The AFP state director writes that the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Open App Markets Act are the two most sweeping, dangerous antitrust bills introduced in Congress.
Our mission at Americans for Prosperity (AFP) Mississippi is to help everyday citizens realize their full potential and contribute to society in a meaningful and unique way. We push for all Mississippians to gain the tools, skills, and freedoms necessary to achieve their goals on their own terms without the burden of heavy regulations and government interference. The recent efforts by some lawmakers to dismantle America’s most successful tech firms is one example of unwanted government intrusion that threatens AFP’s mission and the prosperity of Mississippi and its people.
The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) and the Open App Markets Act (OAMA) are the two most sweeping and dangerous antitrust bills introduced in Congress to date. Both the AICOA and the OAMA are a response to unfounded concerns that certain companies, like Meta, Amazon, and Google, have become monopolies that dominate all avenues of the tech market. The AICOA seeks to eliminate “unfair” practices, such as self-preferencing – a company utilizing its own service or product on its own platform – while the OAMA aims to do away with the convenience of pre-installed apps and app stores on smart devices, among other restrictions.
In a capitalist economy, antitrust law is essential because it ensures competition among businesses and industries, benefiting consumers by providing more choices and keeping costs low. This is known as the consumer welfare standard – the guiding principle of antitrust law in the United States for decades. The consumer welfare standard states that the ultimate goal of antitrust law is “economic efficiency” and that the consumer’s well-being should come before all other agendas. The primary issue with the AICOA and the OAMA is that the consumer welfare standard is being completely discarded and used as a pawn in the political power games of Washington.
Many of America’s most well-known and successful tech companies have created easy-to-use digital tools and services on which countless consumers depend. Most importantly, these tools and services are affordable. After an unprecedented, global pandemic that halted our economy and left consumers and entrepreneurs reeling with uncertainty, access to low- or no-cost tools or services is critical for small business owners. In fact, AFP’s True Cost of Washington Tour has shed a light on how “Bidenomics” has negatively impacted American families across the country, and if the AICOA and OAMA are allowed to move forward, it will only add insult to injury for America’s struggling consumers and their loved ones.
It would be difficult to overstate the impact technology has had on small businesses and startups. In Mississippi, Google alone has helped over 150,000 small businesses get off the ground and grow their business with their readily available, affordable, and user-friendly digital tools. Tech companies have also partnered with many state and local chambers of commerce in Mississippi to teach free classes on how to use their digital tools. Many of these companies have also invested billions in the Magnolia State, making Mississippi a new hub for innovation and bringing hundreds of jobs and new revenue streams to the state. If the proponents of these tech antitrust bills get their way, this progress will come to a screeching stop.
Fortunately, the AICOA and the OAMA have thus far failed to advance past the floor in either chamber, but antitrust legislation could find itself on the docket again in the lame-duck session. We cannot let up; we must make it known to our Mississippi elected officials and others in Congress that the AICOA and the OAMA must be defeated once and for all. To all who call the Magnolia State home and rely on tech, rest assured that AFP Mississippi has your back in this fight.
Submitted by Starla Brown. She is the State Director of Americans for Prosperity, an allied organization of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
The Mississippi State Legislature recommends dissolving the Mississippi Board of Barber Examiners.
Mississippi should abolish the Board of Barber Examiners, says a new report from the state legislature. Mississippi’s Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review Committee – or PEER committee – has proposed that both the Barber Board and the Cosmetology Board be dissolved.
This is great news. It is absurd that Mississippi has more restrictive practices in place limiting the number of barbers than most other states. As the PEER report says, the Barber board is not very good at what it does; "the Board examination practices are not very effective at evaluating a candidate’s effectiveness."
Nor, suggests the report, is the Board particularly well run.
With fewer than four out of 10 applicants approved for a license last year, some might suggest that the barber board exists to limit the number of people able to operate as barbers. This is just to sort of restrictive practice Mississippi needs to do away with.
"But what about the dangers of unlicensed barbers?!" some will shriek. "How will Mississippi manage without a Board of Barber Examiners?"
Curiously, the Barber Examiner Board doesn’t seem to have been that into examining. In 2022, the Board’s inspectors only conducted 191 inspections of the 2,134 barber shops and schools licensed by the Board. If the vast majority of barbers could cope without an inspection, why have an inspection board at all?
Why does this new report matter? Actually, this is about much more than barbers. It is about a new Mississippi mindset.
