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Senate has little appetite for changing the difficult way it restores suffrage to convicted felons

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Kenneth Almons told a group of about 16 state lawmakers inside crowded Room 113 at the state Capitol earlier this year that if he could ever regain his right to vote, he could actually demonstrate the importance of voting to his children.

But until that happens, he will carry a massive albatross around his neck over a mistake he made over 30 years ago, he said.

“If you can’t vote, you’re nobody,” Almons said. “And in the public’s eye, I’m a nobody.”

The cold, hard truth is that most Mississippi legislators haven’t shown any desire to change Almons’ mind or taken any significant steps to show him they don’t consider him a nobody.

A 51-year-old Jackson resident, Almons was convicted of armed robbery when he was 17 years old and was released from the Mississippi State Penitentiary, commonly known as Parchman, when he was 23.

For the last 28 years, he hasn’t been convicted of a speeding infraction, much less another felony, he told the state officials. Instead, he’s run his own business, currently works for the city of Jackson, has raised three children and has, by most standards, been a picture-perfect example of what legislators would consider being rehabilitated back into society.

“You’ve been more productive than people who have never even seen the inside of a prison,” House Minority Leader Robert Johnson III said to Almons during an April 17 hearing.

But because he was convicted of armed robbery and aggravated assault as a teenager, he still cannot cast a vote in a Mississippi election and, despite paying taxes for decades, has no direct say in who represents him in government.

This is because the Mississippi Constitution imposes a lifetime voting ban on people convicted of 10 types of crimes. An Attorney General’s opinion expanded that list to 22 specific crimes.

Not every felony crime is a disenfranchising crime – only certain felonies. This is largely because the racist framers of the Jim Crow-era 1890 constitution selected disenfranchising crimes that they believed were more likely to be committed by Black people. 

Thousands of people like Almons have only two ways to get their voting rights back. Both paths are up to elected state officials. 

A governor could restore someone’s voting rights, but a governor has not issued such a pardon since Republican Gov. Haley Barbour left office in 2012.

The other way for someone to get their voting rights back is for two-thirds of the lawmakers in both chambers to agree on restoring suffrage. But this process is incredibly burdensome and subject to the political whims of the day.

For starters, not every person knows a lawmaker who can introduce a suffrage bill on their behalf, and not every lawmaker is willing to introduce a suffrage bill. If those disenfranchised felons are unhappy with the lawmaker who won’t introduce a suffrage bill, they have no way to vote their local legislator out of office because they can’t vote.

The other reality is suffrage restoration bills are not voted on until the final days of the legislation session, which is usually the time when lawmakers are fighting with each other and are ready to leave Jackson.

While any lawmaker can introduce a suffrage restoration bill for anyone, legislative leaders in both chambers have adopted unofficial rules that virtually prohibit lawmakers from considering suffrage restoration measures for people convicted of violent felony offenses, no matter how long ago the crime was or if a person has ever committed another felony.

Republican Sen. Walter Michel of Ridgeland told reporters earlier this year that he would never agree to restore voting rights to someone who used a weapon to commit a crime, such as Almons’ armed robbery conviction.

“Somebody that’s willing to put a gun to somebody’s head or steal a car or steal their personal property, I’m not interested in having them vote on laws or vote on people,” Michel said. “That’s just my opinion on that.”

With violent crimes out of the question, that only leaves nonviolent offenses up for consideration. But the two chambers of the Capitol can’t even agree on a plan to streamline the suffrage restoration process for people convicted of nonviolent felony offenses.

The GOP-majority House this session overwhelmingly passed a proposal that created an automatic process for people previously convicted of some nonviolent felony offenses to have their voting rights restored.

It wouldn’t have given Almons his suffrage back, but it would have been a small step forward in streamlining the convoluted process that Mississippi uses to restore voting rights.

Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann double referred the House measure to the Constitution Committee and Judiciary B Committee. Senate Constitution Committee Chairwoman Angela Burks Hil refused to bring the bill up for debate and killed the measure.

Hill, a Republican from Picayune, has not publicly articulated why she killed the measure other than offering a cryptic explanation that “the Constitution speaks for itself.” 

Hosemann told reporters during the final days of the session that he personally supports efforts to restore voting rights to nonviolent felons who have completed all the terms of their sentences. However, he believes most of the Senate wouldn’t agree to the House proposal.

“Just giving a blanket is pretty hard,” Hosemann said. “My senators want to vote individually and go through them one at a time.”

House Speaker Jason White, a Republican from West, told reporters last month that he believes the House will continue to push for felony suffrage reform partly because he believes it would reduce the state’s recidivism rate and give people a second chance at a successful life

White, an attorney, said he often has clients who approach him asking how they can get a crime expunged from their record or get their voting rights restored. All of those clients, he said, are people who have made a deliberate effort to rehabilitate their lives and are looking to have their dignity restored.

“I’ve never once had a career criminal drug dealer who is still in the middle of crime activity wanting to clean up and get his voting rights restored,” White said. “The people that show up are the people that have totally cleaned up their life and … want to take part in their community.”

If the House passes a similar version during the 2025 session, Hosemann could use his legislative power to simply refer it to the Judiciary B Committee, which has jurisdiction over the criminal code, and not allow the Constitution Committee to consider it.

But if Hosemann’s comments about the Senate’s beliefs are accurate, Mississippi will be stuck with one of the most convoluted, processes for granting voting rights back to convicted felons unless those senators change their minds.

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

Mississippi Today

On this day in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-27 07:00:00

April 27, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois by James E. Purdy in 1907 from the National Portrait Gallery.

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.

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Mississippi Today

Jim Hood’s opinion provides a roadmap if lawmakers do the unthinkable and can’t pass a budget

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mississippitoday.org – @BobbyHarrison9 – 2025-04-27 06:00:00

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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Mississippi Today

1964: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-26 07:00:00

April 26, 1964

Aaron Henry testifies before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Civil rights activists started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the state’s all-white regular delegation to the Democratic National Convention. 

The regulars had already adopted this resolution: “We oppose, condemn and deplore the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … We believe in separation of the races in all phases of our society. It is our belief that the separation of the races is necessary for the peace and tranquility of all the people of Mississippi, and the continuing good relationship which has existed over the years.” 

In reality, Black Mississippians had been victims of intimidation, harassment and violence for daring to try and vote as well as laws passed to disenfranchise them. As a result, by 1964, only 6% of Black Mississippians were permitted to vote. A year earlier, activists had run a mock election in which thousands of Black Mississippians showed they would vote if given an opportunity. 

In August 1964, the Freedom Party decided to challenge the all-white delegation, saying they had been illegally elected in a segregated process and had no intention of supporting President Lyndon B. Johnson in the November election. 

The prediction proved true, with white Mississippi Democrats overwhelmingly supporting Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act. While the activists fell short of replacing the regulars, their courageous stand led to changes in both parties.

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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