While we don’t have official numbers, estimates say some 15,00-20,000 Mississippi children are homeschooled during normal times. Currently, every child in the state is learning at home as the state deals with the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Without a clear timetable to return to school, we have seen a push toward distance – or online – learning for all Mississippians. Yesterday, Gov. Tate Reeves issued two new executive orders, including one to implement distance learning.

“During the remainder of the school year districts immediately begin working with the Mississippi Department of Education to develop and implement distance learning or other instructional means to achieve completion of essential grade-level instruction for the 2019-2020 school year,” the order reads. 

As the education future continues to develop, we will continue to see a demand for online learning, and not just for this spring. With online learning options, students literally have the world at their fingertips. Whether it’s a unique subject with hard-to-find instructors, a class they need more help with, or one that they are wishing to dive deeper into, the ability to use technology to transform education is very real. And it’s already happening. Whether you are in need of a short-term fix or long-term planning, there are dozens of free online resources, many that schools already use within the traditional brick-and-mortar realm. 

While it is something that could be vitally beneficial for our future, online education is something that Mississippi leaders have been slow to support.  

Virtual schools serve as a resource for many families enrolled in charter schools across the country, but they are prohibited in Mississippi’s limited charter law. Some states even have a hybrid mix of homeschool/ charter school facilities where students attend a couple days per week while still doing most of their education at home. Mississippi has a virtual public high school, but it’s simply a couple courses a student can take, not a full distance learning program. 

And the renewal of the Education Scholarship Account program for students with special needs strips online learning from the inclusion of educational expenses families can be reimbursed for. 

Colleges and universities have led in online learning, with fully online programs long available for those who either don’t want to attend a traditional school or need the flexibility to balance their work and family. Regardless, the technology and future are here. We need to move beyond the box that education currently sits in. 

Because the next time the world pauses, it would be nice if we could seamlessly flow to online learning. And for those who could benefit from online learning every day of the week, it would be nice to make that available for Mississippi students. 

It is time to bring the technological future to K-12 rather than continuing to fight it. 

The Senate defeated a bill that would have authorized the direct shipment of wine last night. And the vote wasn’t even close. 

Senate Bill 2534, authored by Sen. Walter Michel (R-Ridgeland) and carried by Sen. Josh Harkins (R-Flowood) on the floor, would have made Mississippi the 44th state in the country to allow consumers to purchase wine and have it shipped directly to their house. Currently in Mississippi, a control state, you are limited to what the state has in stock, limiting your freedom to choose the wine you prefer. If ABC doesn't have it available, you don't have the option.

On deadline day, the bill came to the floor and was defeated 32-13. Thirteen Republicans voted for the bill, and two others that would have supported the bill paired their votes with opponents. Every other Republican voted no, as did the entire Democratic caucus.  

This is the latest defeat this session, though we don’t usually see floor votes showcasing the opposition from legislators. Earlier this session, bills to allow wine in grocery stores died in committee without a vote considered in either chamber. 

House Bill 981, sponsored by Rep. Brent Powell (R-Flowood), and Senate Bill 2531, sponsored by Michel, would have allowed wine to be sold in grocery stores, while providing up to six permits. You are currently limited to one permit. Wine sales in grocery stores are legal in 39 states, including Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee. But it will remain illegal in Mississippi, at least in 2020.  

Some new establishments, including Costco in Ridgeland, Whole Foods in Jackson, and Sam’s Club in Madison, have separate establishments that sell alcohol – essentially their own liquor store attached to their main store, but not a place you can access without leaving the main grocery store. Most grocery stores can’t or won’t take on what is an unnecessary burden. 

The opposition to alcohol freedom is very loud, and obviously influential with legislators. 

And they don’t even hide what they are trying to do. It is liquor stores who don’t want competition, and everyone in Jackson knows that. But it shouldn’t be the job of the legislature to pick winners and losers. Coupled with the Department of Revenue who says we can’t handle the capacity of the wine needed to stock Kroger and Walmart (maybe we should remove the state from the alcohol distribution business), you have a pretty dangerous one-two punch that has outgunned citizens who overwhelmingly favor these ideas. 

It is abundantly clear that most Mississippians who don’t have a vested interest in the status quo want change. They are tired of having the government make life decisions for them and would prefer that they have the ability to decide if, when, and where they purchase wine, and how it is delivered. 