For years, economic and business activity in our state has been regulated by vested interests entrenched in the local bureaucracy. This latest report is based on a realization that things do not have to be that way.
If we can cope without a Barber board, we might not need dozens of other regulators and boards, such as the Charter School Authorizer board, whose main activity seems to be to say ‘no’.
Interestingly, the report cites Mississippi’s new universal licensing law as a reason for reform. With it now much easier for those that have obtained certification out of state to get permission to practice in Mississippi, our homegrown restrictive practices are all the more evident.
Change is coming, and hopefully, it will sweep away more than just the Barber Board.
Mississippi has some excellent local newspapers. But there also seem to be a number of Mississippi media outlets that love to talk our state down.
Take the recent example of the Jackson water crisis. What ought to have been a straightforward news story about incompetent city officials failing to provide clean water was twisted by the left-wing media into a narrative about inequality and race.
National media outlets were always going to want to jump at the chance to misrepresent what was really happening in our state. They cheerfully ignored the actual causes of Jackson’s water crisis and wrote a narrative that read to me like fiction. But what I struggle to understand is why Mississippi’s own media outlets would – with a few notable exceptions - rush to join in?
Armed with their local knowledge, Mississippi’s home-grown media ought to have helped set the record straight, as several writers in this newspaper did. But many others chose not to.
We need to have a discussion as to why much of Mississippi’s progressive media seems to delight in portraying our state in a negative light. Perhaps those that fund Mississippi’s anti-Mississippi media don’t understand the damage this does to our state?
Maybe they don’t care, provided they are able to bolster their progressive credentials? Part of me suspects that Mississippi’s media and those that fund them feel the need to put Mississippi down as a way of signaling their supposed moral superiority relative to the rest of us.
A recent arrival from England, I love Mississippi. I find being upbeat about this state is remarkably easy, and I take every opportunity to explain to outsiders why this is such a wonderful place.
But don’t just take my word for it. Look at how folks are voting with their feet; Mississippi’s population had been falling for as long as anyone can remember – until now. For the first time in decades, Mississippi’s population is starting to grow.
Part of this is down to the fact that our state leaders have begun to make Mississippi much more business-friendly. Earlier this year, Mississippi implemented the largest tax cut in the state’s history, reducing the state income tax was cut from an average of 7 percent to a flat 4 percent.
Mississippi has begun a far-reaching red tape reduction strategy, giving people with professional qualifications issued in other US states a near automatic right to practice in Mississippi.
Mississippi might have pockets of poverty, but please don’t let any media organizations tell you that this state is poor and backward. In the past 20 years, our state’s income per person income has more than doubled.
Growth has been so strong, in fact, that over the next 12 months, the per capita income of Mississippi ($45,881 in 2021) is expected to overtake that of my own country, the United Kingdom ($47,202 in 2021). A generation ago, Britain was roughly twice as wealthy per person as Mississippi. Never let the left-wing media tell you that tax cuts and deregulation don’t work.
The really interesting news story about our state is that we are on the up. Mississippi is on a similar trajectory to that taken by other southern states, like Tennessee, Texas and Florida. Thanks to conservative leadership, those states are thriving, and help explain why the south has become the fastest-growing part of the US.
I cannot imagine why the progressive media don’t want to write about why free markets work. Perhaps that tells us more about them than it does about our state.
Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
Why are so many companies "woke"? Because of the ESG – or environmental, social and governance – agenda that many money managers are pursuing, which is forcing many big businesses to focus on combating climate change and promoting "diversity" ahead of delivering for their customers.
ESG means that money managers on Wall Street are able to impose their political preferences on businesses in which they invest. As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently put it, "ESG is an attempt to impose, through the economy, an ideological agenda that could not win at the ballot box."
The trouble is that the ESG agenda is winning. Billions of dollars of professionally managed assets are now used to impose ESG targets on corporate America – and on those that work for them.
Whatever your own personal political preferences, surely we can all agree that investment managers should not be using other people’s assets to promote ideology?
Quite apart from the politics, the problem with ESG is that it is not objective. There are different methodologies that various companies use to evaluate their use of ESG. Many of these businesses, it seems, rate their ESG scores on feelings rather than facts, making the process arbitrary
For example, one might assume that Tesla, a maker of eco-friendly electric vehicles, would have a high ESG rating. False. Tesla has been marked down by many of those that devise various ESG metrics, while various oil-producing businesses are rated highly.
