JACKSON — Civil-rights protections could be “rolled back” if Mississippi joins a conservative group’s effort to amend the U.S. Constitution, a prominent civil-rights organization is warning.
On Thursday, the Mississippi Senate passed a resolution calling for a new constitutional convention. It would be the first since the original convened in 1787, and would grant representatives from all 50 states broad power to write or even rewrite the U.S. Constitution. Already, 28 have called for a convention, drawing the proponents close to the two-thirds necessary.
Last month, Sen. Angela Burks Hill, the Picayune Republican who is the lead sponsor of Senate Resolution 596, told the Jackson Free Press that she and other proponents are focused on limiting federal power, and have no intention of rolling back civil rights.
“I see a runaway federal government, and I see the opportunity that the founders gave us in the Constitution to reclaim the powers that belong to the state,” she said at the Capitol on Feb. 21. “And I try to keep our federal government from going bankrupt, which I don’t think Congress has any intention of doing right now.”
But Jody Owens, who heads the Mississippi branch of the Southern Poverty Law Center said curbing federal power would threaten civil rights in states like Mississippi, where slavery, segregation, and prohibitions on women’s rights and LGBT rights only ended following federal intervention.
“In Mississippi, historically and now, we know that far too often the federal government has been the lynchpin that has brought out equality in states like Mississippi that needed motivation,” Owens said. “It is our position that any bill that would roll or even have a possibility to roll back those fundamental Constitutional rights are bad for all Mississippians.”
All but one Republican voted for the resolution Thursday, and all but one Democrat voted against it. Sen. J.P. Wilemon Jr., a Belmont Democrat, voted for the resolution; Sen. Terry Burton, a Newton Republican, did not vote.
Backers Support ‘State Sovereignty’
A Texas-based group, Citizens for Self-Governance, or CSG, is behind the push for the resolution. CSG is responsible for resolutions in 13 states that call for a constitutional convention to specifically address four of the group’s priorities: curtailing the national debt, limiting regulations on business and industry, stopping federal “attacks” on “state sovereignty” used to impose a “radical social agenda,” and what it calls the “federal takeover of the decision-making process” by the courts and the executive branch.
Other right-wing and left-wing groups have also backed calls for a convention in other states.
In June 2016, Bruce Cook, who is one of the leaders of the Mississippi branch of CSG, told attendees at a Mississippi Tea Party gathering that the U.S. Supreme Court was pushing “a radical social agenda.”
“The Supreme Court has become a political agency, and we’re hanging by a thread right now,” he said.
Conservatives have long complained similarly about the Supreme Court, going back to its 1954 ruling that struck down school segregation, and continuing with rulings like the one in 1973 that declared abortion a constitutionally protected right and its 2015 ruling that ended state prohibitions on same-sex marriage.
In Mississippi, conversations about “state sovereignty,” encroachment by the federal government and “radical social agendas” inevitably, whether intentional or not, evoke the language of the state’s past. Here, southern whites defended everything from slavery to Jim Crow to school segregation by making arguments for “state’s rights” and “state sovereignty.”
From 1956 to 1977, Mississippi governors used the taxpayer-funded Sovereignty Commission to defend segregation and to collaborate with local law enforcement to spy and clamp down on civil-rights activists, even orchestrating firings and evictions to convince them to give up their activism.
Curtailing civil rights, Hill told the Jackson Free Press, is “absolutely not” what the resolution is about. Under Article V of the Constitution, three-fourths of state legislatures would need to ratify any amendments the delegates pass at a constitutional convention for them to become law. She said that would make it unlikely that an amendment highly offensive to the right or left, like the watering down of civil-rights protections, would pass.
“This is not the intent of this convention,” she said. “It’s not even in the parameters of what we’re trying to accomplish here. And I don’t think you’re going to see 38 states taking civil rights away from people.”
Lt. Gov. Reeves Bowed to Right-Wing Pressure, Owens Says
Last year, the Mississippi House passed CSG’s resolution for a constitutional convention, but the bill died after a Senate committee declined to take it up. Now, in an election year, the Senate has passed the resolution, which heads to the House.
“We saw in previous years that this bill was killed by the same leadership because they knew that this was a bad bill,” Owens said on Thursday. “But what I think we’ve seen is pressure from groups directed at the lieutenant governor and others that they have to be out on issues like this because the far right tells them it’s important.”
Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, who presides over the Mississippi Senate, is a 2019 candidate for the Republican nomination for governor.
Last month, retired Lt. Col. Allen West, a former Republican Florida congressman and Tea Party star, shamed Reeves after he declined to join CSG’s call for a constitutional convention at the Capitol.
“I don’t like it when people shirk their responsibilities,” West said, speaking to a group of Mississippi conservatives in a video that CSG supporters spread across social media earlier this month. “I don’t like it when people have misguided priorities. And I just wonder if the lieutenant governor will be able to look at himself at the end of the day in the mirror knowing that he could not find two minutes. That’s not courage. That’s not what built this country.”
“Ask yourself about these elected officials” before giving them your vote, West told the crowd.
