Ballot initiatives, disenfranchisement, mobile sports betting deaths’ laid on Senate’s hands

• Disagreements over funding for local projects and the state budget led to a stalemate between the Mississippi House and Senate.
• Major legislative priorities, including Medicaid expansion, ballot initiatives, and voting rights restoration, failed to pass.
• School choice proposals and mobile sports betting legislation also faced defeat in the Senate.
• The focus on tax cuts and retirement reforms overshadowed other important issues.

As the sun set on the 2025 legislative session, by Thursday, it ended pretty much in stalemate between the Mississippi House of Representatives and the Senate.

That stall of the legislative process came mostly over disagreements over a local projects funding bill, a $200-to-$400-million bill to fund project requests all over Mississippi, and the state’s $7 billion budget, which died by a legislative deadline after lawmakers could not agree on a final budget proposal and died again when lawmakers couldn’t agree to revive the budget.

Those issues also appeared to arise from beefs developed during other debates such as income tax elimination, grocery sales tax cuts, gas tax increases and state retirement reforms. As a result, several other major priorities for the year died either once or repeatedly throughout the session.

“Republicans had a lot of big issues this session, and that took their attention,” said Spence Flatgard, chairman of Ballot Access Mississippi, a statewide nonprofit advocacy group and someone who has been observing the Legislature for decades. “There are things that matter to people, but it’s not a lot of people’s No. 1 issue. I think the reason that (issues such as ballot initiatives) didn’t move (as easily) is taxes and big picture stuff, priority list things.”

Tax cut finale: Mississippi governor signs income tax elimination bill. How are you affected?

Because of those financial issues not getting solved, and huge tax cut debate this session, the fact of the session is that other than sweeping changes to the state’s tax structure and changes to the retirement system, not a whole lot of major legislative big to-dos got done.

“I think the priority this year was the elimination on personal income tax, because, for some reason, our state leaders wanted the elimination of personal income tax,” said Derrick Simmons, Senate minority leader. “Also, what we saw was the really big national issues (with President Donald J. Trump) like DEI, our state leaders just got caught up in that.”

Several big issues laid out by House Speaker Jason White, R-West, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, in January just didn’t happen this year. Among them Medicaid expansion, restoring ballot initiatives to the people, restoring voting rights to certain nonviolent felony holders, education reforms such as expanding school choice and legalizing mobile sports betting.

One of the reasons for those bills’ death could have been, according to Simmons, due to more hot-button issues, such as tax cuts and PERS reforms, becoming as controversial as they did throughout the session and that allowed other issues to fall through.

Simmons also said that because of the conservative nature of the top two issues of the session, Democrats were largely left out of the big discussions between House and Senate leadership, leaving roughly a third of the Legislature in the dark as the supermajority pushed some legislative priorities forward and left others behind.

“Democratic leadership has not been at the table for the priorities of Republican leadership,” Simmons said.

That sentiment was shared by House Minority Leader Robert Johnson, D-Natchez, in a March press conference when he noted how House leadership was essentially ignoring concerns from the Democratic caucus regarding tax cuts.

“Nobody has talked to us,” Johnson said during the February press conference in the Mississippi State Capitol. “Nobody wants to hear what we have to say about it. We (Democrats) represent 40% to 50% of the state of Mississippi, and nobody has said a word about how (tax cuts) will impact your community (and) what can we do to help.”

Below is how those bills died:

Ballot initiatives, disenfranchisement die

PERS reforms: New retirement benefits incoming for MS employees. See how you are affected

Early in the session, both ballot initiatives and disenfranchisement died in the House chamber after passing out of committee.

Both ideas were heavily pushed for by House leadership in the 2024 session, with several proposals being advanced to the Senate before dying either in a committee or were left to die on the Senate calendar.

Simmons said this year he believed a serious effort was in underway in both chambers to address those issues, but because a few key lawmakers opposed those ideas, as well as energies spent elsewhere on the tax cut, they just didn’t make it.

