Dealing in the House of Representatives
by Wyatt Emmerich
Apparently nobody told Billy McCoy that the Republicans won in Mississippi in November.
In a decisive vote, Mississippians elected a Republican governor and lieutenant governor. The Democrats lost fair and
square.
The Republicans have a clear agenda, but big chunks of it are getting killed in the Mississippi House of Representatives.McCoy, the new speaker, is beholden to the black caucus and other powerful groups that put him in office. As a result, voter
ID, tort reform and Medicaid reform are dead on arrival.
If that were not enough to give our new governor heartburn, McCoy has pushed through rule changes that are a throwback
to another era of backroom deal making. The new requirement for bypassing a committee is two-thirds. It used to be a
simple majority.
This means McCoy’s hand-picked committee chairmen can rule like barons over their legislative domains. Not even a
majority of the legislators can overrule a committee chairman.
A perfect example of this is tort lawyer Ed Blackmon, who has made millions off our state’s out-of-control legal system.
Having Blackmon in charge of tort reform is . . . excuse me...I can’t type when I’m laughing this hard.
Few Democratic legislators want to go anywhere near tort reform. If they vote against tort reform, many of their constituents
will be riled. If they vote for tort reform, boss McCoy will not look favorably upon them.
So it’s best for McCoy and his Democrats to just let everything die quietly in committee.
Obviously, McCoy has cut a lot of deals to gain the speakership. Politics, like the making of sausage, isn’t pretty to watch.
Special interest groups can often beat out the general will.
In the wake of an increasingly Republican Mississippi, McCoy appears as an Appalachian populist hiccup. His skepticism
about corporate America is understandable, but I’m not sure it’s going to bring many jobs to our state.
The voters spoke clearly last November. They want genuine tort reform. They want jobs. They’re tired of never-ending
government growth. Barbour won, Musgrove lost.
So who elected McCoy governor?
Some would argue it’s a flaw in our state constitution. A handful of hill country voters led by McCoy are nullifying the
will of the majority. Others may argue the will of the majority is not always a good thing.
How can Mississippi be suffering from political schizophrenia? Why do we have a liberal House and a conservative Senate
and Governor? After all, McCoy’s got to be elected by the legislators, who are, in turn, elected.
In a word — redistricting. Unlike many states where redistricting is managed by an independent board, the House makes
its own districts. You would not believe the squiggles and serpentine shapes keeping the Democrats in control of the House.
It’s a high stakes gamble for the Rienzi worm farmer. Tim Ford knew his limits and compromised. Haley Barbour is a
shrewd political operative. McCoy’s effort to thwart Barbour’s agenda could blow up in his face. The Senate changed quickly.
It may take the House a little longer because of its size, but a political coup in the House could be closer than it appears
in McCoy’s rearview mirror.
Mississippi does a terrible job of tracking criminals. In fact, the state has no statewide database to track criminals from
the patrol car through the court system and then all the way through the penal system.
In recent years, the legislature created the Mississippi Criminal Information Center (CIC), but it only includes arrest
records of those counties bothering to voluntarily send in the information.
The CIC has no data on who’s out on bond, who’s been convicted in the court system, who’s in prison, who’s out on parole.
The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
Jackson real estate developer Clint Herring, as chairman of Jackson’s Safe City Initiative, is attempting to change that.
Herring has teamed up with State Senator Richard White to introduce Senate Bill 2950. If it passes, it will transform crime
fighting in Mississippi. Criminals will be tracked through every level of the criminal justice system using fingerprints and
retinal scans.
We can spend millions on more police, but unless we can track the criminals with an integrated statewide computer network,
it will be money down the drain.
Jackson’s never-ending bonding fiasco is a case in point. Murders are committed by thugs who keep bonding out again and
again for a few hundred bucks.
There is a law to prevent this from happening, but the clerks who handle the bonds are clueless about who these thugs are.
So the law goes unenforced. DBJ
(Wyatt Emmerich is president and owner of Emmerich Newspapers. He is also the Publisher of the Northside Sun in Jackson.)
