Some Mississippians around the state will have the chance to participate in at least three special elections to fill vacancies in the state Legislature — and there could be more in the future. 

Rep. Charles Young, Jr., a Democrat from Meridian, died on December 19, and Rep. Andy Stepp, a Republican from Bruce, died on December 5. Sen. Jenifer Branning, a Republican from Philadelphia, will be sworn into office on January 6 for a seat on the Mississippi Supreme Court. 

Gov. Tate Reeves on Friday announced the special elections to fill Young and Stepp’s seats will take place on March 25, and the qualifying deadline for those two seats will end on February 3. Branning has technically not yet vacated her Senate seat, so Reeves has not set the election date for her seat yet. 

Since the special elections will take place in the spring, this means that the areas will be without representation at the Capitol for much of the 2025 legislative session. 

Municipal elections are also taking place this year, and there could be even more special elections to fill vacant legislative seats. 

Rep. Fred Shanks, a Republican from Brandon, qualified on Thursday to run for mayor of Brandon. Sen. John Horhn, a Democrat from Jackson, has qualified to run for mayor of the capital city. 

If either of the two lawmakers win their bids to lead the metro areas, the governor will also have to set special elections to replace them. Qualifying for municipal offices ends on January 31. 

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

Mississippi’s top legislative leaders on Monday unveiled details of their different plans to cut state taxes and potentially expand Medicaid coverage to the working poor, likely two of the main issues that will be debated at the Capitol over the next three months of the 2025 legislative session. 

Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said he intends to push a proposal through the Senate to trim the state’s income and grocery taxes, while House Speaker Jason White wants to abolish the income tax altogether and slash the grocery tax in half.

Hosemann, the leader of the Senate, at a Monday Stennis Capitol Press Forum proposed immediately lowering the state’s 7% sales tax on grocery items to 5% and trimming the state’s 4% income tax down to 3% over the next four years. 

Mississippi is already phasing in a major income tax cut. After rancorous debate in 2022, lawmakers agreed to a plan that will leave Mississippi with a flat 4% tax on income over $10,000, one of the lowest rates in the nation, by 2026.

Under Hosemann’s proposal, the income tax would be further reduced by .25% over the next four years and leave the state with a flat 3% income tax rate by 2030. 

“I think continuing our elimination of the income tax, I think we can afford to do that over a period of time,” Hosemann said. “And we can still fund our transportation system and our education system.”

White, a Republican from West, said at a Monday press conference in his Capitol office that he wants to phase out the income tax completely over the next eight to 10 years and reduce the grocery tax from 7% to 3.5% over an unspecified number of years. 

“I think it all needs to go, and I think you’ll see legislation from the House that does.” White said of the income tax. “Now, you’ll see legislation that makes it go in an orderly fashion over a period longer than four years.” 

White said state economic growth, which averages 2% to 3% a year when measured over many years, would cover the tax cuts and elimination.

Mississippi has the highest tax on groceries in the nation, at 7%. The state collects the grocery tax along with all other sales taxes, but remits 18.5% back to cities. For many municipalities, the sales tax on groceries is a significant source of revenue. 

Hosemann and White said separately on Monday that their plans to cut the grocery tax would include making municipalities whole. White said a potential way to do that is to allow towns and cities to enact additional sales taxes at the local level. 

Another component of the first-term speaker’s tax plan is ensuring that the Mississippi Department of Transportation has a dedicated revenue stream available to fund new road infrastructure projects, which could include raising the state’s 18.4% gas tax, one of the lowest in the nation. 

Any tax cut plan would go to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves’ desk for approval or rejection. Reeves has previously said his priority is eliminating the income tax, but he generally supports all types of tax cut packages as long as they do not raise any other tax. 

Both want to tackle Medicaid Expansion again

White and Hosemann both said negotiations around Medicaid expansion could be delayed as legislative leaders wait to hear from a new Trump administration-led Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services what changes might be coming down the pike, and whether the agency would approve a work requirement for Medicaid recipients. 

“We’re going to pump the brakes and figure out where a Trump administration is on these issues,” White said. “Anybody that doesn’t want to do that, I think you’re not being honest with where the landscape is.”

Hosemann and Senate Medicaid Chair Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, have both told Mississippi Today they would not consider an expansion plan that didn’t include a work requirement.

Hosemann said Monday that he has already contacted CMS about the prospect of the federal agency approving a work requirement. But “like the army, the sergeant really runs the place,” Hosemann said, meaning the provision’s approval could rest in the hands of the agency’s future administrator.

