A legislative alternative to a medical marijuana initiative that critics say is designed to kill it passed the Mississippi House Tuesday.
House Concurrent Resolution 39 — sponsored by Rep. Trey Lamar (R-Senatobia) — passed 72-49 after several rounds of contentious debate on a largely party-line vote with most Republicans voting yes for the alternative.
If the resolution passes the Senate, it will appear on the bottom of the ballot in November alongside Initiative 65 since it doesn’t require a signature from Gov. Tate Reeves.
On the floor, Lamar said his bill was about creating a better program that wasn’t an entryway to recreational marijuana.
“If we’re going to have a program, we need to have a proper program,” Lamar said on the floor.
The legislature has had plenty of time to act. Since 2010, there have been 11 bills that either would’ve created or were related to the creation of a medical marijuana program and none made it past the first committee deadline.
Rep. Joel Bomgar (R-Madison) is part of the Medical Marijuana 2020 steering committee and has authored several unsuccessful bills that would’ve created a medical marijuana pilot program. He said on the floor that the legislative alternative was intended to kill the initiative and that sponsors of HCR 39 were being disingenuous about its true purpose.
House Speaker Philip Gunn said in a news release that the alternative gives people in favor of medical marijuana a responsible pathway to having it. He also said that Initiative 65 comes extremely close to legalizing recreational marijuana. He also didn't like that Initiative 65 doesn’t allow the state to use the tax revenue from the program.
Initiative 65 would amend the state’s constitution to create a medical marijuana program in Mississippi and more than 220,000 statewide signed the petition to put it on the ballot. For ballot initiatives in Mississippi, the certified signature requirement is 106,190 total with at least 21,238 from each of the five congressional districts as they were in 2000.
The medical marijuana under Initiative 65 program would be administered by the state Department of Health, whose board opposes the ballot initiative.
HCR 39 would create a much less expansive program, with the number of producers strictly limited. The smoking of marijuana would also be limited to those with terminal conditions.
Initiative 65 would keep the revenues generated by medical marijuana in the program to pay for the state Department of Health to implement and enforce the rules and regulations in the program.
Since the beginning of the state’s ballot initiative system in 1972, only one legislative alternative has made it to a ballot and that was for Initiative 42, which would’ve given the Hinds County Chancery Court the power to appropriate more state money for individual school districts through injunctions.
Neither 42 nor the legislatively-approved alternative 42A passed (46.98 percent of voters in 2015 voted for 42). The difference between the two (8,933 votes or two percentage points) wouldn’t have been enough to get the original initiative passed into law.
Under Initiative 65, patients with debilitating conditions seeking to be part of the program would be required to get an examination by a physician and then be referred to a licensed and regulated treatment center. At these centers, either the patient or caregiver for a disabled or home-bound patient could buy limited quantities of marijuana or related products.
Legislation to ensure free speech on college campuses in Mississippi will not only protect the rights of every student, it will also save taxpayers the costs of attorney fees.
Healy v. James, U.S. Supreme Court (1972). … “State colleges and universities are not enclaves immune from the sweep of the First Amendment.The precedents of this Court leave no room for the view that, because of the acknowledged need for order, First Amendment protections should apply with less force on college campuses than in the community at large.”
Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System v. Southworth, U.S. Supreme Court (2000) … “When a university requires its students to pay fees to support the extracurricular speech of other students, all in the interest of open discussion, it may not prefer some viewpoints to others.”
Sweezy v. New Hampshire, U.S. Supreme Court (1957) … “The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. ... Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.”
Papish v. Board of Curators of University of Missouri, U.S. Supreme Court (1973) … “We think Healy makes it clear that the mere dissemination of ideas—no matter how offensive to good taste—on a state university campus may not be shut off in the name alone of “conventions of decency.”
Widmar v. Vincent, U.S. Supreme Court (1981) … “With respect to persons entitled to be there, our cases leave no doubt that the First Amendment rights of speech and association extend to the campuses of state universities.”
Dambrot v. Central Michigan University, 6th Circuit Court of Appeals (1995) … “Because the CMU discriminatory harassment policy is overbroad and void for vagueness and because it is not a valid prohibition against fighting words, the CMU discriminatory harassment policy violates the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.”
DeJohn v. Temple University, 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals (2008) … “The Policy punishes not only speech that actually causes disruption, but also speech that merely intends to do so: by its terms, it covers speech `which has the purpose or effect of' interfering with educational performance or creating a hostile environment. This ignores Tinker's requirement that a school must reasonably believe that speech will cause actual, material disruption before prohibiting it."
