Mississippi has the looks of a consultant authorities.
Legislators — 52 senators and 122 representatives — from all elements of the state are chosen to enact laws throughout a three-month session that begins every January. We’ve got a governor chosen by the vote of all Mississippians. Judges are chosen by well-liked vote in what are, on the floor at the least, nonpartisan elections.
But for all the trimmings of consultant authorities, it’s a farce, an phantasm.
Our state is and at all times has been ruled by just a few highly effective males and maybe essentially the most highly effective of all of them is the one who sits within the Home Speaker’s seat. Proper now, that man is Philip Gunn of Clinton. There’s nearly no laws handed into regulation that doesn’t have his consent.
It is a rigged recreation lengthy earlier than the legislature convenes in January.
Does this look like a cynical view?
Not after Friday when the Mississippi Ethics Fee, the physique entrusted with ensuring public enterprise is carried out brazenly, dominated that the legislature is just not topic to the state’s open conferences regulation.
For nearly 50 years, the Ethics Fee has held native governments to the necessities of the 1975 Open Conferences Act.
Its existence provides the general public — and media — an avenue to problem elected officers who obfuscate public enterprise.
Repeatedly, the Ethics Fee has dominated that native governments can not meet secretly to debate or approve coverage issues and that any time a quorum is established that these conferences have to be held publicly.
For many who should still undergo from the delusion of a consultant state authorities, Friday’s ruling is a shocker.
The Ethics Fee ruling was a response to a Open Conferences Act grievance filed by the Mississippi Free Press, which argued that it was unlawfully denied entry to a gathering by the Home Republican Caucus. Of the 122-member Home, 77 are Republicans. By assembly, the Republican Caucus established a quorum — 61 members — and its assembly ought to have been open to the general public and the media.
Home Republicans, most notably Gunn, argued the caucus was not a gathering of the Home legislature, however a celebration assembly. However the nature of what goes on within the caucus, as reported by Mississippi Right this moment via interviews with caucus members, demonstrates that these conferences are the place the script for the upcoming legislative session is written. What occurs within the Home chamber is little greater than studying the traces. Caucus members who’ve questions in regards to the legislative agenda established by Gunn are directed to talk privately to committee chairmen, Gunn’s high lieutenants.
Ethics Fee director Tom Hood really helpful the fee rule in favor of the Mississippi Free Press, writing, “It’s important to the basic philosophy of the American constitutional type of consultant authorities and to the upkeep of a democratic society that public enterprise undertaken by a quorum of the Home of Representatives be carried out in an open and public method. The formation and dedication of public coverage by a quorum of the Home is public enterprise and have to be carried out at open conferences.”
The Fee, whose members are appointed by the Governor, Lt. Governor, Home Speaker and Chief Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court docket, rejected Hood’s advice by a 5-3 vote.
The fee has but to supply a written report on its choice, however the psychological gymnastics wanted to justify the choice figures to be a doozy.
For the sake of brevity, the fee may simply situation a three-word assertion that cuts to the guts of the matter:
“Enterprise as common.”
— Columbus Dispatch, Dec. 6