John Polk talked to a handful of voters at a veterinary clinic back home a while back, where he learned some things that might be a surprise to voters throughout the state.
It is well known that the patrons of this particular vet clinic in Hattiesburg are the modern equivalent of The Oracle of Delphi, where the answers to all great philosophical questions of the age are revealed.
Thus enlightened, Polk said Mississippians don’t really care that much about the right to amend the state constitution when the legislature is unresponsive to the will of the people. He also said that if people don’t like what the legislators do, they can replace them at the ballot box every four years.
Polk, a Republican state senator from Hattiesburg, made these observations after his unilateral decision to kill a bill that would restore voter initiative after the Mississippi Supreme Court torpedoed that right in 2021.
In Mississippi, a single committee chair, presumably with the blessing of the House Speaker or the Lt. Governor in the Senate, can decide the fate of legislation in such a manner.
In this case, that one man is Polk, chairman of the curiously-named Senate Accountability Efficiency and Transparency Committee.
Mississippians who do care about the right to amend the constitution (80 percent of them in the latest polling) can just go to the ballot box this November and punish Polk for his decision because that’s how representative government works, Polk said.
Really?
Well, there are roughly 1.8 million registered voters in Mississippi. In Polk’s last election when he ran unopposed, 1,785,500 of those voters did not vote for Polk, which is also the number of voters who didn’t see Polk’s name on their ballots. I think a whole lot of Mississippians would vote Polk’s bulbous bee-hind right out of the senate if given the chance.
So, based on the feedback Polk received from a handful of people in a Hattiesburg vet clinic who said their greatest concern at the moment was not the ballot initiative, but getting their dogs to stop throwing up on the rug, the people’s rights are again ignored. On the bright side, we should expect to see some excellent pet-related legislation in the near future.
Yea for representative government.
Two years ago, legislators all over the state, shocked by the justifiable anger that followed the state supreme court’s decision, fell all over themselves to assure the people that the ballot initiative would be quickly restored.
The Northern District Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley was the first to weigh in, urging the governor to immediately call a special session of the legislature to restore the initiative by changing a single word in the initiative language that was the basis of the supreme court’s decision.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann disagreed, calling the push for a special session a “knee-jerk move.” Hoseman preferred to wait to address the matter in the next regular session.
“Out of this you’ll see some organized legislation coming out in January to address all those things,’’ Hosemann said on that day in May 2021.
Yet the 2022 session came and went without action, with Polk holding the legislation in his committee. The 2023 session will come and go as well.
Hosemann told Mississippi Today that he has been very vocal in support for restoring the voter initiative, but it’s odd that Hosemann assigned the legislation to Polk’s committee, given that Polk had killed similar legislation just the year before. Hosemann had to know that Polk was hostile to the legislation, I believe Hosemann sent it there to die, although I do not know why.
If you are thinking this whole affair is a rigged game and that the legislature has no intention of restoring the right for citizens to amend the constitution in a meaningful way, consider this, too.
The legislation that failed to get out of Polk’s committee wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.
Unlike the previous ballot initiative, this legislation only applied to general laws rather than amendments to the state constitution, which can only be modified or removed by another popular vote. Under the new legislation, the legislature could alter or repeal the citizen’s initiative legislation at any time by a simple majority vote.
This bill restores nothing. It’s a sham.
So how hostile is the legislature to the very idea the citizens can bypass an obstinate legislature? Even a bogus ballot initiative couldn’t make it into law.
What to make of this?
There are few things our legislature, in its current form, despises more than the people it represents.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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