Barnes v. Zaccari, 11th Circuit Court of Appeals (2015) … “Qualified immunity offers complete protection for government officials sued in their individual capacities as long as their conduct violates no clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known. … To defeat qualified immunity on a motion for summary judgment, Barnes must show that, when the facts are viewed in the light most favorable to him, Zaccari violated a constitutional right.” … In this case, the president of the university agreed to a personal $900,000 settlement because there is no “immunity” to violate the U.S. Constitution.
Koala v. Khosla, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (2019) … “We are sensitive to the challenges facing educational institutions seeking to steer a difficult course between free expression and civil discourse. Nevertheless, we are equally mindful of that fact that, in the university setting, “the State acts against a backdrop and tradition of thought and experiment that is at the center of our intellectual and philosophic tradition.” Rosenberger, 515 U.S. at 835. We conclude that the Eleventh Amendment does not bar plaintiffs’ suit.”
The lesson from the Families First debacle is that we should never confuse local, private charity with taxpayer-funded, government-granted charity.
In 2018, $428 billion was given to charity in the United States of America. Sixty-eight percent of that giving was given by individuals; 18 percent by foundations; 9 percent by bequests, and only five percent by corporations. Of the types of giving, $125 billion was given to religious causes – by far the largest category of all giving. Education was a distant second, receiving $59 billion.
The evidence is very clear in America. We are a generous lot and the most generous among us are religious. Religious practice is the behavioral variable most consistently associated with charitable giving. What’s more, the religious giver is also much more likely to give to secular causes than the non-religious.
According to the Philanthropy Roundtable, Mississippi ranks number two nationally in the percentage of our gross income that goes to charitable giving. We are second only to Utah, which has a disproportionate number of Mormons, who are expected to give at least 10 percent. Utahans give 6.2 percent of their gross income on average whereas Mississippians give 5.6 percent of theirs.
It is no surprise then to know that Mississippians also rank at the top in several categories of religious practice. According to the most recent data from Pew Research, we rank number one for belief in heaven (88 percent); the frequency of prayer (75 percent); frequency of reading scripture weekly (59 percent); religious service attendance (49 percent); and participation in religious study and education (43 percent).
But there is one piece of data from the Pew Research that caught my eye and sent a shiver up my spine. Despite our remarkable history of charitable giving and religious practice, we only ranked number 33 in the number of residents who believe in limited government. This is a yawning paradox. And it’s in total incongruence with the above.
Not only is this lack of a belief in limited government not consistent with the behaviors of most Mississippians, it’s also not consistent with Christian doctrine. Theologians from across the spectrum of Christianity have warned of the danger of the consolidation of power into higher-level organizations. John Locke, whose writing heavily influenced our own founders’ view of liberty, was himself a deeply religious man who consistently warned of the disempowerment of ourselves and our communities of the responsibility we own naturally to help others by leaning instead on a large, complex, and expensive government.
Pope John Paul II once wrote about what happens when the government intervenes into the communities and starts competing with local charities, saying, “this leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.”
We have missed these warmings. We’ve allowed ourselves to be convinced that our tax dollars are an efficient way to solve problems and meet need where it is. It is only in a place where we’ve transferred personal accountability to the state and ceded moral authority in exchange for federal grants that a program like Families First could emerge.
Rather than trust government propaganda and unaccountable claims of doing good, we need to be engaged and aware of what is being done in the name of our “common good.” Thankfully, State Auditor Shad White and his staff were able to prevent further waste and theft in the name of charity. We should heed the lesson.
There are major differences between charities that depend upon the giving of donors to fund specific types of work and the non-profits who depend upon government grants for funding and often morph and change their missions in order to qualify for grants, which are of course ultimately funded by taxpayers. Perhaps this will help us to recognize the incongruence of our nature as one of the most generous and religious states in America but one that has fallen into the trap of a dependence upon government.
We can do better. God has already shown us the way.
This column appeared in the Clarion Ledger on March 11, 2020.
Imagine, it’s 1876 and Alexander Graham Bell has just invented the telephone, when he gets a call from the government letting him know that the state legislature has voted to enact market regulations that stop the device from being sold.
After all, the phone could seriously disrupt the telegraph market and the companies that run that industry, so naturally government needs to step in. Coincidently, telegraph operators just happen to be some of the largest campaign contributors to the same elected officials. Looking back on this, it sounds a bit ridiculous, but in small ways it happens almost every day in Mississippi.
