By Christopher Young,
Contributing Writer,
With few exceptions, you could count on former House Speaker Philip Gunn to uphold the status quo of inequity in Mississippi, the unwavering mindset of yesterday’s thinking and behavior that keeps us locked to the bottom. By all reports, he did deviate from the norm when it came to changing the state flag. On June 22, 2015, he released a statement about the flag, “As a Christian, I believe our state’s flag has become a point of offense that needs to be removed. We need to begin having conversations about changing Mississippi’s flag.” It took six years, but the Stars and Bars were removed, with the help of Gunn and many others.
Yet in May of 2022, when the bombshell Southern Baptist Convention sexual abuse scandal report was released, we learned that this same Christian was serving as an attorney for Morrison Heights Baptist Church in Clinton, whose music director, John Langworthy, had admitted to church officials that he had abused young boys in previous positions at First Baptist Church in Jackson and Daniel Memorial Church in Jackson, as well as another church in Texas prior to his time at Morrison Heights. When Langworthy admitted his misdeeds in 2011, the head of Morrison Heights never reported it to the police, and later is apparent that Gunn tried to make the matter go away, per reporting by Mississippi Today on May 24, 2022.
At the start of the 2020 legislative session, Republican Representative Jason White (R-48) was elected as House Speaker Pro Tempore. In 2022, after the Senate passed SB2033 to expand Medicaid coverage from 60 days to 12 months for post-partum mothers – in a state with the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the nation per worldpopuationreview.org – Speaker Gunn made it emphatically clear, in complete contradiction to medical experts and associations, that it would go nowhere in the House, and sure enough it died on the calendar as more mothers and children died.
But a year later, two things happened with the same legislation, which was now labeled SB2212, first while Gunn continued to oppose the bill that had passed again in the Senate, White – his longtime lieutenant – broke with Gunn and voted for the expanded postpartum coverage under Medicaid. Second, no doubt owing to an election campaign only a year away, Governor Reeves signed the legislation into law, saving hundreds of lives of mothers and children in doing so.
In 2023, White still sided with former Speaker Gunn voting in favor of HB1020, per Legiscan.com, which became law, dealing a devastating and plainly racist blow to the capital city of Jackson and Hinds County – white men siphoning power from elected black leadership in a majority black city and county and diminishing voter autonomy.
Now as Speaker in 2024, with Gunn no longer present in the Capitol, White promised to get the larger statewide Medicaid expansion on the table, telling the Associated Press on January 12, 2024, he “wants legislators to consider Medicaid expansion as a way to bring up to $1 billion of federal money to the state each year.” Is Speaker White business minded? We certainly know he is not opposed to change, after all, he was elected in November 2011 in District 48 as a Democrat, but about a year later, on December 11, 2012, he changed his party affiliation to Republican, per the Clarion-Ledger, on the same date.
Pushing further, longtime conservative syndicated columnist Bill Crawford offered an opinion piece in the Daily Journal on April 20, 2024, praising Speaker White as a “good government conservative.” He focused on the Medicaid expansion issue, and White’s approach that he shared with Mississippi Today in an April 8, 2024, interview. “My Republicans think that is the smart, common sense, business-minded thing to do,” White said, explaining that federal dollars would fully fund the first four years of expansion. “I’ll admit this. Most of my Republicans don’t get there because of compassion. They get there when they look at dollars and cents.”
“Now, if you come for the savings and stay for the compassion,” White said, “I think that’s all the more better, you know, to give these people a chance at some decent health care, some regular preventive health care that might prevent some of the problems that we end up – guess what – paying for anyway.”
It is such a sad reality that this Medicaid expansion debate is even necessary. Our governor, now term-limited in his second term, continues to call it Obamacare, and threatens a veto if passed. Reeves has a degree in economics, but surely doesn’t act like it while presiding over the poorest state in the nation. He dog-whistles federally funded healthcare, while 47.10% of our state’s funding comes from the federal government, per the FY24 Legislative Budget Report. He strives to reduce individual income taxes, even as they make up 32.32% of the state’s revenue, per the same report.
If Speaker White can influence “his” Republicans in a positive manner which can lead to improving the health and lives of poor and low-wage earning Mississippians in The Hospitality State, the opposite of what his iron-fisted predecessor did, then more power to him. And please Lord, make it by a veto-proof majority.
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