We believe that it is up to those that own private capital to decide how best to invest it. Whether or not fund managers, who are merely the custodians of other people’s money, should be free to prioritize investment choices based on their own personal political preferences is perhaps a little less clear-cut. One thing we should absolutely insist on is that when it comes to allocating public money, investment should be made on the basis of maximizing returns, not promoting political beliefs.
To that end, several states across the country have implemented policies that prohibit investing on the basis only of ESG. Pension fund managers in states such as Texas, Louisiana and Florida are now required to invest in companies that would generate the best financial outcomes for growing pension funds, instead of ESG-driven objectives and exposing taxpayer dollars to potentially harming risks. This is what we would like to see in Mississippi.
Currently, Mississippi has no such legislation in place. In our state, it is up to the state’s ten-strong Public Employees’ Retirement System (PERS) board to oversee the investment strategy on behalf of around 325,000 PERS beneficiaries.
We would like to see legislation put in place to ensure that PERS funds are invested in order to maximize returns for those that have paid into the system, rather than promote fashionable causes.
ESG is, according to Elon Musk "a scam". Masquerading as a noble cause, "it has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors." ESG investing will not only cause long-term distortions in the marketplace. We fear it will ensure lower returns for pensioners whose savings have been managed by the scammers. Given the already precarious position of Mississippi’s public employee pension system, we believe ESG is something we simply cannot afford.
A potential bill we would like to see passed during the session calls on the state’s asset managers to comply with the highest standard of integrity to funds and their investments. Due to the ever-changing definition and standards of ESG, Mississippi should take its trust funds, specifically retirement fund money, fiduciarily seriously, and therefore, should act solely in the interests of participants and beneficiaries and invest in funds in a manner that prioritizes the highest return.
In recent years, left-wing ideologues seem to have been elected to office in states like California, Oregon, New York and Illinois. There they have raised taxes, imposed radical curriculums in the classroom and in some cases even attempted to defund the police.
While some parts of the US have lurched left, state leaders across much of the South have gone in the opposite direction, and the South is starting to thrive as a result.
Already, the southern United States is the most populous region of America. In the past couple of years, this growth has accelerated as hundreds of thousands of Americans leave the left-wing la la land states, and move to places like Texas, Georgia, Tennessee and Florida.
If this trend continues, the South may soon become the center of economic, demographic, and perhaps even political gravity in America.
But, of course, there is one state slap bang in the middle of the South that has not benefited, until now, as much from this growth opportunity - our own state, Mississippi.
Mississippi needs to emulate what other southern states, like Tennessee, Texas and Florida, have already done. While we have cut Mississippi’s income tax, Tennessee, Texas and Florida have eliminated theirs. We need to do the same.
While Mississippi deregulates, we have done so by drawing on what we have seen work in neighboring states. It is time to be even bolder and make Mississippi properly competitive.
Our state has been run by those that call themselves conservative for years. On behalf of Mississippi’s overwhelmingly conservative voters, the Mississippi Center for Public Policy has just published a conservative Platform for our state.
Here are some of its highlights:
1. CUT TAXES: With a massive state budget surplus, we propose an authentically conservative budget that would cut personal income tax and corporation tax responsibly.
2. RECALL: We need to give local residents the power to recall ineffective and incompetent mayors.
3. RIGHT OF INITIATIVE: It is time to fix the right of initiative so that the public is able to vote to change state law.
4. EDUCATION: Legislation is needed to break the monopoly of the Charter School Authorizer Board, which acts as a roadblock to reform. At the same time, we need a bill to ensure transparency in education, so that moms and dads can see what their child is being taught.
5. CUT THE COST OF HEALTH CARE: Too many people in our state are unable to afford healthcare. The answer is not to hose more federal dollars at local healthcare, which would simply inflate costs. Instead, we need a concerted effort to eliminate the restrictive practices that make health care more expensive by preventing new providers from operating.
6. REINS ACT: Bureaucrats like to make decisions and spend taxpayers’ money without accountability. To combat this, conservatives in our state should support a “Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny” (REINS) bill.
7. ANTI-ESG: The ESG (Environmental Social and Governance) agenda promoted by big money managers is forcing publicly listed corporations to promote a “woke” agenda. An anti-ESG bill that we are behind will help restore the voices of everyday citizens in the economy.
