The Issues Mississippi Lawmakers Hope to Address in 2025

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Jackson, MS (Mississippi Free Press)

Black Mississippians' votes do not count as much in white-majority districts. In-vitro fertilization is not protected under Mississippi law. Elementary and secondary reading scores are improving, but math scores are falling behind. Mississippians still do not have access to Medicaid expansion. And the state still has an income tax and a tax on groceries.

As lawmakers begin the 2025 legislative session, here's a rundown of the issues legislators and other state leaders want to address.

Mississippi could eliminate the state income tax, reduce taxes on groceries and add a fuel tax over the next decade under House Bill 1, the "Build Up Mississippi Act," which could affect $1 billion in revenue based on data from the Mississippi Department of Revenue's annual report for fiscal year 2023.

"We will Build Up Mississippi by eliminating the income tax to further our state's competitive advantage and award our workforce," House Speaker Rep. Jason White, R-West, said in a press release on Jan. 10. "We will build up Mississippi by cutting the grocery tax in half to boost the pocketbook of Mississippians."

The House Ways and Means Committee passed the bill on Jan. 14. If the bill passes through both chambers and earns Gov. Tate Reeves' signature, it would reduce the income-tax rate from 4% to 3% this year and lower the rate by 0.3% each year for 10 years until the tax is gone.

Mississippi's 7% tax on groceries would fall to 2.5% by 2036. The city that collected the tax and the state currently split the revenue from the 7% sales tax, where the city gets 18.5% of the revenue and the state gets the rest. Under H.B. 1, the state budget would garner all funds from the sales tax to make up the difference lost under the lower sales tax rate. It offers an additional 1.5% local sales tax that cities and counties would have to vote to opt out of.

H.B. 1 also adds a 5% gasoline sales tax, with expected yearly revenues of $400 million that would help fund the Mississippi Department of Transportation's road and bridge infrastructure budget.

The bill would lower taxes by $2.2 billion and add another $1.1 billion in taxes to make up for lost revenue at the city and county levels.

In the other chamber, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said the Senate would bring up legislation to reduce the 4% income tax to by .25% each year for four years until the rate is 3% in 2030 and lower the grocery sales tax from 7% to 5% this year.

The Senate, Hosemann said, would continue to work toward eliminating the state's income tax bit by bit.

"The way you do that is the same way we've been doing it: Gradual, conservative fiscal policy is key towards maintaining education and everything else we have to do in this state," he said.

The Mississippi Legislature must redraw its House and Senate district maps this year to include more Black-majority districts after the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi's Northern District ruled that Black voters do not have equal participation in the voting process.

The Legislature must add two more Black-majority districts for the House of Representatives and one more for the Senate. The districts will be areas around Desoto County and the City of Hattiesburg as well as a district that includes Chickasaw and Monroe counties.

"The numbers and the population justifies a redistricting, not to mention that the Constitution requires it," Senate Judiciary A Chairman Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, told the Mississippi Free Press on Jan. 3.

Democratic Party Chair Cheikh Taylor, D-Starkville, said he expected up to 15 special elections to occur after the legislature adds new districts.

"We need to be very intensive about how these lines are drawn and also having candidates that are ready, that are poised and step up to the plate so we can have a great session moving forward," he told the Mississippi Free Press on Jan. 2.

After efforts to expand Medicaid coverage for working Mississippians failed in the 2024 Legislative session, some lawmakers are working to hopefully push the issue to the finish line this year.

At the end of last year's session, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said Medicaid expansion with a work requirement will only happen in Mississippi if Donald Trump won the presidential election because his administration would be more likely to approve a work requirement than President Joe Biden's, which has declined other state's Medicaid expansion plans that included work requirements..

At the Stennis Press Forum on Jan. 6, Hosemann told the press that Mississippi has already reached out to the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services to ensure that their plans would work for the incoming Trump administration.

"So we reached out once already. We're waiting on the approval of Dr. Oz and others to be certified by the Senate. And we started the initial consultations about that," the lieutenant governor said on Jan. 6 at the Stennis Press Forum at Hal and Mal's in Jackson, Miss. In principle, Hosemann once again backed the concept of expansion for Mississippi. "Working people that don't have access to healthcare should have access to healthcare," he said.

Democratic Party Chairman Cheikh Taylor, D-Starkville, said he hopes lawmakers will remove the work requirement from the Medicaid expansion bill or put the work requirement in as a trigger that lawmakers could remove in the future. He said he wants clarity about how the work requirement would function, especially for potential Medicaid recipients who are of retirement age and no longer work.

