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Lawmakers pass largest budget in state history. No tax cuts or refunds, more for schools and roads

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Lawmakers pass largest budget in state history. No tax cuts or refunds, more for schools and roads

After bitter arguments, stalemates and blown deadlines the Mississippi Legislature pulled an all-nighter and passed a state budget of $7.6 billion early Saturday morning, the largest budget — not counting federal funds — in the state’s history.

It includes a roughly $120 million increase in public K-12 education spending, an extra $620 million for road work and a $104 million bailout of the state’s struggling hospitals. It also includes more than $600 million for individual lawmakers’ projects this election year.

Despite pleas from hospitals, health advocates and some lawmakers, the Legislature again refused to expand Medicaid coverage — for which it would receive more than $1 billion a year in federal money — to cover working poor Mississippians and help hospitals struggling to provide care to the indigent.

The budget includes no new major tax cuts or refunds for Mississippians, despite vows by Gov. Tate Reeves, House Speaker Philip Gunn and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann early in the year to provide relief for taxpayers.

Hosemann had proposed a one-time rebate check for Mississippi taxpayers or cutting the state’s highest-in-the-nation tax on groceries. Reeves and Gunn proposed a phase-out of the state’s personal income tax. No agreement was reached, and no tax break was passed, although lawmakers last year enacted the largest income tax cut in state history, still being phased in.

After much dickering that held up other budget work late in the session, lawmakers on Friday night agreed to spend about $3 billion on K-12 education, an increase over this year of about $120 million.

The Senate had proposed revamping the state’s adequate education formula and fully funding it for the first time in years, which would have cost about $181 million. The House refused to add more money to the Mississippi Adequate Education Program formula, pushing instead for Legislature-directed spending for schools, including a $22-million raise for teachers’ assistants.

Neither agreed to the other’s proposals and in final negotiations agreed to provide an extra $100 million divided among schools based on numbers of students, with few restrictions other than the money cannot go to pay increases for superintendents, assistant superintendents and principals.

“This was a way to get a compromise,” Senate Education Chairman Dennis DeBar told his colleagues. “It’s almost the same effect as if it was in the (MAEP) formula.”

Most of the balance of the schools increase — about $17 million — is to cover increased insurance costs for education employees.

“I am pleased with it,” said House Education Chairman Richard Bennett. “I would have loved to fund raises for teachers’ assistants, but it’s a give and take … We’ve all got to sit down next year and look at the (MAEP) formula and what we need to change.”

Hosemann and Gunn said they were pleased with the final budget.

“From a $600 million-plus infrastructure plan to legislation strengthening our elections process, providing options for the continued collaboration of hospitals, and increasing the number of doctors and nurses in Mississippi, the session has been an overwhelming success,” Hosemann said. “The state is in excellent fiscal condition, we are paying off debt, our personal and business taxes are decreasing, and we have adopted a conservative budget which funds necessary services.

“I am particularly proud of the Senate’s earlier 52-0 commitment to fully funding the education of our children,” Hosemann said. “Our senators’ leadership on this issue resulted in an additional $100 million for our schools, which will fund local supplements for teachers, classroom supplies, diesel for buses, and all the other things necessary to providing every child in Mississippi with an opportunity for a first-class education.”

House Speaker Philip Gunn, who is not running for reelection and was presiding over his final regular session, said of the budget, “I think it meets a lot of needs across the state. We put another $100 million in public education. We are proud to be able to do that.”

This year’s legislative session also saw some of the worst partisan, racial and geographic division and argument in recent years, mostly centered around measures aimed at state takeover of policing, courts and infrastructure in the capital city of Jackson.

At a press conference Friday night, Democratic leaders Sen. Derrick Simmons and Rep. Robert Johnson III said Republican leaders wasted too much time and lucre on “targeting Jackson” and instead should have focused on the needs of average Mississippians.

“We had a $4 billion surplus and we wouldn’t even fully fund MAEP, provide money for hospitals and provide the kind of support Jackson needs,” Johnson said.

“Eighty percent of Mississippians want Medicaid expansion,” Simmons said. “Seventy nine percent want our schools fully funded. Another over 70% want us to restore the ballot initiative process. But what have we done here for 90 days? We spent our time dealing with bills targeting the city of Jackson … It’s an insult. This is an election year. … One thing that scares a politician is the fear of not being reelected … If you want Medicaid expansion, if you want the ballot initiative restored, if you want your schools fully funded, Democrats have supported that year after year.”

The Legislature appropriated $7 million in one fund for relief for residents impacted by the tornadoes that ripped through north Mississippi earlier this month killing at least 21 people and $7 million in another fund for housing for those impacted by the storms. In addition, $3 million was appropriated for the schools to help pay their damages from the tornadoes and $1.5 million for hospitals that suffered damages.

Legislators worked overnight Friday well into Saturday morning to fund dozens of pet projects throughout the state.

In an item separate from the budget, the Legislature did not pass any bills to restore voting rights to people who lost their right to vote because of a felony conviction. The House sent four bills to the Senate restoring voting rights, but Senate Judiciary B Chair Joey Fillingane opted not to bring any of those up for considerations before the full Senate.

Most years the Legislature passes a handful of suffrage bills (normally about five) each session.

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

Mississippi Today

Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-03 13:02:00

Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting. 

Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.

The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID. 

The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots. 

The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion. 

Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor. 

England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking. 

The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber. 

England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.

“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said. 

Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting. 

To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice. 

Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures. 

Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security. 

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

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

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.

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Mississippi Today

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

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

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.

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