8. A WOMEN’S BILL OF RIGHTS: Our Women’s Bill of Rights would codify, for purposes of law and regulations, the common sense—and previously self-evident—definition of “woman.”
9. A PARENTS’ BILL OF RIGHTS: Young people have been subjected to irreversible gender reassignment procedures that they have subsequently come to regret. Our proposal would stop this in our state.
This is a list of practical steps that any conservative in our state ought to be able to support to make our state even better.
Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. Details of the Conservative Platform can be found on their website mspolicy.org
If the UK feels gloomy and broken, it’s in large part because the Conservative Party has abandoned its basic principles
On a flight back to Britain the other week, I watched Manifest. A story of the supernatural, an aeroplane mysteriously lands several years after it took off. The time-traveling plot might have been daft, but it was good preparation for my arrival at Heathrow, where I felt that I had landed back in the 1970s.
The news in Britain is full of stories about strikes and disruption. Inflation is out of control. Once again, we have a government intent on raising taxes and throwing ever more money at underperforming public services. From the NHS to the police, much no longer seems to work the way it should. A pervasive pessimism seems to hang over every conversation. Conservative ministers and policymakers do not appear to have a clue how to fix it.
How different things feel over in America. There, conservatives are finally overcoming their infatuation with Donald Trump. In the recent mid-term elections, the so-called Republican “red wave” might not have materialized, but conservative leaders in a number of key states showed that they know how to win again.
In the US, the heirs to Ronald Reagan are clambering back into the saddle. In Britain, the heirs to Margaret Thatcher are looking lost.
Last week, at the Margaret Thatcher Conference on Growth, at the Guildhall, organized by the Centre for Policy Studies, I listened to Michael Gove. It was more Ted Heath than Margaret Thatcher. He spoke of a regional policy, now called “leveling up”. Britain’s problems of productivity and inequality would all be solved, he suggested, with just a little bit more government direction.
Other ministers and pundits cling to the delusion that Britain’s woes can be entirely explained by a series of unfortunate extraneous events, such as the war in Ukraine, Brexit and US-Chinese trade tensions. It is almost a case of bad luck, they seem to say. In his Autumn Statement, Jeremy Hunt echoed that idea, describing Britain as being in a “recession made in Russia”.
The reality is that Britain’s economic mess is largely of its own making. Over the past 12 years, British Conservatives have made a number of policy blunders, the consequences of which are catching up with the country.
Britain has become poorer in part because of its ruinously expensive (and unnecessary) Covid lockdowns. For two years, the Government paid people to sit at home and borrowed money to pay for it all. With fewer goods and services being produced, but lots of money in the system, inflation rose. We used up the equivalent of our national overdraft to pay for people to be unproductive. Now, the bank won’t lend anymore. Unsurprisingly, since they presided over it, Britain’s Conservatives seem reluctant to recognize this.
“But surely,” you interject, “every economy around the world is facing a cost of living crisis. The Ukraine war has made matters worse for everyone.”
True, but while geopolitics has increased the price of natural gas for everyone, Britain has done a number of things that have made us especially vulnerable. For most of 2022, natural-gas prices have been five to six times higher in Britain compared with America. Is this because the laws of physics are different Stateside? Of course not. Energy is more expensive in Britain thanks to bad policy.
Britain has pursued the idea of eliminating hydrocarbons as a source of energy more vigorously than almost any other country – including America, despite President Biden’s best efforts. According to Rishi Sunak at the Cop27 climate summit, this will make Britain a “green energy superpower”.
Whatever that might mean, more renewable energy necessarily means being more dependent on natural gas since it is the only realistic energy source that can plug the gaps caused by intermittent wind and solar supply. Since Britain has banned fracking, that in turn means being more dependent on expensive imports of natural gas.
Far from addressing any of this, ministers talk of “doubling down” on their commitment to renewable energy. On the other side of the Atlantic, conservative leaders, such as the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, who has just cruised to a landslide victory, are unapologetic in their support for the oil and gas industries.
One thing Conservative ministers in Britain can be counted on to say they support unequivocally is the NHS. So slavish have they been in their devotion to socialised health provision that they seem oblivious to its shortcomings and quite incapable of proposing desperately needed reform.
A recent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies revealed that spending on the NHS has grown by 12 percent since 2019 in real terms. There are now 13 percent more NHS doctors and 11 percent more nurses. Yet the NHS somehow manages to treat 5 percent fewer people. Behind these abstract figures sit real stories of personal angst, including a friend of mine whose cancer returned after several years of remission, only for them to discover NHS indifference.
