The Mississippi House of Representatives passed a constitutional amendment Wednesday that would restore the ballot-initiative process that the state's conservative-dominated Supreme Court obliterated in 2021. However, the amendment would implement a process far more limited than the previous one, and it would still bar any measures that would undo the state's near-total ban on abortion.
This restriction, which was also part of an unsuccessful measure last year, is one of many contained in the amendment. Other subjects, including Mississippi's anti-labor "right to work" laws, would also not be subject to repeal or alteration.
The amendment also allows no more than three initiatives to appear on the same ballot. The legislature would also be able to place alternative proposals before voters for any initiative that does qualify. If both pass, the version with the most votes would go into effect.
And while the House amendment would nominally bar lawmakers from altering voter-approved statutes until they'd been in place for at least two years, that limitation wouldn't apply "if the Legislature determines the existence of an emergency affecting the public peace, health, safety or financial solvency of the state."
What the plan would not do, though, is give citizens back their power to place constitutional amendments on the ballot, a power the legislature still reserves for itself. Citizens had the ability to do so until 2021, which was one of the few tools progressives had to pass policies in this Republican-controlled state. Therefore, it would likely be impossible to end gerrymandering or the state's lifetime ban for voters convicted of certain felonies, which is a relic of Mississippi's 1890 Jim Crow constitution.
It remains to be seen, though, if voters will get the chance to place anything on future ballots at all. The state Senate failed to reach an agreement with the House in both 2022 and 2023, and the upper chamber's leader signaled earlier this month that he wasn't excited about this House proposal.
"To me, it seems like if we’re going to do a ballot initiative that had enough people sign onto it and they really thought the Legislature was not doing their job, then you ought to have a pretty clean ballot initiative," GOP Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said on Jan. 9. "If we’re doing one and you can’t do a ballot [initiative] on any of these things, then why are you doing it at all?" Mississippi Today says that April 2 is the deadline for a Senate committee to advance the House plan.
The state’s highest court, as we wrote in 2021, decreed that the ballot-initiative rules adopted in the 1990s requiring organizers to gather signatures from each of the state's five congressional districts had become impossible to comply with because the state lost a congressional district in the 2000 round of reapportionment. This decision not only made it impossible for any future ballot measures to qualify under the current rules, but also invalidated a 2020 initiative that voters had passed to legalize medical marijuana.
The House's new plan requires signatures from about 166,000 voters (a figure that represents 8% of the number of registered voters in the most recent election for governor) spread out evenly across however many congressional districts there are. This requirement could shift, though, as the Senate last year insisted on a higher number of signatures. State Rep. Fred Shanks, who introduced the new amendment, implored his colleagues to pass legislation they could use as a starting point for renewed negotiations, arguing, "We are just trying to get a vehicle to the Senate."
One thing that doesn't seem to be up for negotiation, though, is the rule that would keep abortion rights off the ballot. Shanks pointed out that the state's 2018 House-authored law ultimately led the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down Roe v. Wade four years later in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision. "It was no one else," he bragged, according to the Associated Press. "It was us. And I just don’t think we want to be messing with it." He also insisted his chamber wouldn't pass an amendment to restore citizen-initiated measures unless the abortion-related restriction remains intact.
State Rep. Cheikh Taylor, who chairs the state Democratic Party, unsurprisingly sees things differently. "Don’t let anyone tell you this is just about abortion," Taylor responded. "This is about a Republican Party who thinks they know what’s best for you better than you know what’s best for you. This is about control."
The House ultimately cleared the bill 80-39, which is exactly the two-thirds supermajority it needed to move forward. Every Republican but one voted in the affirmative, while just a single Democrat broke from their caucus to support the plan.
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