Current market operators work with legislators and regulators to put in place laws and regulations that make it difficult to enter a given market, whether it be eyebrow threading, liquor sales, taxi services, or other industries. Prices stay high, the operators face less competition, and ultimately the average Mississippian loses, having been denied the lower prices and new technology consistently brought forth by competition and enterprising entrepreneurs. This competition is indeed a good thing, and government shouldn’t stand in the way of the market. After all, why should the state decide who wins and who loses?
This issue has been especially pronounced lately during debates on the issue of alcohol freedom. Over the course of the legislative session, a variety of bills have been introduced that would further alcohol freedom. From wine in grocery stores to the direct shipment of alcohol to your doorstep, many good bills have been introduced. Unfortunately, not all of them have made it out of committee, and an anti-competitive spirit is partially to blame.
Naysayers suggest that wine sales in grocery stores would hinder the success of liquor stores. But the major reason liquor stores would face trouble competing with larger chains would be because of the other burdensome regulations that have been placed on these business owners by government. This includes limiting of what they can sell, and the blocking of their ability to own more than one liquor store. Looking around the country, other states that allow for the sale of wine in grocery stores have no noticeable drought in liquor stores, so the fears seem a bit unfounded. The grocery stores and liquor stores typically cater to different markets in their sales, and thus both consistently survive.
In many ways, your ability to purchase wine from grocery stores has been delayed for at least another year because people did not want to have to compete. If a business can’t compete, then it should lose on the market, not in the hall of the legislature, this is how we encourage innovation. In this way, capitalism is truly the closest thing we have to direct democracy, as every individual has the power to vote with a dollar that represents an equal value no matter the holder.
The question is indeed worth asking, should government have stepped in to protect the pony express, the horse drawn carriage, or the telegraph? These might be larger examples, but the same principle applies in theory. When the legislature drafts laws and regulations that discourage competition and protect existing operators on the market, it discourages new businesses from entering the state.
Each lost business represents jobs that never had the chance to come into existence because an entrepreneur was blocked from potential success by government, and that’s a tragedy.
A bill that would create a regulatory reduction pilot program has been kicked to the bottom of the House calendar after objections were raised on Thursday.
House Bill 1422 would require the Mississippi Departments of Education, Health, Transportation, Agriculture and Commerce, and Information Technology Services to review their existing regulations, accept written comments from the public for 60 days following the review, and conduct at least two public hearings for citizens and businesses to identify any rule or regulation that is burdensome.
The review would have to be conducted within 120 days of HB 1422 becoming law. Each of the agencies covered in the pilot program would have to reduce their regulations by:
- 10 percent by December 31, 2020.
- 20 percent by December 31, 2021.
- 30 percent by December 31, 2022.
According to the bill, if one of the agencies hasn’t reduced its regulations by 30 percent by February 1, 2023, the House Appropriations and Senate Finance committees would conduct a budgetary audit to determine the obstacles preventing the agency from reducing its regulations by 30 percent. The Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER) would also have to conduct a review of the regulatory reduction efforts of the agencies involved in the pilot program and make a report to the legislature.
The bill was initially placed on the noncontroversial calendar which helps to speed up the legislative process by passing bills that are deemed noncontroversial in short order. However, just a small number of legislators need to raise objection. They did that with HB 1422 and it is now at the bottom of the general calendar in the House.
Various questions were asked about what we’d be cutting, why this is needed, etc. We can just look at the data, and what it means. According to a study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, wading through Mississippi’s morass of regulations would take 13 weeks to absorb its 9.3 million words and 117,558 restrictions.
Reform is something that has considerable momentum across the country. And for good reason.
Regulatory growth has a detrimental effect on economic growth. We have a history of empirical data on the relationship between regulations and economic growth. A 2013 study in the Journal of Economic Growth estimates that federal regulations have slowed the U.S. growth rate by 2 percentage points a year, going back to 1949. A recent study by the Mercatus Center estimates that federal regulations have slowed growth by 0.8 percent since 1980. If we had imposed a cap on regulations in 1980, the economy would be $4 trillion larger, or about $13,000 per person.
On the international side, researchers at the World Bank have estimated that countries with a lighter regulatory touch grow 2.3 percentage points faster than countries with the most burdensome regulations. And yet another study, this published by the Quarterly Journal of Economics, found that heavy regulation leads to more corruption, larger unofficial economies, and less competition, with no improvement in public or private goods.