With the NHS accounting for an ever-growing proportion of public spending, its atrocious productivity has a drag effect on the entire economy.
Hunt this week said that he would like the NHS to have “Singaporean efficiency”. In Singapore, every citizen has a dedicated healthcare account, with money following the individual and providers competing for patients. In Britain, ministers can’t bring themselves to charge patients who don’t bother turning up to appointments.
Monetary policy has also added to Britain’s malaise. Ever since the financial crisis, the Bank of England has used a monetary trick known as quantitative easing to try to stimulate economic growth. Initially, it worked, raising output but only by generating ghost growth.
In his brilliant new book, The Price of Time, Edward Chancellor explains how the monetary magic of QE comes at a cost in terms of poorer productivity and underperforming companies. Conservative ministers talk blithely about raising productivity by improving education outcomes or relocating businesses to the other end of the country. In a party that once fiercely debated monetary policy, few even seem to understand the damage caused by central bankers.
Across the pond, the Federal Reserve has not been innocent of the same monetary sins. But it has not held back from raising interest rates, either. The American economy might be first into a recession, but it is likely to be out of it and growing again while Britain stagnates. How many Conservative policymakers yet understand that higher interest rates are not just unavoidable, but essential if we want the next generation to prosper?
Britain’s Conservatives don’t understand the causes of their country’s underperformance. Small wonder they have no idea how to fix it.
While Hunt raises the tax burden as Britain heads into recession, American conservatives are doing the opposite and cutting it. President Biden’s Democrats might run Washington DC, but that has not stopped Republicans from implementing conservative economic policies at a state level.
In my adopted home state of Mississippi, for example, conservative leaders responded to the downturn by implementing the largest tax cut in the state’s history. The state income tax was cut from an average of 7 percent to a flat 4 percent. Mississippi also responded with a far-reaching red tape reduction strategy, giving people with professional qualifications issued in other US states a near automatic right to practice in Mississippi.
“Ha! Mississippi!” some will scoff. “What has Britain got to learn from a small southern US state? Besides, isn’t Mississippi poor?” My adopted home state is indeed the poorest state in America. But in the next 12 months, the per capita income of Mississippi ($45,881 in 2021) is expected to overtake that of the United Kingdom ($47,202 in 2021). A generation ago, Britain was roughly twice as wealthy per person as Mississippi. Tell me again that tax cuts and deregulation don’t work.
Mississippi is in a way simply emulating what other southern states, such as Tennessee, Texas and Florida, have already done. While we have cut our income tax, they have eliminated theirs. While we deregulate, we do so by drawing on what we have seen work next door.
Thanks to the reforms that conservative leaders are implementing at the state level, the American south has become the fastest-growing part of the US. Indeed, it is well on its way to becoming the demographic, economic and, one day soon, perhaps the political center of gravity in America.
If only British Conservatives were willing to look across the Atlantic to see what works over there.
Douglas Carswell is a former Conservative MP and now the president & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, one of America’s leading state-based think tanks. He lives in Jackson.
This article originally appeared in The Telegraph.
The Mississippi Center for Public Policy launched a “Conservative Platform for Mississippi 2023” today.
The platform offers lawmakers a policy program on important issues that MCPP feels true conservatives in Mississippi should support. Topics discussed within the platform consist of taxes and spending, renewed democracy, combatting extremist ideology, innovation and enterprise, education and healthcare.
All of Mississippi’s state-wide elected officials have been controlled by self-identified “conservatives” since at least 2015. MCPP believes many of these “conservatives” do not vote in favor of policies that support values involving limited government and personal freedoms, therefore prompting the organization to launch this platform as a guide to voting conservatively.
Some key issues include a recall, giving residents the power to remove locally elected officials when they fail; the Mississippi Reins Act, which requires the legislature to approve agency spending over $200,000; and an Anti-ESG bill, which prohibits the state’s Public Employees’ Retirement System of Mississippi (PERS) board from investing in Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) policies.
The Mississippi Center for Public Policy will also publish a detailed, carefully costed draft budget for 2023 in December, which will show what tax cuts should look like in the future.
MCPP plans to introduce several pieces of legislation during the 2023 Mississippi Legislative Session that follow these policy issues. The organization will promote draft bills and work with allied partners to build a coalition enabling each of these reforms.
