The Mississippi Free Press reported recently on a failed effort in Mississippi to restore the public’s right to initiate and vote on statewide referenda.
Mississippi citizens will not be able to organize and vote on issues using ballot initiatives again any time soon after a Mississippi Senate leader allowed legislation that would have revived the option to die on calendar due to multiple concerns—including his fear that voters could use an initiative to repeal the state’s “right-to-work” law, which severely limits labor union organizing in the state.
The Mississippi Supreme Court nullified the ballot initiative process in a 2021 ruling that also killed a voter-approved medical marijuana law. Senate Concurrent Resolution 533, which lawmakers in the upper chamber passed on Feb. 9, would have restored a more limited version of the ballot initiative process.
The House made substantial modifications to the Senate’s bill, though, including removing a provision that said voters would not be able to “amend or repeal the constitutional guarantee that the right of any person to work shall not be denied or abridged on account of membership or nonmembership in any labor union or organization.” They also inserted a prohibition on using ballot initiatives to amend Mississippi’s highly restrictive abortion laws, which polls show most voters oppose.
After the House made its changes, Mississippi Senate Accountability, Efficiency, Transparency Committee Chairman John A. Polk could have sent the bill back to the Senate floor for concurrence or he could have called for a conference between the two chambers to iron out their differences. Instead, the Hattiesburg Republican allowed it to die on deadline Thursday.
Polk told the Mississippi Free Press he did not see a path to an agreement.
“We were so far apart. I don’t think there was any way we would ever get an agreement in conference,” the senator said.
The chairman said it “was disturbing to me” that House lawmakers removed language from the bill that would have prohibited voters from altering Mississippi’s right-to-work law.
“They took that out of the bill we sent, and that was disturbing to me because I’m not sure why they did it,” he said. “Mississippi needs and should be a right-to-work state.”
While supporters of right-to-work laws say they increase worker freedom by banning union membership requirements as a condition of employment, opponents argue that such laws lower wages and weaken worker protections by curtailing the ability of labor unions to organize.
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Democracy is not alive and well in a state that refuses to acknowledge the will of the people but prefers to limit the voice of the public by gerrymandering control of the legislature.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Slavery is the original form of Capitalism.
And it always, always reverts to type.
“of the people, by the people, for the people” When this is no longer observed by our elected officials, then the government no longer works for us and we cease to be a democracy
Traitor Trump gave rise to and helped spread a terminal disease of the brain that may one day destroy the U.S. Constitution and the democracy guided by that document.
That destroyer of rational based reason may even one day bring an end to global civilization as we know it, leaving in its wake nothing but wreck and ruin.
In the US, that malignancy is known as MAGA, and it is more dangerous by far than COVID. In the Middle East it is known as ISIS.
The citizens have a referendum every time they elect legislators. The reason the referendum proposal will be defeated is because of the legislators the people elect. The reason that Unions are weak in Mississippi is because the people do not vote to be organized. After 3 plus decades the people of Michigan finally and barely got rid of their Republican Legislature. Yesterday in less than 3 months Gretchen Whitmer signed a repeal of Right To Work.
Do you think that the citizens who vote for these troglodytes are going to vote
for a referendum to strengthen Unions that they vote against joining. Three decades after Thomas Frank wrote “Whats the Matter With Kansas ” we are still asking whats the matter with Kansas . Perhaps we are going about this all wrong. Let the Social Safety Net fall and see how long it takes for the guillotines to come out .
While it is true that communities of color suffer proportionally more in these states. It is also true that in sheer numbers more Whites are the victims of these policies that crush the working class.
“There was hardly a farmer in the 1890s nor a worker on a bread line in the 1930s who did not know who was screwing them and how” . And if they forgot FDR reminded them.