President-elect Donald Trump has selected Dr. Mehmet Oz, a TV personality and celebrity physician, to be the administrator of CMS. Conservative think tanks and congressional Republicans have floated several potential changes to Medicaid, including slashing funding for the program and introducing federal legislation to bolster or require work requirements. 

White said his caucus would continue to push for expansion despite possible cuts to the program. 

“I just don’t think Congress and the Trump administration is going to go and try to find a way to try to kick 40 state’s people off of coverage for low income workers,” White said.  

As the state continues conversations with CMS and waits for the U.S. Senate to confirm Oz, Hosemann expects the state Senate to introduce a “dummy bill,” or a placeholder containing only code sections required to expand Medicaid without approving specific details. 

White expects the starting point for negotiations between the House and Senate will be a compromise bill both chambers appear to support before the proposal fizzled and died. The compromise proposal would have expanded Medicaid coverage to individuals who make roughly $20,000, or 138% of the federal poverty level, but only if the federal government signed off on a work requirement for recipients. 

Opponents of the work requirement, including legislative Democrats, argue the bureaucracy of requiring monthly or semi-annual proof of employment further strains low-income people already facing a slew of socioeconomic barriers. Gov. Tate Reeves opposes expansion, and any expansion bill in 2025 will likely need the help of the minority party to achieve a veto-proof majority. 

PERS, CON laws, sports betting among issues on table

Hosemann also said he plans to push for legislation that: 

• Addresses chronic absenteeism in public schools 
• Makes the Public Employees Retirement System financially sustainable
• Establishes last dollar tuition free community colleges 

White also said he plans to advocate for bills that: 

• Reform certificate of need laws to state medical centers 
• Improve transparency around pharmacy benefit managers 
• Restore suffrage to people previously convicted of nonviolent felony offenses
• Reinstate Mississippi’s ballot initiative process 
• Legalize mobile sports betting 
• Expands  public education savings accounts for students located in D and F-rated school districts, putting the state’s portion of the students’ education funding into ESAs and allow the parents to use the money for allowable education expenses including private school tuition.

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

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is taking a message to the grieving families of victims in the deadly New Year’s attack in New Orleans: “It takes time. You got to hang on.”

Biden on Monday will visit the city where an Army veteran drove a truck into revelers in the French Quarter, killing 14 and injuring 30 more. It’s likely to be the last time Biden travels to the scene of a horrific crime as president to console families of victims. He has less than two weeks left in office.

It’s a grim task that presidents perform, though not every leader has embraced the role with such intimacy as the 82-year-old Biden, who has experienced a lot of personal tragedy in his own life. His first wife and baby daughter died in a car accident in the early 1970s, and his eldest son, Beau, died of cancer in 2015.

“I’ve been there. There’s nothing you can really say to somebody that’s just had such a tragic loss,” Biden told reporters Sunday in a preview of his visit. “My message is going to be personal if I get to get them alone.”

Biden often takes the opportunity at such bleak occasions to speak behind closed doors with the families, offer up his personal phone number in case people want to talk later on and talk about grief in stark, personal terms.

The Democratic president will continue on to California following his stop in New Orleans. The White House was moving forward with plans for the trip even as a snowstorm was hitting the Washington region.

In New Orleans, the driver plowed into a crowd on the city’s famous Bourbon Street. Fourteen revelers were killed along with the driver. Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who steered his speeding truck around a barricade and plowed into the crowd, later was fatally shot in a firefight with police.

Jabbar, an American citizen from Texas, had posted five videos on his Facebook account in the hours before the attack in which he proclaimed his support for the Islamic State militant group and previewed the violence that he would soon unleash in the French Quarter.

Biden on Sunday pushed back against conspiracy theories surrounding the attack, and he urged New Orleans residents to ignore them.

“I spent literally 17, 18 hours with the intelligence community from the time this happened to establish exactly what happened, to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that New Orleans was the act of a single man who acted alone,” he said. “All this talk about conspiracies with other people, there’s not evidence of that — zero.”

The youngest victim was 18 years old, and the oldest was 63. Most victims were in their 20s. They came from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, New Jersey and Great Britain.

Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican, was asked on Fox News Channel what the city was hoping for from Biden’s visit.

“How can we not feel for both the families of those who die but also those who’ve been injured in their families?” he asked.

“The best thing that the city, the state, and the federal government can do is do their best to make sure that this does not happen again. And what we can do as a people is to make sure that we don’t live our lives in fear or in terror — but live our lives bravely and with liberty, and then support those families however they need support.”

Associated Press writer Fatima Hussein contributed to this report.

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