"Mississippi votes for conservatives. It's time for those elected as conservatives to cut taxes, support free enterprise and deregulate," MCPP CEO & President Douglas Carswell said. "Other Southern states have done that - and are growing. We could be, too."
A copy of the platform can be found here.
Did you know that in Mississippi – the state that led the charge to overturn Roe v. Wade – elective abortions are both illegal and a constitutional right at the same time?
If that sounds confusing to you, it should. That’s why the Mississippi Justice Institute recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of pro-life physicians seeking to end the court-imposed, elective abortion policy in our state.
So, how did we get here?
The people of Mississippi have long sought to protect the lives of unborn children. However, in 1973, those efforts came to a near halt following the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous opinion in Roe v. Wade, which held that abortion was a right protected by the U.S. Constitution.
In 1986, several obstetrician-gynecologists and abortion clinics filed a lawsuit claiming that a Mississippi parental consent abortion statute violated the federal constitutional rights of minors to seek an abortion. That lawsuit ultimately failed, with the federal courts finding in 1992 that Mississippi’s parental consent law did not violate the federal standard for abortion regulations announced by the U.S. Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.
After that lawsuit failed, Pro-Choice Mississippi, an abortion advocacy group, and some of the same obstetrician-gynecologists and abortion clinics filed a new lawsuit in state court in 1994. This time, they did not argue that the parental consent law violated the federal constitutional right to seek an abortion. Rather, they argued that the Mississippi Constitution guaranteed a right to seek an abortion and that Mississippi’s parental consent law violated this state constitutional right.
Every state has its own constitution. While state constitutions cannot restrict rights secured by the federal Constitution, they can offer greater protection of rights than that afforded under the U.S. Constitution. So abortion advocates sought protection under the Mississippi Constitution for conduct that the federal courts had determined was not protected by the U.S. Constitution.
In 1998, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled on the state court lawsuit in Pro-Choice Mississippi v. Fordice. Relying heavily on the U.S. Supreme Court’s holdings and reasoning in Roe and Casey, the Mississippi Supreme Court held that the Mississippi Constitution – like the U.S. Constitution – did protect a right to seek an abortion.
As we all know, the U.S. Supreme Court recently handed down the Dobbs opinion which overruled Roe and Casey and returned control over abortion policy from the federal courts back to the states, where it rightly belongs. After the Dobbs decision, Mississippi enacted a law prohibiting abortion except in cases where necessary for the preservation of the mother’s life or where the pregnancy was caused by rape.
But what about the Fordice opinion? Because it relied so heavily on Roe and Casey – cases which the U.S. Supreme Court has now said were “egregiously wrong” – the rationale for the supposed state constitutional right to abortion appears now to be invalid. But the Mississippi Supreme Court has not yet had the opportunity to overrule its opinion in Fordice. So, as of today, elective abortions in Mississippi seem to be both statutorily illegal and constitutionally protected at the same time.
To make things worse, this legal uncertainty has placed physicians in Mississippi in an impossible “Catch-22.” Several medical societies and board certification authorities have issued guidelines suggesting that it is unethical, and potentially punishable by the government, for physicians who oppose elective abortion to refuse to provide or refer patients to other providers for lawful, elective abortions. But are elective abortions “lawful” in Mississippi? That depends on whether you are looking at Mississippi’s elective abortion ban or the Mississippi Supreme Court’s opinion in Fordice.
Due to this legal uncertainty, physicians in Mississippi necessarily have to guess as to the legality of their actions involving elective abortion, and no matter which guesses they make, they could be punished for guessing wrong. That’s why the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists partnered with the Mississippi Justice Institute to file a lawsuit seeking to clarify that abortion is not protected by the Mississippi Constitution.
In Dobbs, Mississippi secured a major victory for human rights and the rule of law. Now it’s time to finish the job and put an end to the judicially imposed, elective abortion policy in the state that took down Roe.
Aaron Rice is the director of the Mississippi Justice Institute, a non-profit, constitutional litigation center and the legal arm of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
Andy Taggart is a founding partner of Taggart, Rimes & Wiggins, PLLC, and a volunteer attorney with the Mississippi Justice Institute.
Mississippi Center for Public Policy CEO & President Douglas Carswell spoke to the South Rankin County chapter of Rotary Club.
Clubs or groups interested in having Douglas speak at a meeting or event can make a request at the link here.
