The Mississippi legislative session ended Wednesday not with a bang, but with a whimper, to borrow a line from T.S. Elliott.
The gavel came down about mid-day and the 174 legislators made for the door like a scoundrel running out on his bar tab.
There will be popular sentiment suggesting that this year’s session was yet another failure. The two biggest issues facing the legislature this year (and the year before that and the year before that) were road/bridge infrastructure repair and education funding.
For the third straight year, nothing came of it.
In January, the Mississippi Legislature, aka Charlie Brown, will convene again, brimming with confidence that they will pass laws to take care of these issues. We all know how that turns out. We’ve seen the cartoons already.
But to call this session a failure is to view it from the wrong perspective.
In one sense, the legislature succeeded. It didn’t make the situation worse.
The House killed the Senate’s grievously insufficient and dubiously-funded infrastructure bill, dubbed by the bill’s champion, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, as the BRIDGE Act.
But the BRIDGE Act turned out to be as rickety as the actual bridges it proposed to repair. It provided less than a quarter of the funds needed to put the state’s road and bridges in good condition and relied on a revenue surplus for much of that money, something that hasn’t happened in years.
The House killed it with no small amount of enthusiasm. Yeah, House!
In the tit-for-tat world of the current legislature, the Senate got its licks in, too.
The House sent over its education funding bill for House approval.
In a brilliant piece of legislative footwork, Sen. Hob Bryan (D, Amory) managed to drive a stake into the heart of that bill with the aid of eight Republican insurgents.
That’s good news, too. The new version of ed funding provided far less money for schools than the current formula, which will limp along grossly underfunded as it always does.
There were other things the legislature didn’t do that should be considered a victory, too.
A school voucher bill that would allow parents to use tax dollars to send their kids to private schools failed. It was a disappointment to Gov. Phil Bryant, who supports “School Choice,” i.e,. white folks choosing not to send their kids to schools with black children.
A bill that would allow guns in sports venues, as well as providing public school teachers the ability to carry weapons, also failed.
The bill, like all gun bills, was sponsored by Rep. Andy Gibson, (R, Braxton). No surprise there. If there is a gun bill circulating around the legislature, it has Gibson’s fingerprints all over it.
I’m not sure what’s up with Gibson where these endless string of gun laws are concerned. I suspect his parents never let him play Cowboys & Indians when he was a kid. He’s compensating for that, I bet.
Of more local interest Rep. Jeff Smith and Rep. Gary Chism, both of Columbus, rolled a live hand grenade into Lowndes County’s economy by refusing to pass a bill that would have extended the county’s 2-percent restaurant tax. That move wipes out more than $2 million in revenue used to generate more than $100 million a year in tourism. The effects of that will be felt through the entire economy.
But there’s even an upside to that, too. You won’t have any trouble finding a hotel room or a good table in Columbus from now on.
When you look at it that way, this year’s session was anything but a failure.
There were a whole lot of things the legislature didn’t make worse.
And in Mississippi, that’s a success story.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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