It’s been a quiet week here in Lake What-the-heck, also known as the Mississippi Capitol.
Most legislators spent the week sitting around waiting to see what remaining bills will emerge from conference committee. Conference committees, made up of three member of each chamber, consider bills that have passed both the House and the Senate, but have had changes adopted in one chamber or the other.
If the committee can agree on the changes, it sends the bill back for another vote. If not, the bill dies.
The deadline for advancing bills out of the conference committees was Thursday.
Probably the most noteworthy bill that had its fate determined in conference committee was House Bill 1083.
HB 1083 will not come up for a vote again after the House members on the conference committee refused to accept changes in the bill passed by the Senate. The bill would have allowed school districts to train teachers and staff to carry firearms in schools, something the Senate added. The Senate version also stripped away part of the original bill that would have allowed folks to carry guns in the college sporting events. This was non-starter for the bill’s author and conference committee chair Andy Gibson, (R, NRA) who seems determined to have Ole Miss and Mississippi State chunked out of the SEC, something that was likely to happen if Ma and Pa Kettle were allowed to pack heat when the Alabama football team comes to town.
In the absence of any actual progress on anything remotely related to the lives on average Mississippians, the House did pass a continuing resolution that calls for a national constitutional convention.
Right-wing groups have been calling for a re-write of the Constitution since 2010, mainly demanding an amendment that would require the federal government to operate under a balanced budget.
That sounds like a great idea until you realize that there’s not a single legislator supporting this measure who actually practices what he preaches in his own home. All of them are in debt, mostly due to home loans. Some of them have car-loans, too, I bet. Adults realize that some debt is good. If not, we’d all be living in rentals. The last time I paid for a house with cash, it came with a little pewter dog and a race car.
Even so, the idea that our Constitution is somehow broken and needs to be fixed remains popular on the right.
There are three different groups advocating for a Constitutional Convention. The House version seems to model the one being shopped around by Citizens for Self-Government, founded in 2012 by Tea Party Patriots founder Mark Meckler. Of the three, it is the broadest, calling not only for a balanced budget but for allowing states to ignore federal laws and Supreme Court rulings they don’t like.
Of course, Mississippi is well-practiced in ignoring federal law and the Supreme Court.
Mississippi is pretty good at ignoring its own laws, too, school funding under MAEP being the most obvious example.
Every year, the legislature passes at least one law that is patently, obviously unconstitutional, then expresses shock and dismay when those laws are laughed out of court.
Maybe our House Republicans are simply sick of getting laughed at. There is a simple remedy for that, of course: Stop doing stupid things.
But that’s asking far too much.
Better to simply rewrite the Constitution to allow the state to do whatever it wants.
Gary Chism (R, Columbus), Jeff Smith (R, Columbus) and Rob Roberson (R, Starkville), voted for the resolution while Kabir Karriem (D, Columbus) voted no.
Compared to secession, another idea that pops up from time to time, making “state’s rights” supreme is the better option, since it would allow Mississippi to do what it wants without forfeiting the federal tax dollars that are about the only thing that prevents our state from being a poor man’s Somalia.
The good news is that the resolution, like the legislature’s promise to fund education, repair our roads or fix our state budget, doesn’t actually mean anything.
It’s just noise.
And during a quiet week in Lake What-the-heck, noise is all we got.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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