There's the possibility of some legal wrangling (read: power struggle) here in my home state. The Mississippi state constitution gives the governor the authority to veto individual provisions from—and only from—spending bills. But if it's a general bill, the governor can only veto/endorse the whole thing.
As I understand it from this news article, apparently the Legislature tried to be tricky this year and passed a set of twin bills:
- SB 2189, which amounts to "Here is the list of projects we want to give money to" but doesn't contain the authority to spend that money—i.e., it's technically a general bill, not a spending bill, and
- SB 3051, which amounts to "We authorize spending all the money listed in SB 2189."
Governor Reeves took the—not totally unreasonable, in my view—position that SB 2189 was effectively a spending bill, even if it strictly speaking didn't authorize releasing funds, and vetoed several of the particular projects it contained. Regardless of whether these projects should be funded or not (a question on which I don't have an opinion), it seems like it should be obvious that the Legislature shouldn't be able to get around constitutional provisions it doesn't like merely by creating, in essence, dummy bills. On the other hand, it's often the case that as my late father, a lawyer, said to me more than once, the law doesn't mean what it means; it means what it says.
So we'll see what happens.
#uspolitics #statepolitics #mississippi #law
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