Dem
51
GOP
49
After the Republican-controlled Mississippi state legislature decided not to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would provide 90% of the funding via the Affordable Care Act (as in, "poor people deserve to be sick"), a citizens group tried to bypass the legislature using a ballot initiative. This sort of thing has happened before and is not unusual per se.
What is unusual is that the state Constitution specifically states that ballot initiatives must collect a minimum number of signatures in each of the state's five congressional districts. This was put in to prevent citizens from collecting all the signatures in MS-02, which covers the western 40% of the state (including Jackson, Natchez, and Vicksburg) and is 63% Black. This is the D+11 district of Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who chaired the 1/6 select committee.
Now here's the problem. In the 2000 reapportionment, Mississippi lost a House seat and now has only four House seats. In 2021, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that the Medicaid initiative was invalid because it didn't have enough signatures from the (nonexistent) MS-05. Specifically, the state Constitution says that no congressional district may supply more than one-fifth of the required number of signatures, which is 12% of the total vote for governor in the most-recent gubernatorial election. So not only did the Medicaid initiative fail, but no new initiatives are possible anymore. At least, not until the state Constitution is amended to say that each district must supply at least N/k valid signatures, where N is 12% of the total vote in the previous gubernatorial election and k is the current number of congressional districts. Maybe if the Mississippi legislature spent more time passing laws requiring all students to take elementary algebra and less time passing laws banning critical race theory, problems like this wouldn't occur. But maybe the legislature considers this a feature of its Constitution, not a bug. (V)