Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood was a few minutes late for his appearance at the Columbus Rotary Club Tuesday.
A lifelong resident of Chickasaw County, who as a young attorney worked in Columbus for about a year, is familiar with the roads and backroads of north Mississippi, so he didn’t feel the need to rely on his GPS to make the trek from his office to the Lion Hills Center.
He figured an alternate route would save time. What he didn’t count on was being delayed by not one, but two, road/bridge constructions.
In his brief talk to the Rotarians, Hood explained his travel worries not only to explain his late arrival but to illustrate the frustrations of his job as attorney general.
Some laws ‘waste taxpayer money’
Now in his fourth term as AG, Hood said his office spends far too much time defending the state over ill-advised moves by the legislature and its failure to consult his office before making those moves.
“I just wish they would get some good legal council before they do these things,” Hood said. “It would save our office a lot of time and, more importantly, it would save the people of Mississippi a lot taxpayer money.”
Although he is the only Democrat to hold state-wide office in a state where Republicans dominate the legislature and governor’s office, Hood said his complaints aren’t based on politics.
“Hey, I believe a lot of the things they do,” he said. “But there is something called the supremacy clause that says a state can’t make laws that violate federal law. This isn’t anything new. The supremacy clause has been around a long time. So with a lot of these laws, they have no chance to stand and our office spends a lot of time and money, taxpayer money, defending them. It’s shouldn’t be that way.”
Although Hood initially defended the state in a suit against its religious liberties law passed in this year’s legislature session, he elected not to appeal U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves’ ruling on the matter. Gov. Phil Bryant has chosen to pursue his own appeal.
Likewise, the state’s law requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at hospitals is also likely to wind up a costly failure after similar laws have been struck down, mostly recently in Texas.
“I think a lot of these laws are written because of politics,” Hood said. “But the truth is, we can’t afford to be playing politics with laws that can’t be defended.”
The cost factor is especially critical now, given the state’s declining revenues and its difficulty in balancing the state budget this year.
Hood was a prominent player in that case, too.
“The legislature has a pretty big hole in their budget, and what they tried to do was sweep money from a lot of the state’s trust funds into the general fund to fill that gap and make it look like they had balanced the budget,” Hood said.
Those trust funds are set aside for specific uses with money from fees and taxes. By law, those dollars cannot be transferred to the general fund, Hood said in a June opinion.
“The language is pretty plain,” Hood said. “You can’t do that. But they did anyway, trying to plug that hole. We identified $79 million in trust money that was put in the general fund that should not have been. Plus, there was another $56 million they called a staff error, money lost when the agencies were not allowed to pay each other for services between agencies.
“So, when you really look at it, that’s about a $135 million to $140 million shortfall, at a bare minimum.”
Foster care, mental health
Hood also said the legislature ignored his efforts to make sure the state complied with federal law for foster care and mental health.
“With the foster care ruling, I told them it would cost us $22 million to get into compliance,” he said. “They didn’t do anything, we wound up getting sued and guess what the lawyers’ fees were — $22 million.”
Earlier this month, the federal government sued Mississippi for its failure to provide adequate community-based mental health services.
Hood said that will ultimately cost the state big dollars.
“Georgia has already spent $200 million trying to get into compliance and they had a better system than we do to begin with,” he said. “Everyone knew this was coming. I had been able to hold it off for about three years. But when the state stopped setting aside money for it and then, this year, even cut more from mental health services, the feds had had enough.”
For Hood, those kinds of costly self-inflicted wounds are frustrating.
“It’s kind of like this morning,” he said. “When I was out there stuck on the highway and there are five guys watching one guy striping the road, it’s easy to get frustrated. But I remind myself that you can’t worry about the things you can’t do anything about.
“We ought to be spending our time in things that matter,” he added. “When you talk about economic development, the best things you can do are education and roads. We should be putting our money in pre-K and our roads. Instead, we’re spending our time with all these social political bills that don’t do us any good.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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