Gov. Tate Reeves has said that while his office has looked into the closing of bars and restaurants, he is hesitant to issue mandatory closings to private businesses. The city of Oxford had less restraint last night.
As the COVID-19 virus pandemic spreads, the Oxford Board of Aldermen unanimously passed a resolution Tuesday night that requires restaurants and bars to shut down common dining facilities. Restaurants will only be allowed to use drive-through, curbside pick-up, or delivery methods.
The resolution also gave the mayor the power to close all liquor stores and to order a general curfew as deemed necessary. The curfew could only last up to five days.
The mayor also was given the power to issue additional orders that “are necessary for the protection of life and liberty.”
According to the Daily Journal, several Oxford restaurants had voluntarily closed, including Ajax Diner, Proud Larry’s, The Sipp, McEwen’s, Volta Taverna, Oxford Canteen, and Track 61.
As of yesterday's count, there were 21 positive cases in Mississippi from the following counties: Copiah, Forrest, Hancock, Harrison, Hinds, Jackson, Leflore, Monroe, and Pearl River. There have been 389 individuals tested by the state’s public health laboratory.
The Mississippi House of Representatives adopted a bill today to protect the rights of college students to speak freely about the causes and issues they hold dear. The bill codifies existing federal case law for the state of Mississippi to avoid expensive litigation for public universities and colleges.
“The last place on earth we should expect to see free speech go unprotected is on a college campus,” said Jon Pritchett, President and CEO of Mississippi Center for Public Policy (MCPP). “Students and administrators need to tolerate speech with which they may disagree. And while this is not a left or right issue, it is important to thank Speaker Philip Gunn and the House for their leadership and action on this important issue.”
Eighty-three percent of Mississippi voters support legislation that “would protect speech for all college students, even if others disagree with their point of view.” This law has broad public support in every corner of the state. Seventy-eight percent of Democrats, 88 percent of Republicans, and 80 percent of independents support the law.
HB 1200 does not protect speech that would incite violence or harassment or would objectively disrupt a campus event or activity. It only applies to the campus community and allows universities to set reasonable limits to speech and peaceful protests.
“Under House Bill 1200, schools would not be able to create specific ‘free speech zones’ and they would have to use ‘clear, published, content-and viewpoint-neutral criteria’ in restricting student speech and gatherings,” explained Dr. Jameson Taylor, Vice President for Policy with MCPP. These criteria are set forth in U.S. Supreme Court decisions like Healy v. James (1972) andTinker v. Des Moines (1969) and, more recently in the lower courts, Barnes v. Zaccari (2015) andKoala v. Khosla (2019).”
According to a recent audit by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, there is an “urgent” need to address unconstitutional restrictions on campuses like at Ole Miss. The University of Mississippi “has set out unconstitutional rules for ‘Speaker’s Corners,’ ‘Organized Student Demonstrations,’ carrying props, and use of sidewalk chalk. It has, moreover, a Bias Incident Response Team, whose stated procedures will almost inevitably trigger a legal challenge.” Likewise, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), cautions that “the picture on the ground in Mississippi is not all rosy.” FIRE is currently suing Jones County Community College for violating the free speech rights of student Mike Brown.
Almost 20 states have passed campus free speech protections, including every state in the SEC except Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina.
Full poll results can be found here. The poll was conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy.
Mississippi’s slow, but steady, progress toward reforming the state's civil asset forfeiture program continued this week in the House.
House Bill 1398, sponsored by Rep. Dana Criswell (R-Olive Branch), would end the practice where law enforcement or prosecutors could request a property owner to waive their rights to their property, often in exchange for charges to be dropped. The new language in the bill will also change the burden of proof for forfeiture to clear and convincing evidence.
Over the past five years, the state has begun to make small steps from a program that not too long ago had no transparency on what was happening to property rights in the state. Through task force recommendations, the state adopted a transparency website that brought light to what was being forfeited. Two years ago, the legislature let administrative forfeiture – which allows agents of the state to take property valued under $20,000 and forfeit it by merely obtaining a warrant and providing the individual with a notice – die.
Still, significant reforms remain harder to come by. The original language of HB 1398 would’ve put caps on what kind of property that state and local governments can acquire via civil asset forfeiture. That bill would have exempted property, currency totaling $500 or less, and a vehicle with a market value of $2,500 or less from civil asset forfeiture.
According to the most recent analysis of the civil asset forfeiture database by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, of the 353 seizures in 2019, 118 of them of them had a total value of $2,500 or less.
There were 41 vehicles seized by law enforcement with an average value of $5,091 in 2019. Of those, 29 would’ve been below the cap set by Criswell’s bill and would not have been eligible for forfeiture.
Despite the narrative that civil asset forfeiture is a vital tool for busting big drug cartels, most seizures are small in size. Only three seizures were $60,000 or more in 2019 and 177 had a total value of $10,000 or less.
HB 1398 passed 107-10, with ten Republicans voting against it: Reps. William Andrews, Jim Beckett, Kevin Felsher, Jill Ford, Dale Goodin, Gene Newman, Brent Powell, Randy Rushing, Troy Smith, and Mark Tullos.
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.
Senate Bill 2726, sponsored by Sen. Derrick Simmons, and House Bill 1299, sponsored by Rep. Abe Hudson, would prohibit food establishments from offering plastic straws, unless requested by a customer.
This law would be enforced by the Department of Health and repeat offenders could receive fines of no more than $300 each year.
