House Rules Adopted, Tweaked
The House adopted its new rules last week, replacing sexist language in them, creating new committees and, potentially, limiting media access to legislative activities. The new committees include: Accountability, Drug Policy, Judiciary B (the 50-member committee was split into two), Revenue Expenditure, Technology and Performance Based Budgeting. Now in the House rules, the words “she” and “her” appear in the rules that previously only denoted “he” or “him.”
More significant changes to the House rules, which haven’t changed since 2012 until now, include tightening down on public-information access and the media. The new rules include a section that says employees of the House of Representatives cannot reveal “the contents or nature of any request for services made by any member of the House except with the written consent of the person making such request.” And if they do, they will be terminated immediately.
Additionally, the media accessibility portion of the rules changed to put the Rules Committee in charge of “set(ting) aside space” for members of the press. This contrasts to the old rule, which said the space immediately below the Clerk’s desk in the front of the House was to be set aside for media members.
On Jan. 28, Rep. David Baria, D-Bay St. Louis, brought the change to the House’s attention. “I am concerned what we are doing to our fifth estate with these rule changes,” he told Rep. Jason White, R-West, who spoke on behalf of the Rules Committee.
White said that the new rule change did not require the House to make (or keep) room for the press inside the House chamber, specifically, and that if the Rules Committee so chooses, media members might lose access to the space in front of the clerk’s desk where, currently, major media outlets, including the Jackson Free Press, have a designated space facing the chamber.
From Re-entry to Firing Squads
Attorney General Jim Hood laid out his legislative agenda for 2016, which ranged from creating a statewide re-entry program for inmates to transition back into society to setting up alternative ways to executive death-row inmates, including firing squads.
“We passed House Bill 585 (in 2014) turning out a lot of convicts, but we hadn’t given them skillsets to cope once they’ve re-entered society,” Hood told the press Jan. 27 at his office in the Walter Sillers Building. He is the Mississippi’s only Democrat in statewide elected office.
The attorney general is asking for specific changes to protect children and women affected by human trafficking and domestic violence, including wiretapping authority. His office is calling for an amendment to the definition of “abused child” to include children who have been victims of human trafficking in the Youth Court Act. He is also asking to codify the appeals process for domestic-violence protection orders.
The ACLU of Mississippi applauded the attorney general’s efforts in advocating for a re-entry pilot program, but it strongly opposes his calls for alternate means of execution and keeping related information exempt from public access.
Other proposed changes have been met with criticism. Hood is calling for alternate means of execution, should lethal-injection drugs become unavailable or itself declared unconstitutional. These include nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution or a firing squad. He also wants the identities of the state execution team to remain exempt under the Public Records Act, as well as the lethal injection drug supplier. The attorney general said he and Gov. Phil Bryant agree that alternate means of execution should be available to the state. “We think the state ought to have alternate means (of execution) and if there’s some other method, we should have the ability to fall back on it,” Hood said.
A press statement from the ACLU of Mississippi said that citizens have a right to that public information and that “states have been allowed to conduct executions cloaked in secrecy and free of public and judicial scrutiny, to rely on drugs from unknown and untested sources.”
The ACLU also opposes the death penalty and believes that the state should not give itself the right to kill human beings by any means.
Email reporter Arielle Dreher at arielle@jacksonfreepress.com. Read more MS Legislature stories at jfp.ms/msleg.
