Mississippi’s new speaker of the House, Jason White, has sent some encouraging signs that he is not only willing to listen to others’ suggestions but perhaps incorporate them into legislation the Republican majority is considering.
There is a leap from saying something to actually doing it, but the fact that White has sounded these tones of bipartisanship several times leading up to and since his installation as House speaker makes one think that he means it.
Let’s hope so.
Mississippi, as with much of the nation, has gotten too polarized in recent times, with much of the leadership in both major political parties not only having difficulty in finding common ground but being disinterested in even trying to find it.
With a supermajority in both the Mississippi House and Senate, it has been tempting for Republican leaders to write off their Democratic colleagues, knowing Republicans had the votes to pass whatever they wanted as long as they kept their own members together.
That one-party approach may work with issues on which Republicans are ideologically monolithic. On matters on which they are split, though, little will get accomplished without some bipartisan agreement.
Two such issues are education funding and Medicaid expansion, both of which White wants the House to look at with an open mind. White is of the camp that believes the 1997 education formula, the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, needs significant retooling. And while he’s not yet ready to champion Medicaid expansion, White sounds so much more reasonable on this issue than did his predecessor, Philip Gunn, or Gov. Tate Reeves. The unflinching opposition of that pair deterred most GOP legislators from pushing the issue, even as their constituents warmed to the sensibility of accepting an extra billion dollars a year from Washington and providing health insurance coverage for 200,000 or so of the working poor.
White said he would not be playing the same political games of demonizing Medicaid expansion because of its association with a Democratic former president, Barack Obama.
“I’m not going to be hung up on names like Obamacare or Affordable Care Act,” said White. “We’re going to try to do what’s best for Mississippi, and I think with less than 3 million people in our state, there ought to be a way for us to figure this out.”
There might be ultraconservative Republicans who will bristle at White’s early bipartisan overtures. They might call him a RINO (Republican in name only) and point to the fact that he was a Democrat before switching to the GOP in 2012, the year after his first successful run for a House seat. They’ve tried to put that same label on another sensible Republican, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who is not afraid to reach across the aisle to try to build consensus on tough issues.
What this state needs, and what this nation needs, though, are people in public office who think it’s more important to do what’s good for the people they serve than what’s good for their personal political fortunes or their parties. Hosemann has demonstrated he is that type of public servant. It is encouraging to think that White might be cut from a similar cloth.