For Mississippi to grow our private sector economy, we must push for regulatory change and a smaller government footprint. Otherwise we’ll continue to stand in the way to entrepreneurs wanting to pursue their dreams and begin careers.
House Bill 229, authored by Rep. Hank Zuber, will update the state’s transparency laws to require counties and municipalities to maintain an easily accessible transparency website with financial information.
The bill applies to counties with a population of 20,000 or more and municipalities with a population of at least 10,000. The new website will provide access to existing financial audits, budgets, and other financial documents, as well as expenditure information. This will provide the public with a new opportunity to monitor their local government, in an easy-to-read fashion.
This is all existing information, meaning there is nothing new for local governments to create. It is just information that local governments may not be sharing online. Transparency in government is necessary, and this will increase that level of transparency for taxpayers.
MCPP has reviewed this legislation and finds that it is aligned with our principles and therefore should be supported.
Read HB 229.
Track the status of this bill and all bills in our legislative tracker.
MCPP’s Jon Pritchett and Hunter Estes recorded Unlicensed from the campus of Ole Miss this week as they talked about campus free speech, speech codes, and how we can pay college athletes with revenue from sports gambling.
Senate Bill 2857, sponsored by Sen. Chris McDaniel, ensures that paying cash for health care services won’t be regulated as an insurance product by the state Department of Insurance. In doing so, it makes sure red tape won’t hold back health care in Mississippi.
The bill expands our current direct primary care program to include other health care providers, like physical therapists.
Direct primary care enables doctors to bill patients directly for services. This bypasses traditional health plans, where a third party pays most of the cost while the insured pays a smaller amount.
The passage of the so-called Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, resulted in massive, annual premium increases for most health insurance customers and forced consumers to have health insurance or pay a tax. President Donald Trump signed legislation in 2017 that reduced the tax to nothing.
People tired of paying excessive costs for insurance went back to the old way of funding primary care by paying the provider directly. In 2015, Mississippi became one of the first states to clarify that this payment arrangement could not be regulated as an insurance product. Senator McDaniel’s bill expands the current law to include other health care providers.
A direct primary care (DPC) practice offers members a set amount of on-demand visits for a flat, periodic fee and also has transparent pricing models for tests, labs and X-rays. With transparent pricing, competition can enter the healthcare field and provide better, less costly benefits for consumers.
It’s a model on the march, with 1,000 DPC practices in 48 states that serve 300,000 patients, according to the Direct Primary Care Coalition.
The Mississippi Department of Insurance does not currently regulate direct primary care providers, owing to legislation passed in 2015. This clarifies that other health care providers may operate under a similar arrangement.
MCPP has reviewed this legislation and finds that it is aligned with our principles and therefore should be supported.
Read SB 2857.
Track the status of this bill and all bills in our legislative tracker.
A bill that would’ve required teams to be designated for one biological sex or the other died without a committee vote on Tuesday, but the idea has found new life attached to another bill.
Sen. Angela Hill (R-Picayune), along with senators Chris McDaniel (R-Ellisville) and Melanie Sojourner (R-Natchez) attached an amendment to Senate Bill 2351 concerning the state’s public high athletics sanctioning body, the Mississippi High School Activities Association.
The bill would require the MHSAA, which is a non-profit corporation chartered by the state, to adhere to the state’s Open Meetings Act.
Her amendment would prevented public school districts from having to join and pay membership dues to the MHSAA or any other sanctioning body that allowed biological males to compete against biological females in sports. While not as expansive as her original legislation, Senate Bill 2240, the amendment accomplishes the goal of keeping biological males from competing against females in sports.
The amendment passed 34-12 and the overall bill passed by a 32-15 margin. It’s being held on a motion to reconsider, meaning the Senate needs to take it up again before sending it to the House.
The problem of biological males competing against females is an issue with vast statewide support that even cuts across partisan lines. According to a recent poll by Mason Dixon, 79 percent of the 625 registered voters in the poll said they would support a law prohibiting biological males from competing in female-only sporting leagues. Seventeen percent opposed such a law.
According to the poll, 65 percent of Democrats, 83 percent of independents and 87 percent of Republicans favored the legislation.
SB 2240 would’ve required any public school, university, or community college team to be either designated for those of one biological sex or the other (in addition to an exception for co-ed teams). It died without a vote in committee on the March 3 deadline.
The legislation also had a clause that would allow any student who reports a violation of the law and is retaliated against by the school or other athletic association to have the right to injunctive relief and damages. Another would’ve allowed a student whose bodily privacy was violated to have the same rights.