Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo
A full House of Representatives chamber listens as the nominations for Speaker of the House are under way at the Mississippi State Capitol in Jackson, Mississippi, January 2, 2024.
Something is rotten in the state of Mississippi. Republicans in the Mississippi House of Representatives are trying to convince voters that they’re playing fair in their deliberations to revive the ballot measures framework that was unceremoniously shut down three years ago. What they are really trying to do is pull off an elaborate con.
Three years ago, the state’s supreme court junked the state’s initiative law because it stipulated that signatures to put measures on the ballot had to be gathered from all five of the state’s congressional districts, even though Mississippi has had only four since the census of 2000. Rather than simply change the number from five to four in the law, the Republicans have spent three years pondering how to limit voters’ say while pretending to protect it.
Under the House bill passed last week, Mississippi voters would not be able to offer constitutional amendments to approve, modify, or repeal any section of the 1890 state constitution, a significant erosion of people power. They would only be able to vote on questions involving new or existing statutes, and by no means all of those: no laws related to abortion, appropriations from the state treasury, the public employees’ retirement system, right to work, and localities could be subject to voter approval, rejection, or modification.
Ballot measure sponsors of proposals affecting the few remaining areas of law that voters could weigh in on would be required to collect even more signatures. The legislature would also have the option of revising any initiative two years after its passage. The lawmakers are happy to hand ballot measures back to the people as long as they don’t address the state’s most crucial issues and one hand is tied behind their backs.
Hannah Williams of Mississippi Votes stresses that voters are “restless” and “disappointed” with the lack of progress. It’s really a bipartisan conversation,” says the policy director of the statewide civic engagement group, explaining that even conservatives realize that both progressive and conservative measures have been thwarted by legislative inaction. “It seems like there is just a complete disconnect between the people in the same party on the legislative level and the actual civilian level,” she adds.
The Mississippi debate is another component in the carefully calibrated national GOP mission to break apart direct democracy as well as bipartisan alliances by diluting voters’ strength until they are empty vessels in the political process. State legislators expect “the people” to be content with voting without substance (a phenomenon that I analyze in my “Breaking the Ballot” feature).
Mississippi politicians are more likely to sell their plan as “finally, progress!” if few voters understand how it narrows their choices and restricts their power. Unlike neighboring Arkansas, which has had a ballot measure framework for more than a century (and recently certified proposed ballot measures on abortion and the state Freedom of Information Act to move on to a more stringent signature-gathering phase), Mississippi is a relative newcomer to people power. Its process debuted in 1992. Some Republican lawmakers appear to fear their discerning electorate: Of the 76 ballot questions that have been proposed in the past several decades, only eight have made it to the ballot. Of those, voters passed a total of three, all by supermajorities: requirements for voter ID, eminent domain restrictions, and medical marijuana.
The success of the 2020 medical marijuana question (74 percent of voters approved it, the highest of the three measures) sparked the current controversy. In 2021, the state supreme court not only struck down the medical marijuana initiative as unconstitutional, but decided to undo the entire framework until the legislature dealt with the discrepancy in the number of congressional districts. The majority ruled that “[t]o work in today’s reality, [the process] will need amending—something that lies beyond the power of the Supreme Court.”
Mississippi is a relative newcomer to people power. Its process debuted in 1992.
The legislature has dithered over the issue for nearly three years. “It’s about control [and] sore loser politics,” says Gina Berne, a Ballot Initiative Strategy Center senior manager working on direct-democracy issues, “It’s very clear from the issues that are restricted here that there is going to be considerable legislative overreach. If their voters are as aligned with them on abortion or any other issue as they claim them to be, then why not actually have a workable ballot initiative process?”
Given voters’ rejection of abortion bans even in deep-red states, the desire to keep abortion off the ballot is unsurprising. But ballot initiative opponents are going after much more than abortion. Recreational marijuana has been legalized in 24 states, and there are factions in the legislature that are dead set against Mississippi joining that cohort. Red-state voters have also mandated Medicaid expansion when given the chance, so legislative Republicans would prefer not to give voters any say in the matter.
“Abortion is the Trojan horse; it gets us all into our silos, whether Republican or Democrat, and so it muddies the waters,” says Democratic state Rep. Cheikh Taylor, the vice chair of the legislature’s constitution committee that worked on the ballot initiative bill. What House Republicans have done, he says, amounts to “just strip[ping] the entire process and ditch[ing] it for a period of time until you get some restrictions in there that will support your national agenda.”
The 2021 state supreme court ruling also shut down a Medicaid expansion signature drive that had just launched—and the House proposal to curb appropriations from the state treasury has been viewed as one way to prevent Medicaid expansion (states must provide 10 percent of the funding; the federal government pays the rest) from appearing as a ballot measure that they fear would pass, given the abysmal state of the Mississippi health care sector.
The alarming rate of rural hospital closures, combined with country-leading mortality indicators from conditions like diabetes and heart disease and within specific cohorts such as new mothers and infants, may force state lawmakers to set aside their ideological objections and move on some version of expansion before the ballot initiative process gets sorted out. Taylor, who also chairs the state Democratic Party, says that Democrats in the legislature will soon be introducing their own Medicaid expansion plan.
Though the ballot measure restrictions passed easily in the House, that may end up being an empty gesture in the face of continuing Senate opposition. The chamber voted down a similar House plan last year. Delbert Hosemann, the Republican lieutenant governor who also serves as president of the state Senate, opposes the House restrictions and wants a clean ballot measure bill.
Mississippi “is a testing ground for bad bills,” says Taylor. “We are one of the major cornerstones of white supremacy, and though we are not talking about race per se [when considering voters’ right to legislate at the ballot box], the idea that our voice is going be muted by legislators is very disingenuous when we are talking about the ballot initiative process. All we asked for was a clean bill that would have dealt with what the Supreme Court asked us to do: make sure we have the right congressional districts.”
