Below is a political opinion column by Bobby Harrison:
It is tough to determine the exact reason the Mississippi Legislature adjourned the 2025 session without a budget to fund state government, which will force lawmakers to return in special session to adopt a spending plan before the new fiscal year begins July 1.
In a nutshell, the breakdown seemed to have occurred when members of the Senate got angry at their House counterparts because they were not being nice to them. Or maybe vice versa.
Trying to suss this reasoning out is too difficult. The whole breakdown is confusing. It’s adolescent.
Perhaps there’s no point in trying to determine a reason. After all, when preteen children get mad at each other on the playground and start bickering, does it serve any purpose to ascertain who is right?
During a brief time early in the 2000s, when the state had the semblance of a true two-party system, the Legislature often had to extend the session or be called back in special session to finish work on the budget.
During those days, though, the Democrat-led House, the Republican-controlled Senate and the Republican governor were arguing about policy issues. There were often significant disagreements then over, say, how much money would be appropriated to the public schools or how Medicaid would be funded.
Now, with Republicans holding supermajorities over both the House and the Senate and a Republican in the Governor’s Mansion, the disagreements do not seem to rise to such legitimate policy levels.
It appears the necessity of a special session this summer is the result of House leaders not wanting to work on a weekend. And actually, that seemed like a reasonable request. It has always been a mystery why the Legislature could not impose earlier budget deadlines keeping lawmakers from having to work every year on a weekend near the end of the session.
But there were rumblings that if the House members did not want to work on the weekend, they should have been willing to begin budget negotiations with senators earlier in the session.
In fairness and to dig deeper, there also was speculation that the budget negotiations stalled because senators were angry that the House leadership was unwilling to work with them to fix mistakes in the Senate income tax bill. Instead of working to fix those mistakes in the landmark legislation, the House opted to send the error-riddled bill to the governor to be signed into law — because after all, the mistakes in the bill made it closer to the liking of the House leadership and Gov. Tate Reeves.
In addition, there was talk that House leaders were slowing budget negotiations by trying to leverage the Senate to pass a litany of bills ranging from allowing sports betting outside of casinos to increasing school vouchers to passing a traditional pet projects or “Christmas tree” bill.
The theory was that the House was mad that the Senate was balking on agreeing to pass the annual projects bill that spends state funds for a litany of local projects. For many legislators, particularly House members, their top priority each year is to bring funds home to their district for local projects, and not having a bill to do so was a dealbreaker for those rank-and-file House members.
To go another step further, some claimed senators were balking on the projects bill because of anger over the aforementioned tax bill. Another theory was that the Senate was fed up with House Ways and Means Chair Trey Lamar sneaking an inordinate number of projects in the massive bill for his home county of Tate.
But as stated earlier, does the reason for the legislative impasse really matter? The bottom line is that it appears that the reason for legislators not agreeing on a budget had nothing to do with the budget itself or disagreement over how much money to appropriate for vital state services.
House and Senate budget negotiators apparently did not even meet at the end of the session to fulfill the one task the Mississippi Constitution mandates the Legislature to fulfill: fund state government.
As a result, lawmakers will have to return to Jackson this summer in a costly special session not because of big policy issues, such as how to fund health care or how much money to plow into the public schools, but because “somebody done somebody wrong.”
Those big fights of previous years are less likely today because of the Republican Party grip on state government. The governor, the speaker and the lieutenant governor agree philosophically on most issues.
But in the democratic process, people who are like-minded can still have major disagreements that derail the legislative train — even if those disagreements are over something as simple as whether members are going to work during a weekend.
-- Article credit to Bobby Harrison for Mississippi Today --
