The recently concluded session of the Mississippi Legislature will mostly be remembered for what lawmakers did, not what they failed to do.
On the “did” list was a lot: the largest tax cut in state history; the largest teacher pay raise (at least in dollars not adjusted for inflation) in state history; the adoption of new voting boundaries for congressional and state legislative districts; the allocation of most of the $1.8 billion the state is receiving in coronavirus relief funding; the legalization of medical marijuana.
Some may justifiably question some of these decisions, and time will tell whether any may be regretted. Still, it was a busy three months at the Capitol.
What the Legislature didn’t do, and it’s an inaction that lawmakers may come to regret, is adopt a constitutional amendment to restore the initiative process.
In 2021, citizens lost that power to bypass the Legislature and put proposed laws directly to a vote of the people. That’s when the state Supreme Court ruled on a technicality that the state’s initiative process had become invalid due to the Legislature’s failure to update it when the state lost one of its congressional seats two decades ago. That ruling also threw out the voters’ approval of medical marijuana, but the Legislature fixed that problem this year by creating a state law and a regulating mechanism to give voters generally what they had overwhelmingly said they wanted.
Although many legislators may not like being bypassed, it was assumed that they would restore the initiative process for fear of what might happen to their reelection chances next year if they didn’t. After the court’s decision in 2021, there was even talk that Gov. Tate Reeves, a supporter of the initiative process, might call a special session to get it restored.
So far, though, nothing.
Lawmakers were apparently close to an agreement except for one sticking point. They couldn’t concur on how many signatures of registered voters should be enough to bring an initiative before the voters.
The House wanted to retain the previous threshold, while the Senate wanted to raise the requirement by almost threefold. The House defined the minimum as 12% of actual voters, the Senate as 12% of registered voters.
Although it’s true that you don’t want the threshold so low that the number of initiatives gets out of control, it’s hard to make the case that Mississippi had reached that point under the old law. Over a 30-year period, only 14 petition drives had been able to gather the requisite number of signatures — an average of one every other year.
Whatever the magic number for signatures, it should be based on actual voters, not registered voters. Mississippi has notoriously bloated voter rolls, with some counties, including this one, having more registered voters than they have people of voting age.
If the bloat got worse, the higher the signature requirement would be for initiatives under the Senate’s language. If counties got their act together and cleaned up their rolls, the lower the requirement for signatures.
It would be bad practice to use for a benchmark a database that is so flawed.