"Eighty percent of Mississippians say they want Medicaid expansion, so this is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue: this is a Mississippians issue and we need to give them the best product and service that we can," he said.

Under the ballot-initiative system, Mississippians could put issues on the ballot to vote on, bypassing the Legislature. Through the 1992 Constitution Amendment that created the initiative as a right, a person or organization had to gather a certain number of signatures from each of the state's five congressional districts.

But Mississippi lost a congressional district after the 2000 census. For about two decades afterward, secretaries of state, including current Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson, interpreted the law to be valid as long as petitioners garnered signatures from each of the former five congressional districts as the lines existed before the 2000 redistricting.

However, the Mississippi Supreme Court did not address the issue until 2021 after the City of Madison, Miss., filed a lawsuit against Initiative 65, which was a ballot initiative that a majority of voters adopted in 2020 to legalize medical cannabis. In a 6-3 vote, the Court ruled that Initiative 65 was invalid because the state does not have five congressional districts and thus nullified the ballot-initiative system entirely.

Lawmakers have unsuccessfully brought up bills to restore the ballot initiative in the past three legislative sessions.

"Just to be honest about it, I haven't seen a movement to resurface that and bring it to the forefront," Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said on Jan. 6 at the Stennis Press Forum at Hal and Mal's in Jackson, Miss. "(Now,) things change during the session. I expect we'll have a ballot-initiative bill. I have to go look at the votes again -- we didn't have the votes last time, and we need to go count again, but right now it's gonna be difficult."

Rep. Cheikh Taylor, who serves as the vice chairman of the House Constitution Committee, said he was confident a ballot-initiative bill would pass through his committee.

Past efforts to revive the ballot-initiative system included restrictions, such as barring voters from using it to change the state's near-total abortion ban.

Mississippi is one of 13 states that has a lifetime voting ban for people convicted of disenfranchising crimes that bars them from voting for life whether they are actively in prison or have completed their sentences.

Mississippians convicted of any of the following 23 crimes are banned from voting for life, even after incarceration: voter fraud, rape, statutory rape, murder, bribery, theft, carjacking, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, forgery, embezzlement, bigamy, armed robbery, extortion, larceny, felony bad check, felony shoplifting, receiving stolen goods, robbery, timber larceny, motor vehicle theft, and larceny under lease or rental agreement.

Mississippi House Rep. Kabir Karriem, D-Columbus, wants to change Mississippi's felony-disenfranchisement law, which dates back to the Jim Crow-era when white supremacist lawmakers wanted to limit Black voting power. He led efforts in the 2024 legislative session to pass a bill that would restore voting rights for formerly incarcerated people convicted of nonviolent crimes and expunge their records. The House passed the bill, but it died in the Senate Constitution and Judiciary B committees. He said at an Aug. 27, 2024, Right to Restore panel in Jackson, Miss., that he hoped to bring the bill back this session.

Rep. Cheikh Taylor said his party does not want to do any "additional damage" to the law that is already on the books.

"If there are (23) felonies that require you to lose your voting rights, we don't want to expand that list at all," he said. "We want to make sure that people get a chance to vote in the State of Mississippi. We have a president with 34 felonies, and so it just seems very hypocritical not to let hard-working Mississippians who paid their debt to society vote."

Mississippi Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, said the Senate would continue to hash out a plan to address youth court intake issues outlined in a Mississippi Youth Court Commission task force report. The issues cited in that report include funding, lack of staffing and a lack of private or public residential adolescent mental-health facilities

The Legislature must address youth court intake, staffing, training and support to have "consistency across the state," Wiggins told the Mississippi Free Press on Jan. 3.

Some Mississippi districts do not have county courts to handle youth court cases. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann shared two ways those districts could handle cases. The first, and less expensive option, he said, is to appoint chancellors in the districts without county courts to approve adoptions.

Chancellors are judges in chancery courts that voters in each district elect. Chancellors can appoint youth court referees to hear cases of abuse, neglect and delinquencies in counties that do not have county courts. However, only the chancery court can handle adoptions, name changes and parental rights. Some counties may need the legislature to appoint additional chancellors to handle adoptions and other chancery court matters. County courts can only handle civil lawsuits and certain youth court matters.

The second option Hosemann mentioned is to add youth court judges in the districts that don't have judges, which is more expensive because a youth court judge's salary is $165,000 and a judge comes with a secretary and a bailiff that the districts would also have to pay.

"And my inclination is to look at the chancellor system. Because (the process is) seamless. From the first day that they're there. You take the child away from a parent, which is very difficult to do, and hopefully doesn't have to be done, (from that) all the way through the adoption process," Hosemann said.

