Two recent stories prove that we are all flawed humans who sometimes make mistakes.
In Washington, national security officials used an unsecure app to discuss plans to fire missiles into Yemen without realizing they had invited a reporter into the conversation.
And in Jackson, a long debate over eliminating the state income tax ended when the state Senate mistakenly approved a bill that made it too easy to keep cutting the tax rate in the 2030s.
The legislative story deserves attention since it happened in Mississippi, but also because the fallout from the error shows how much enmity has built up between Republicans in the House and the Senate.
The Mississippi Today website quoted House Speaker Jason White as confirming that his members had discovered mathematical errors in the Senate’s version of the income tax cut bill but passed it anyway. They sent it on to Gov. Tate Reeves, who said he will sign it into law.
The House for some time has wanted to eliminate the income tax over the next few years. The Senate has resisted, saying it’s unwise to remove a large percentage of state revenue during uncertain times.
Finally, though, Senate Republicans came around, agreeing to eliminate the income tax over the next decade, but only if the state met goals for economic growth and government spending. Unfortunately for the Senate, the bill they sent back to the House mixed decimals and percentages, making the growth and spending goals miniscule — not zero but pretty close.
House Republicans were a bit too glad to approve the Senate version. They knew their counterparts had messed up, but took advantage of the mistake to send a bill to Reeves that was much closer to what the governor and the House had wanted all along.
Tax elimination advocates surely have enjoyed the story. They can say the Senate didn’t pay attention to the details and have no one to blame but themselves. That is certainly true.
Still, this is the wrong way to handle an important issue. It is even more clear now that House and Senate Republicans neither like nor trust each other all that much. This is not how a party in control of a government should behave.
White, the speaker, said his price for fixing the legislation is concessions from the Senate.
Mississippi Today, for example, said House Republicans want the Senate to agree to the House plan to use lottery sales to improve the finances of the Public Employees Retirement System.
The House does have the advantage here. But what goes around comes around, and you can be sure the Senate will remember this in 2026 and beyond, when the House needs a favor.
The Senate’s errors will not be applied to income tax rates for at least six years, so there’s plenty of time to fix this. The first step, it seems, would be to turn down the temperature among Republicans in the state Capitol.
