JACKSON - The Mississippi Senate on Wednesday failed to override Gov. Haley Barbour's veto of a bill that would have eased the tax burden on food items and made smokers pay more for their habit.
The vote was 29-20, four votes short of what was needed.
"We'll eventually get it, but we may not get it done this session," Sen. David Jordan, D-Greenwood, said today, explaining the Senate hopes to finish its work this week.
Sen. Bunky Huggins, R-Greenwood, who is fighting cancer and has been conducting business from a wheelchair, was in the Senate on Tuesday but not Wednesday, when the vote was taken, Jordan said.
Huggins has not been hospitalized and was expected back in the Senate today.
Jordan said he was disappointed in the failure to override. "I was shocked at that because some of the colleagues who come from some of the most deprived districts voted against it."
Lt. Gov. Amy Tuck predicted the issue would resurface next year. "Hopefully, the people across this state will encourage them (lawmakers) to vote for this measure" in 2007, she said.
The bill would have cut the 7 percent grocery tax - the highest such tax rate in the nation - in half and increased the cigarette tax from 18 cents a pack to 80 cents this July 1 and to $1 a pack a year later.
Jordan said the bill eliminated concerns that a grocery tax decrease would harm municipalities, which receive 18.5 percent of sales tax receipts back from the state. The bill would have raised the percentage received by the cities to make up for the cut, he said. None of the municipalities "would have lost a penny."
During the debate, Sen. Hillman Frazier, D-Jackson, asked his colleagues to think about a gray-haired older woman he had talked to recently at a grocery store in Clinton.
"She said, 'I don't smoke cigarettes but I eat. But I can't afford to buy all I need for my family because of the high taxes,"' Frazier said.
Barbour vetoed the bill March 15, calling it a "risky tax swap."