Flatgard, in talking about ballot initiatives, said it is likely legislative efforts were saved for larger debates. Simultaneously, Flatgard said that a few key senators opposition to it killed ballot initiative legislation.

“I know a lot of things were collateral damage, but even without the tax deal, I just think there’s some senators that aren’t there yet (on ballot initiatives).”

This would be the second year that disenfranchisement had become a priority for the House but died by legislative deadlines. It’s the fourth year in a row that restoration of the ballot initiative will die in the Legislature.

Up until 2020, the state had a ballot initiative process. That changed when a group led by long-time Madison Mayor Mary Hawkins-Butler sought to challenge Initiative 65, which legalized marijuana, and the entire initiative process in court. The law, they argued, was outdated because it required signatures to come in equal proportion from the state’s “five” congressional districts. The state had dropped to four congressional districts in 2001.

Disenfranchisement has its roots deep in the soil of Jim Crow South. During the 1890 constitutional convention in Mississippi, the practice was adopted to prevent Black voters from reaching the polls, according to Clarion Ledger records and reporting.

At the time of the bills’ deaths, House Constitution Chairman Price Wallace, R-Mendenhall, said he let both bills die because of a lack of interest in the Senate.

Medicaid expansion falls flat in 2025 session

Throughout the 2025 session, both the House and Senate kept a “dummy bill” alive that had the ability to expand Medicaid should the opportunity have presented itself.

The prerequisites for that were decisions made by Congress and Republican President Donald Trump regarding federal spending cuts and Medicaid funding. Even though the federal government has begun making massive cuts to federal spending, the Medicaid program and its federal-to-state Medicaid funding structure have remained largely untouched.

Meanwhile in the Legislature, the Medicaid dummy bills died by a legislative deadline as the tax cut debate became the big issue of the session.

“Off the heels of the 2024 regular session, the very first piece of legislation that we would have wanted to see on the Senate side and the House side was to pass both chambers with a Medicaid expansion, but it was not,” Simmons said.

School choice flops in 2025 session

While tax cuts and retirement reforms were the big attraction this session, school choice and education reforms were a major contender for the spotlight as lawmakers moved past the first few legislative deadlines.

By March, approximately five separate proposals to reform education policies in Mississippi had died in the Senate after passing the House. For that, the House killed several Senate education priorities as well.

The most notable of those proposals were several bills seeking to expand school choice, a loaded term for expanding education options for parents’ children through various methods, including funneling public dollars to private schools.

School choice dies: MS House Speaker says school choice bill doesn’t have consensus among House GOP. See why

When all was said and done, House Speaker Jason White said the Legislature might not have been ready to broach full school-choice expansion, but he will continue pushing the idea to give parents more options for their children’s educations.

“We have shown here in the House and last year and this year, a measured approach at looking at ways to move the ball down the field that the average Mississippian feels in their everyday life, and school choice, whether anybody in this Capitol likes it, is coming,” White said at the time.

Examples of those bills that failed were ones to allow students to spend state education dollars on private schools in failing school districts, increasing tax-incentive programs that allow people to donate money to private schools in exchange for a tax break and a bill just to allow students to more easily move between school districts.

Mobile sports betting dies several times

A bill that would have allowed mobile sports betting died in several versions that were sent from the House to the Senate, where they were killed by legislative deadlines.

This is the second year in a row the House sent a proposal over to the Senate to allow people to bet on sports using mobile devices, such as smartphones. Currently, players can only bet on their phones while at physical casinos.

The idea has been pegged by proponents to be both a method to curb some illegal mobile sports betting taking place in Mississippi while also generating more than $50 million in new state revenue via lottery taxes.

Much of the reason given for the Senate’s hesitance to consider mobile sports betting has been laid on the state’s casino operators. According to Senate Gaming Chairman David Blount, D-Jackson, about half of the state’s casinos have opposed mobile sports betting on the grounds it could drive away their business.

Grant McLaughlin covers the Legislature and state government for the Clarion Ledger. He can be reached at gmclaughlin@gannett.com or 972-571-2335.