For the past few years, the left has moved to plastic straw bans in the name of saving the planet after winning the war on the evil cousin to straws, plastic bags. Saving the planet is a noble idea, if in fact you believe we only have limited years remaining. But plastic straws aren’t going to do it. At least not from America. The U.S. contributes about 1 percent of global plastic waste. Because we have well managed waste management and recycling facilities. In contrast, around 80 percent of plastic waste comes from China and other Asian countries that do not.
Many businesses in an attempt to show their wokeness have stopped using plastic straws. However misguided the virtue signaling may have been, it was the decision of a private company, not the state. And that is where it should stay.
MCPP has reviewed this legislation and finds that it violates our principles and therefore must be opposed.
Track the status of this and all bills in our legislative tracker.
In this episode of Unlicensed, Brett and Hunter talk about goat milk, higher ed, the Democratic primary, and the passing of Lecile Harris, the rodeo clown who is synonymous with the Dixie National Rodeo.
Chief District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III has sent a free speech lawsuit filed by the Mississippi Justice Institute (MJI) back to state court and ordered the city of Jackson to pay the attorneys’ fees incurred by the plaintiffs while opposing the city’s attempt to move the case to federal court.
The lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of an ordinance recently enacted by the city of Jackson which bans free speech outside of the state’s only abortion clinic. MJI is representing the plaintiffs, who are members of Sidewalk Advocates of Life – Jackson, Mississippi.
After MJI filed the lawsuit in Hinds County Circuit Court last fall, the city attempted to remove the lawsuit to federal court, stating in a press release that federal court was “the appropriate venue for this matter,” despite the fact that the plaintiffs had alleged only that the challenged ordinance violated the Mississippi Constitution, and had not made allegations regarding the U.S. Constitution.
In an opinion issued today, Jordan sided with MJI’s motion to remand the case back to state court, stating, “It is up to Mississippi’s courts to interpret the state’s constitution and develop the state’s constitutional law.
“The Court is hard-pressed to find a reasonable basis justifying removal in this case. All of Plaintiffs’ claims allege that the ordinance violated their rights under the Mississippi Constitution. As to Plaintiffs’ free-speech claim, the city said that Plaintiffs necessarily raised a federal issue because their claim concerns an abortion-related law, which ‘is at the center of controversial and evolving federal jurisprudence[.]’ That may be true, but the city cites no case law—nor can the Court find any—from which it could reasonably conclude that this could form the basis of federal-question jurisdiction. As explained, the case law, and basic principles of federalism, are to the contrary.”
The judge also held that attorneys for the city of Jackson lacked any reasonable basis to believe their removal of the case to federal court was legally proper, and therefore ordered the city to pay the legal fees and court costs incurred by the plaintiffs in opposing the move. The Court instructed counsel for the Sidewalk Advocates to submit a motion with an affidavit supported by billing records documenting the reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs that they have incurred. While the plaintiffs are represented by MJI for free, the law allows public interest law firms such as MJI to recover reasonable costs and fees incurred when a defendant improperly removes a case to federal court.
“Quite frankly, we were shocked by the position taken by the city of Jackson in these court filings,” said Aaron Rice, the Director of the Mississippi Justice Institute. “Jackson’s argument completely disregarded the principles of federalism upon which our country was founded, denigrated the competence of state courts to hear state law claims, and was dismissive of the authority of state courts to interpret their own state’s constitution. Fortunately, the federal court understood that, and ensured that state courts will have this important opportunity to interpret the Mississippi Constitution’s free speech protections.”
The new ordinance bans individuals who are near health facilities from approaching within eight feet of any person without consent, for the purpose of engaging in various forms of speech such as counseling, education, or distributing leaflets; bans people from congregating or demonstrating within 15 feet of the abortion facility, and bans any amplified sound. Violations of the ordinance could result in fines of up to $1,000 and 90 days in jail.
“Women regularly accept our offer to help in the midst of an unexpected pregnancy, said Pam Miller, Co-Leader of Sidewalk Advocates for Life – Jackson, Mississippi. “In fact, in partnership with other peaceful community members, more women than ever have opted to take advantage of the free, alternative resources the Jackson community provides. We are committed to connecting women with the loving, life-affirming assistance they deserve, and we will continue to serve the women of Mississippi in a peaceful and law-abiding way.”
“Now that we have resolved this jurisdictional issue, MJI looks forward to vigorously defending our client’s fundamental freedom to have peaceful, compassionate, and respectful conversations in public places about one of the most profound moral and political issues facing our nation,” said Rice. “To deny that right would be to deny the very essence of a free society.”
House Bill 526, sponsored by Rep. Steve Hopkins, and House Bill 628, sponsored by Rep. Randy Boyd, will prohibit municipalities from restricting free speech activities within the vicinity of a medical facility.
This is a response to the city of Jackson’s ordinance that was adopted last year and is designed to prevent individuals from engaging in free speech outside of the state’s only abortion facility.
That ordinance bans individuals who are near health facilities from approaching within eight feet of any person without consent, for the purpose of engaging in various forms of speech such as counseling, education, or distributing leaflets; bans people from congregating or demonstrating within 15 feet of the abortion facility, and bans any amplified sound. Violations of the ordinance could result in fines of up to $1,000 and 90 days in jail.
Shortly after the city adopted the ordinance, the Mississippi Justice Institute filed suit against the city, arguing that the prohibition violates free speech rights.
While the issue of abortion clouds the judgment of many on this issue, free speech – whether you agree with the issue or not – is something that should be encouraged, and protected.
MCPP has reviewed this legislation and finds that it is aligned with our principles and therefore should be supported.
Track the status of this and all bills in our legislative tracker.