For a party that prides itself on free markets and competition, Republicans are very scared of anything resembling a free market for alcohol. 

The Senate Constitution Committee passed out a legislative alternative to the medical marijuana ballot initiative Wednesday that cleared the House yesterday.

Earlier today, the motion to reconsider on House Concurrent Resolution 39 was tabled and it was transmitted to the Senate. During a short Senate recess this evening, the Constitution committee met, took up the resolution, and it passed in one minute without discussion.

HCR 39 — sponsored by Rep. Trey Lamar (R-Senatobia) — passed 72-49 Tuesday after several rounds of contentious debate on a largely party-line vote with most Republicans voting yes for the alternative. 

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.

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 86,185 total with at least 17,237 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.

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.

"The House showed (yesterday) that they couldn’t care less about the people who are suffering from debilitating medical conditions in our state and who could be helped with medical marijuana," Jamie Grantham, Mississippians for Compassionate Care Communications Director. "The battle now shifts to the Senate. We hope that Lt. Governor Delbert Hosemann and the Senate will do the right thing and oppose this alternative amendment to give Mississippians a fair vote on medical marijuana this November.”

The Senate could take the alternative resolution up as early as tomorrow. 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.

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.

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. 

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. 

Senate Bill 2534, sponsored by Sen. Walter Michel, would allow for the direct shipment of wine to a house. 

Mississippi is one of seven states that currently prohibit the shipment of wine to a house, meaning consumers in most states enjoy this freedom. This would end that prohibition.

This, however, is just one small part of the state’s desire to regulate, and in many cases, prohibit, legal alcohol sales in the state. 

While the internet, technological developments, and more have made the purchase and production of alcohol freer and easier in other states, Mississippi has denied its citizens personal liberty on this issue. 

The state has discouraged craft beer production, overregulated alcohol distribution, and cracked down on the ability for citizens to privately produce alcohol. Permits are difficult to secure, and thus many businesses have been left in the dark, unable to expand or operate. 

Mississippi could make considerable strides by entrusting in its citizens a greater personal responsibility and freedom when it comes to alcohol sale and production. 

There is much the state could do, but this is a step in the right direction. 

MCPP has reviewed this legislation and finds that it is aligned with our principles and therefore should be supported. 

Read SB 2534.

Track the status of this and all bills in our legislative tracker.

Mississippi became one step closer to legalizing the cultivation of hemp after it easily passed the House this afternoon. 

The debate was lengthy, many questions were asked, amendments offered, but in the end the Mississippi Hemp Cultivation Act passed 105-9. The nine voting against the bill were all Republicans: Reps. Jim Beckett, Donnie Bell, Scott Bounds, Jill Ford, Bill Kinkade, Sam Mims, Ken Morgan, Karl Oliver, and Troy Smith. 

Ford, a Madison Republican, offered a toxic amendment that would require any hemp plants “that are processed for use in medicinal products or products that are ingested or applied to the body must be grown and cultivated in organic soil.” This would mean soil that does not contain man-made contaminants, something Rep. Tommy Reynolds (D-Charleston), the author of the bill, said would render the law useless and unworkable. The amendment was tabled on a voice vote.

A near identical bill has been offered in the Senate where legalization stalled in 2019, and was turned into the task force that met last year. But momentum is on the side of legalization. 

If that is true, this would just be part of a national trend. 

We have seen a massive move toward hemp legalization at the state level after the 2018 Farm Bill expanded the cultivation of hemp. Previously, federal law did not differentiate hemp from other cannabis plants, even though you can’t get high from hemp. Because of this, it was essentially made illegal. But we did have pilot programs or limited purpose small-scale program for hemp, largely for research. 

Now, hemp cultivation is much broader, with the Farm Bill allowing the transfer of hemp across state lines, with no restrictions on the sale, transport, or possession of hemp-derived products. There are still limitations, but most states have taken the opportunity to find new markets for those who would like to cultivate hemp. 

In fact, hemp cultivation is legal in 47 states today. Mississippi, Idaho, and South Dakota are the lone holdouts. And the South Dakota legislature Ok’d hemp legalization last year, but it was vetoed by Gov. Kristi Noem.    

The act will be effective after passage, something supporters hope will allow farmers to cultivate hemp this growing season.