Wiggins said Mississippi should give raises to and work on recruiting additional court reporters. He said he has been talking with the Court Reporters' Association about the best way to handle improvements.

"You can't have court if you don't have court reporters," he said.

Wiggins also said he expects legislation to improve Child Protective Services will come up this session.

At least 16 states have laws that require officials who investigate unidentified remains and missing persons and to log the information into the National Missing And Unidentified Persons System, NamUs. Sen. Brice Wiggins wants Mississippi to be the 17th state with a law requiring law-enforcement officials and county coroners to turn over information to NAMUS.

Mississippi does not have a way to prevent a person or organization from putting unidentified human remains in private collections since no law names a jurisdiction for unidentified human remains. Wiggins said he wants to pass a bill that would give jurisdiction for unidentified human remains to the county medical examiner and the Mississippi Department of Safety to submit to NamUs.

"There's a history, unfortunately, in this state and in other states of coroners and other medical examiners taking that and using them in private collections," he said.

Last year, the senator unsuccessfully introduced a bill to address the issue, but it died in the House after the Senate passed it.

After the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last year that in-vitro, unimplanted embryos have personhood and legal protections, some Alabama IVF fertility clinics shut down in fear of civil and criminal liability. During the 2024 Mississippi legislative session, some Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Mississippi worked on legislation to protect in-vitro fertilization access.

Last year, the Legislature passed and Gov. Tate Reeves signed a bill into law that gives inheritance rights to children conceived through assisted reproductive technology after one of their parents died. An earlier version of the bill included amendments to protect assisted reproductive technology and surrogacy but Rep. Dana McLean, R-Columbus, said at the time that legislators scrapped that section after physicians raised concerns.

No law is on the books to protect Mississippians' access to assisted reproductive technology, including in-vitro fertilization, or address surrogacy. Sen. Brice Wiggins said he hopes to change that this year.

"The bill that passed (last year) was dealing with estate and hereditary matters, but I'm interested in us looking at and picking up where we left off on protecting IVF," he said.

Education in Mississippi public schools is drastically improving. The Mississippi Department of Education must update its 2016 school-accountability model, including continuing technical education, after more than 65% of state school districts achieved a B rating or higher on the school's accountability rating system.

Mississippi House Universities and Colleges committee Chairman Rep. Donnie Scoggin, R-Ellisville, said he is working on a plan to cut state spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in public colleges and universities. He said he does not know how the funding plan would look yet and he has not decided whether the schools would have to fund those programs or if the state would chip in a little.

"We're trying to come up with a way that's workable so they're not spending as much state-supported money and actually can still do whatever they need to do to maintain the quality and equity in the students," he told the Mississippi Free Press on Jan. 2.

One thing that looks unlikely to return from previous sessions is the Legislature's attempts to create a regional authority for the Jackson water system, leaving ultimate control of the once-collapsed system in the hands of federal courts. Jackson's water system is currently in the care of Ted Henifin and JXN Water, the interim managers, under the oversight of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi Judge Henry Wingate.

In two consecutive years, Sen. David Parker, R-Olive Branch, has presented bills that would transition the control of the Jackson water system to a regional board after the federal court steps away. That board would primarily consist of appointees chosen by state officials -- a sore point that Jackson legislators have insisted would effectively rob the city of its own utility.

The first attempt at a regional plan ran into vociferous opposition from Henifin, who identified a risk that the enormous funding from the federal government could potentially flow out of Jackson if the bill had passed. But a modified plan in the 2024 session received his endorsement.

Still, Jackson legislators remain suspicious of future attempts at an end-run around the federal court and the return of authority to the City of Jackson.

"It would have been (filled) with state-appointed individuals, which may or may not have a vested interest in seeing the city maintain control of the system at some point in time," Rep. Zakiya Summers, D-Jackson, told the Mississippi Free Press on Jan. 3.

Lt. Gov. Hosemann, whose office was deeply involved in the crafting of the original bill, told the Mississippi Free Press that he expected the federal court to handle the transition and that he did not expect the Legislature to make a serious attempt at another regionalization bill for the time being.

"Going forward, hearing Judge Wingate's rulings against the mayor and others, my thought is he will establish his own vehicle for the water system, that will be a balanced (organization) that reflects Jackson residents and economic viability going forward," Hosemann said.

This story is provided as a service of the Institute for Nonprofit News’ On the Ground news wire. The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) is a network of more than 475 independent, nonprofit newsrooms serving communities throughout the US, Canada, and globally. On the Ground is a service of INN, which aggregates the best of its members’ elections and political content, and provides it free for republication. Read more about INN here: https://inn.org/.

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