JACKSON, Miss.—An effort to make Mississippi’s operation of the Rural Health Transformation Program more transparent is now dead, after Gov. Tate Reeves vetoed it and Republican legislative leadership failed to bring up a motion to override the veto. That prompted Senate Democrats to also block Republican efforts to override every other bill the governor vetoed this year.
“Because the Senate did not bring it up, Senate (Democrats) were not really interested in considering anything else,” Senate Minority Leader Derrick Simmons, D-Greenville, told reporters after adjournment on Wednesday.
Gov. Tate Reeves vetoed a bill that would increase transparency for the Rural Health Transformation Program and ensure struggling rural hospitals receive funding from the program because he said the Trump administration advised him to veto it, claiming Mississippi could lose funding for not using it on time.
Since the Senate did not bring up that bill, the House could not vote to override the veto because the bill originated in the Senate.
Ultimately, the Legislature could not garner enough votes to override vetoes for several other funding bills, nor could they agree to pass a resolution to revive a youth court bill, which leaves the operations of youth courts under the purview of the Mississippi Supreme Court until lawmakers attempt to pass another version of the bill next year, Senate Judiciary A Committee Chairman Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, said.
The House Judiciary A Committee killed House Bill 938 by not bringing it up for a vote earlier in the session. The bill proposed extending current youth court regulations and provisions to 2029.
“I regret that we’re here because of the House’s actions because I just want to be clear that the repealers were addressed in the youth court bill,” Wiggins told reporters after adjournment on Wednesday. “That’s a fact. That could have been handled that way or that was the plan and we know what happened there.”
The House passed House Concurrent Resolution 65 to revive H.B. 938, which had instructed youth courts to operate under current law until lawmakers could pass legislation in 2027 to address it further. But Senate Democrats blocked an attempt to address youth court operations out of protest.
Most of Wednesday was spent waiting for hours as House and Senate leadership figured out how many votes they had to override vetoes. Those efforts appeared fruitless as legislators left Jackson without overriding any vetoes or addressing any other legislation.
While the House clerk read Reeves’ veto messages aloud for members to hear, the Senate clerk did not read veto messages for senators, which is unusual, Simmons told reporters.
“I’ve been here 15 years, and it’s very, very common that when you get to the messages and petitions that if they had any vetoes, they would be read,” he said.
The House voted overwhelmingly to override Gov. Tate Reeves’ partial veto of several lines in House Bill 1924, which authorized the Mississippi attorney general’s office to use opioid settlement funds for several programs that help prevent and mitigate opioid abuse disorder. The lines he vetoed in the bill provided $1.55 million in opioid settlement funds to the Hope Squad, the Gulf Coast Center for Nonviolence and For Finally First.
Reeves did not explain in a veto message why he was opposed to funding these three programs and instead, had one of his legislative aides, Ginny Zirulnik, write that the governor was signing H.B. 1924 into law while issuing partial vetoes for those projects.
But Senate Democrats refused to play ball and voted no to overriding the bill, leaving the vote at 31-19, which is not the necessary two-thirds majority needed to override a veto.
“We believe that coming back was a waste of our time,” Simmons told reporters Wednesday.
The House also voted 110-0 to override the veto of a loan program to establish the Gulf Coast Restoration Revolving Loan Program, which would have provided grants to certain eligible projects. The Senate did not even bring up an attempt to override the veto of House Bill 1648.
A contentious debate came after Appropriations A Vice Chairman Rep. Angela Cockerham, I-Magnolia, motioned to refer House Bill 1653—a bill funding various local projects throughout the state—back to the committee to pass it a two-thirds majority instead of voting immediately on the House floor to override the veto. She said she wanted to refer it back to the committee because the bill’s projects had been in prior bills the governor vetoed in 2023 and 2024, and the House’s lawyers said it would go against legislative procedure for the Legislature to override the vetoes outright.
Several Democrats said that was false and they wanted to override the veto without moving the bill through Cockerham’s process.
“How could a new piece of legislation that’s filed in a subsequently new legislative year be an old matter?” Rep. John Hines, D-Greenville asked Cockerham on the House floor on Wednesday. “The governor invoked that he had done it prior, but this was a new piece of legislation in the 2026 session. Is that not correct?”
“Gentleman, again, everything that you have said—it’s a new bill, it’s a new session, it’s the same project and it’s the project from the same year that he vetoed,” Cockerham replied. “In the governor’s veto message and what the governor just read is that he’s vetoing it out of an abundance of caution because he previously vetoed it in 2023 and 2024 and it was not overridden.”
“So, gentlelady, just because this body did not act on a subsequent veto does not mean that this body cannot act on this veto this time,” Hines said. “Is that not true?”
“Gentleman, I’m going to repeat myself again for the sixth time,” Cockerham replied. “I have spoken with counsel before I came up here, and I’m telling you what counsel told me.”
The House approved Cockerham’s motion to refer H.B. 1653 back to the House Appropriations A Committee, the committee passed it, but the bill did not get brought up for a vote on the House floor.
After missing most of the 2026 legislative session while recovering from a stroke earlier this year, Sen. Juan Barnett, D-Heidelburg, returned to the Capitol on Wednesday with gratitude for his colleagues’ prayer and concern for him during his absence.
“I just ask this body going forward the same love you all showed for me in my moment of health issues, I pray that we show each other on a daily basis that same kind of love,” he said when speaking during a moment of personal privilege on the Senate floor. “I just pray that we can find it in ourselves to not wait until the hospital, not wait until the funeral, but let’s share that with each other on a daily basis because, again, tomorrow may be too late.”
