When Mississippi lawmakers spend three to four months in Jackson considering thousands of proposals, it’s a certainty that they will end the session with a mixed record.
They will have made good decisions and bad ones. The question, as always, is whether the good outweighed the bad.
On balance, the 2026 session should receive decent marks, mostly for the caution lawmakers showed.
The top issue at the beginning of the session was “school choice,” but the House’s overly ambitious plan, which included provisions to let taxpayers start bankrolling private school tuition for grades K-12, got a deservedly chilly reception in the Senate. The result was little cooperation between the two chambers in getting much passed on the education front. Better a whole lot of inaction, though, than a whole lot of mischief.
What did get enacted was a plan to expand the state’s successful reading initiatives into the upper elementary grades and to emulate the literacy program by doing something similar in math. Also, an across-the-board pay raise of $2,000 for teachers was passed, which was less than both chambers initially proposed but all that they ultimately felt comfortable enacting until the state gets a better read on the direction of its finances.
Some might argue that lawmakers are being overly cautious. After all, state revenues through the first nine months of the current fiscal year are still running ahead of both last year’s collections and this year’s projections. There are, though, legitimate worries over whether the gains can continue.
The war in Iran and the resulting jump in gasoline prices, if they go on much longer, could trigger a global slowdown that will reverberate in Mississippi. Also, at some point, the state’s phased-in elimination of the personal income tax has to be felt by the state treasury. Lawmakers are prudent to keep a cushion to deal with it if and when that happens.
Furthermore, the state’s share of Medicaid costs has risen by hundreds of millions of dollars a year, now that the surpluses built up in that account during the COVID-19 pandemic have disappeared. And there still remains the unsolved long-term problem of a state pension system that is $26 billion short of meeting its future obligations.
One of the big disappointments of the 2026 session is that lawmakers backed away from some of the moderate changes they made a year ago to rein in the cost of the pension system, at least for new employees. Instead, the Legislature appears more inclined to deal with the fiscal instability of the Public Employees’ Retirement by shoveling more public money its way, whether through supplemental appropriations, as the Senate prefers, or a new morally suspect revenue stream by legalizing mobile sports betting, the House’s preference.
Legislators gave too much attention to passing a law that requires proof of citizenship from new voters or from existing voters who are flagged in a national database. At best this law will be a nuisance for voting registrars. At worst it will discourage legitimate voters from participating because of the cost or the inconvenience of providing proof of citizenship. If there was a solution in search of a problem, this law meets the definition. Voting by non-citizens in this state, if it exists, is so miniscule that it doesn’t even register.
There was however a real problem with which one side of the Legislature, the Senate, spent too little time dealing — the lack of accountability within the state corrections system when it comes to inmate deaths, inmate medical care and agency spending. The House did its best to address these issues, but the Senate, blaming it on the ill health of a key committee chairman, was content to let the issues fester for another year.
