We are now less than 90 days away from the primary elections in Mississippi. In just three months, we’ll have a better understanding of the trajectory of our state moving forward. There are quite a few legislative seats to be watching, and I hope to give you more information about those in subsequent emails, but for now it seems one of the biggest races of the season is the Lt. Governor’s race. State Senator Chris McDaniel is challenging the incumbent, Delbert Hosemann, who the McDaniel camp has disparagingly named “Delbert the Democrat.” The Mississippi Freedom Caucus isn’t endorsing or engaging in the Lt. Governor’s race, but I can personally understand how one may come to acknowledge that the current Lt. Governor is a moderate-at-best Republican.
It was under Delbert Hosemann’s Senate that the complete income tax elimination bill was watered down to nothing more than a step-down tax cut, not a complete elimination. It was under Delbert Hosemann that an amendment to extend the covid-19 vaccine style religious exemptions to school age children was thrown out after being ruled as “not germane” to a bill that gave religious exemptions to a vaccine. In the vaccine amendment fight, Chris McDaniel used a rarely utilized parliamentary motion to call into question Delbert’s ruling on the vaccine bill’s amendment, garnering half of the Republicans in the Senate to support McDaniel in the procedure. The parliamentary motion ultimately failed when Delbert received every Democrats’ support against McDaniel.
Delbert has championed Obamacare Expansion and supported a bill this year that I released a statement calling the bill “an attempt at a complete government takeover of our hospital system in Mississippi.” Delbert also championed a bill that would pass out $250 checks to every man, woman, and child this year, instead of returning the massive surplus in the state’s tax coffers to the people that actually paid it; but even his cash handout bill died when the legislature decided instead to blow an extra $700 million on “member” projects in a bill that Gov. Tate Reeves acknowledged may have been passed unconstitutionally for a multitude of reasons. We also saw protectionist bills, anti-free market bills, and the government continuing to grow larger under Hosemann’s reign.
We’ve seen no substantial school choice, educational freedom, parental rights bills, or bills to cut the grocery tax make it out of the legislature during Hosemann’s reign. Chris McDaniel has introduced complete income tax elimination bills, 2nd amendment protection bills, fought for parental rights, and medical freedom. All of which died under Delbert Hosemann’s reign. I’ve seen McDaniel’s opponents say he is an “ineffective” lawmaker, but I see the same rhetoric regarding the Mississippi Freedom Caucus. Leadership doesn’t like legislators that won’t bow down to them, killing any bill with their name on it in an attempt to make free thinkers submit.
The GOP platform says that we as Republicans believe in “the conservative principles of individual freedom, personal responsibility, free market economic policies, and a society that respects our God-given rights”, and the belief that “government that governs best should be of the people, by the people, and for the people”, and that “people, not government, know best how to spend their own money.” Those are the basic values that platform Republicans should believe in.
So, when you read those tenets of our Republican platform, who best comes to mind? Is it Delbert Hosemann, or Chris McDaniel?
