Law and Government
As with all other U.S. states and the federal government, Mississippi's government is based on the separation of legislative, executive and judicial power. Executive authority in the state rests with the Governor, currently Phil Bryant (R). The Lieutenant Governor, currently Tate Reeves (R), is elected on a separate ballot. Both the governor and lieutenant governor are elected to four-year terms of office. Unlike the federal government, but like many other U.S. States, most of the heads of major executive departments are elected by the citizens of Mississippi rather than appointed by the governor.
Mississippi is one of five states that elects its state officials in odd-numbered years (the others are Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey and Virginia). Mississippi holds elections for these offices every four years, always in the year preceding Presidential elections, the most recent of which was in 2011.
Uniquely, Mississippi was the last state to give shares of its popular vote exceeding 85% and 90% to one candidate in a presidential election: in 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt won nearly 94% of Mississippi's popular vote, and in 1964, Barry M. Goldwater carried the state with 87% of votes.
Read more about this topic: Economy Of Mississippi
Famous quotes containing the words law and, law and/or government:
“Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you ... take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal profession, or was at one time, and have only lost standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the lawyer that make popular government under a written constitution and written statutes possible.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The wit of man has devised cruel statutes,
And nature oft permits what is by law forbid.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)