortages and urgent civic challenges, it is absurd to prioritize paid time off to commemorate a failed and racist insurrection. Our taxpayer dollars should be used to advance justice, education, infrastructure and economic development — not to prop up a lost cause of hate.
If we truly believe in moving forward together as one people, we must stop clinging to symbols that represent treason, brutality and white supremacy. There is a legislative record that supports this move in a veto-proof majority changing the state Confederate flag in 2020. Taking Confederate Memorial Day off our official state holiday calendar is another necessary step toward a more inclusive and just society.
Mississippi had the largest population of enslaved individuals in 1865 and today has the highest percentage of Black residents in the United States. We should not honor the Confederacy or Confederate Memorial Day. We should replace it.
Replacing a racist holiday with one that celebrates emancipation underscores the state’s rich African American history and promotes a more inclusive understanding of its past. It would also align the state’s observances with national efforts to commemorate the end of slavery and the ongoing pursuit of equality.
I will continue my legislative efforts to replace Confederate Memorial Day as a state holiday with Juneteenth, which commemorates the freedom for America’s enslaved people.
It’s time to end Confederate Memorial Day once and for all.
Derrick T. Simmons, D-Greensville, serves as the minority leader in the state Senate. He represents Bolivar, Coahoma and Washington counties in the Mississippi Senate.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The post Derrick Simmons: Monday's Confederate Memorial Day recognition is awful for Mississippians appeared first on mississippitoday.org
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Left-Leaning
This article argues against the celebration of Confederate Memorial Day, stating it glorifies a racist and failed rebellion that is harmful to societal values. It critiques the holiday as a symbol of white supremacy and advocates for replacing it with Juneteenth to honor emancipation. The language used, such as referring to the Confederate cause as “moral bankruptcy,” and the call to replace the holiday reflects a progressive stance on social justice and racial equality, common in left-leaning perspectives. Additionally, the writer urges action for inclusivity and justice, positioning the argument within modern liberal values.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies
April 27, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” called for active resistance to racist policies: “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.”
He described the tension between being Black and being an American: “One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
He criticized Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Six years later, Du Bois helped found the NAACP and became the editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis. He waged protests against the racist silent film “The Birth of a Nation” and against lynchings of Black Americans, detailing the 2,732 lynchings between 1884 and 1914.
In 1921, he decried Harvard University’s decisions to ban Black students from the dormitories as an attempt to renew “the Anglo-Saxon cult, the worship of the Nordic totem, the disenfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander — the world rule of Nordic white through brute force.”
In 1929, he debated Lothrop Stoddard, a proponent of scientific racism, who also happened to belong to the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender’s front page headline read, “5,000 Cheer W.E.B. DuBois, Laugh at Lothrup Stoddard.”
In 1949, the FBI began to investigate Du Bois as a “suspected Communist,” and he was indicted on trumped-up charges that he had acted as an agent of a foreign state and had failed to register. The government dropped the case after Albert Einstein volunteered to testify as a character witness.
Despite the lack of conviction, the government confiscated his passport for eight years. In 1960, he recovered his passport and traveled to the newly created Republic of Ghana. Three years later, the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, so Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana. He died on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
Jim Hood’s opinion provides a roadmap if lawmakers do the unthinkable and can’t pass a budget
On June 30, 2009, Sam Cameron, the then-executive director of the Mississippi Hospital Association, held a news conference in the Capitol rotunda to publicly take his whipping and accept his defeat.
Cameron urged House Democrats, who had sided with the Hospital Association, to accept the demands of Republican Gov. Haley Barbour to place an additional $90 million tax on the state’s hospitals to help fund Medicaid and prevent the very real possibility of the program and indeed much of state government being shut down when the new budget year began in a few hours. The impasse over Medicaid and the hospital tax had stopped all budget negotiations.
Barbour watched from a floor above as Cameron publicly admitted defeat. Cameron’s decision to swallow his pride was based on a simple equation. He told news reporters, scores of lobbyists and health care advocates who had set up camp in the Capitol as midnight on July 1 approached that, while he believed the tax would hurt Mississippi hospitals, not having a Medicaid budget would be much more harmful.
Just as in 2009, the Legislature ended the 2025 regular session earlier this month without a budget agreement and will have to come back in special session to adopt a budget before the new fiscal year begins on July 1. It is unlikely that the current budget rift between the House and Senate will be as dramatic as the 2009 standoff when it appeared only hours before the July 1 deadline that there would be no budget. But who knows what will result from the current standoff? After all, the current standoff in many ways seems to be more about political egos than policy differences on the budget.
The fight centers around multiple factors, including:
- Whether legislation will be passed to allow sports betting outside of casinos.
- Whether the Senate will agree to a massive projects bill to fund local projects throughout the state.
- Whether leaders will overcome hard feelings between the two chambers caused by the House’s hasty final passage of a Senate tax cut bill filled with typos that altered the intent of the bill without giving the Senate an opportunity to fix the mistakes.
- Whether members would work on a weekend at the end of the session. The Senate wanted to, the House did not.
It is difficult to think any of those issues will rise to the ultimate level of preventing the final passage of a budget when push comes to shove.
But who knows? What we do know is that the impasse in 2009 created a guideline of what could happen if a budget is not passed.
It is likely that parts, though not all, of state government will shut down if the Legislature does the unthinkable and does not pass a budget for the new fiscal year beginning July 1.
An official opinion of the office of Attorney General Jim Hood issued in 2009 said if there is no budget passed by the Legislature, those services mandated in the Mississippi Constitution, such as a public education system, will continue.
According to the Hood opinion, other entities, such as the state’s debt, and court and federal mandates, also would be funded. But it is likely that there will not be funds for Medicaid and many other programs, such as transportation and aspects of public safety that are not specifically listed in the Mississippi Constitution.
The Hood opinion reasoned that the Mississippi Constitution is the ultimate law of the state and must be adhered to even in the absence of legislative action. Other states have reached similar conclusions when their legislatures have failed to act, the AG’s opinion said.
As is often pointed out, the opinion of the attorney general does not carry the weight of law. It serves only as a guideline, though Gov. Tate Reeves has relied on the 2009 opinion even though it was written by the staff of Hood, who was Reeves’ opponent in the contentious 2019 gubernatorial campaign.
But if the unthinkable ever occurs and the Legislature goes too far into a new fiscal year without adopting a budget, it most likely will be the courts — moreso than an AG’s opinion — that ultimately determine if and how state government operates.
In 2009 Sam Cameron did not want to see what would happen if a budget was not adopted. It also is likely that current political leaders do not want to see the results of not having a budget passed before July 1 of this year.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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