Mississippi Today
Transcript: Democratic leaders respond to 2023 State of the State address
Transcript: Democratic leaders respond to 2023 State of the State address
Rep. Robert Johnson and Sen. Derrick Simmons, the House and Senate Democratic leaders, responded to Gov. Tate Reeves’ Jan. 30 State of the State address.
Below is the statement from Johnson and Simmons.
Editor’s note: This transcript was submitted by the leaders’ staff and has not been formatted to match Mississippi Today’s style.
The Mississippi described in today’s State of the State is not the Mississippi lived in by the vast majority of our state’s families. It is a fantasy — a mythical Mississippi that we all wish we lived in. A booming economy; well-funded and high-performing schools; accessible, high-quality healthcare; economic opportunity for all; functioning infrastructure – it sounds pretty magical.
And it might as well have started with “once upon a time.”
As much as we’d like to believe in this fairy tale, for the rest of us, our Mississippi is a much different story.For many Mississippians, the reality is that our state isn’t working for us, it’s working against us. And far too often it feels like this place that we love so much doesn’t love us back. What’s most frustrating, though, is that not only do state leaders refuse to acknowledge your concerns and do their part to improve your lives — they’re ignoring our state’s issues outright, while telling us over and over again just how great everything is.
According to the most recent census, Mississippi was one of only three states that lost population over the last ten years — a decade that saw Gov. Reeves running the state Senate for two terms as lieutenant governor, where he decided on spending and slashing and what would be prioritized or ignored. But as we watched our kids and grandkids flee, our colleagues and friends leave for greener pastures, we listened to state leaders — including Tate Reeves — tell us that Mississippi was on fire, the state’s coffers were filling up, and that brain drain was just a figment of our collective imagination.
Tonight, again, we heard those same refrains and the same downplaying of the realities of life here in our state.
Since last year’s State of the State address, the healthcare crisis has reached a critical point. But while we have sounded the alarm, Republicans have neglected to extend postpartum Medicaid coverage for new moms; refused to prioritize sending money to rural hospitals; and continued to ignore the pleas of voters, advocates, policy experts, hospital leaders, and business leaders to expand Medicaid. We’ve been warned by the Department of Health there’s a growing area of the state in which there is no hospital to deliver a baby and we are navigating a severe nursing shortage.
Thirty-eight rural hospitals are in danger of imminent closure — that’s 54% of Mississippi’s rural hospitals. More than 200,000 working Mississippians are without healthcare. One in six women of childbearing age is uninsured. 46,000 Mississippi children are uninsured. The only neonatal intensive care unit in the Delta closed this year, where there is one pediatrician for every 4,000 children. We are number one in the nation for babies born with low birthweight. We have the nation’s highest fetal mortality rate. Our preterm birth rate rose to 15% from 14.2% the year prior. And just in case you thought this was an issue that only affected one portion of the state, you should know that preterm birth rates worsened in Harrison County, Rankin County, Jackson County, and Madison County.
Meanwhile, while they continue to insist there’s “more to being pro-life than anti-abortion” the governor and the party he leads have only made excuses for their inaction and vague promises that we have no reason to believe they will ever deliver on.
Gov. Reeves also continues to say that he’ll keep fighting to eliminate the income tax. The revenue from the state income tax accounts for a third of our general fund — the portion of the budget that takes care of the most basic services you expect the government to handle. Things like education funding and money for roads and bridges come from this portion of the budget.
Tonight, the governor told us, again, that “Mississippi continues to be in the best financial shape in its history.” And yet, 30% of Mississippi children are living in poverty. The Department of Mental Health’s workforce has decreased by nearly 4,000 since 2009. State employees – the men and women who keep our state running – are, on average, paid thousands of dollars less than their counterparts in all of our surrounding states. Our state’s schools have been underfunded by over $3 billion since 2007.Our long-neglected roadways continue to cost Mississippians, on average, $800 in vehicle damage annually.
If Mississippi has never been in better financial shape, how do you explain how many Mississippians are struggling to make ends meet? How are our schools still struggling to provide the basics for our students? How did our capital city go without water for weeks this year?How is our healthcare system on the brink of total collapse?
The fact is, it is not a lack of available funds that stops leadership from keeping its promise to the citizens they pledged to serve; it is a lack of interest. Slashing the budget and limiting government spending does, in fact, come at a cost. A human cost. Democrats are often criticized for just wanting to throw money at a problem, but that’s not what we’re doing here. There has to be a shift in the way we think about funding government services. It’s not just about spending money. It’s about investing in Mississippi, in Mississippians – and in the future of our state.
House and Senate Democrats have long offered up concrete ideas and common-sense solutions to move Mississippi forward. Year after year, we’ve authored legislation to address the increasingly dangerous healthcare crisis, raise the minimum wage, fix our state’s crumbling infrastructure, fully fund public education, make voting easier and more convenient, increase transparency in government, ensure equity in economic development so that all corners of our state have the opportunity to flourish, and now we’re working to restore the ballot initiative. We also led the charge on increasing teacher pay and a raise for state employees year after year — and not just when it was politically beneficial to do so. Today’s speech, like most of what comes out of the governor’s mouth, was not reflective of what it’s like outside the gates of the Governor’s Mansion; it was yet another audition to be someone’s running mate. He’s continued not to take his cues from what he’s hearing from you; but from what he knows will remind the producers at Fox News that he’s always available for a booking.
We wish that we could go along with the fairytale spun about the state of our state, but the truth is far more complicated than everyone living happily ever after. We have real work to do. The good news is, we know how to get started on making things better for all of us.
Mississippians share more values and principles than not. We care about what happens to our neighbors because that’s just who we are. We want our families to prosper and for our kids to have a better future and more opportunities than we did. But actions speak louder than words, and it seems that Tate Reeves only wants you to believe that he shares those values.
Our state is in desperate need of a leader who sees all of that and governs based on it — someone who brings people together, someone who will acknowledge the problems we face and try to understand the causes of them. We need a governor who has respect for his fellow Mississippian, someone who will lead with honesty and empathy and compassion, and who can make the best decisions for everyone, not just a select few. We need someone who can not only hear people but listen to them. We need someone who will wake up every single morning and get to work on improving this state.
Most of all, we need someone with the guts to stand up and say, “Enough is enough, it’s time to make Mississippi a better place. For everyone.”
We can do better. And if we want our kids and grandkids to have a fighting chance, we’re going to have to.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate
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
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
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.
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.

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.
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