Mississippi Lt. Gov. Amy Tuck says she has no interest in being appointed to the U.S. Senate.
Tuck attended a performance at the Roxy Theatre in Newton Thursday night. Her friend, Sen. Terry Burton, has a leading role in the play.
Tuck told Newscenter 11 she is not interested in serving in Sen. Trent Lott's seat until a special election is held Nov. 4, 2008, nor in Cong. Chip Pickering's seat, should he be appointed to the Senate position.
Please note that this is a preliminary report. These figures have not been weighted for age, race, or gender. These raw numbers overstate the opinions of women and understate the opinions of African American voters by more than half. Additionally, the survey results understate the opinions of voters under age 50. This preliminary survey significantly overstates the opinions of Republican voters.
Our Democratic candidates for Governor and Lt. Governor are running on trying to cut the regressive grocery tax, the highest in the country. Barbour, a former top tobacco lobbyist, still with financial ties to his former lobbying firm, has repeatedly killed the tax swap legislation that would cut the food tax and offset the revenue loss with a raise of the third lowest tobacco tax in the country. Even the current incumbent Lt. Governor, Republican Amy Tuck has championed the tax swap.
I wonder why?Barbour had been among the tobacco industry's top lobbyists prior to returning to Mississippi. Between 1998 and 2002, such tobacco companies as Phillip Morris, RJR Nabisco, Brown and Williamson, and U.S. Tobacco paid his firm $3.8 million. The firm has collected more than $2 million in tobacco revenue since Barbour became governor.
Barbour’s grip on power here has even members of his own party scared of him:To this day, few in the GOP have dared cross Barbour on the matter. Recently, lobbyists from the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program asked several Republicans to pledge to raise the tobacco tax. They encountered near-universal resistance. "A lot of Republicans are saying, Do you know what you're doing? If I sign this thing, then Haley will come and dump more money into my opponent's campaign,'" says Roy Mitchell, the program's director.
And he rewarded his friends with Katrina money for towing the line on the food/tobacco tax swap legislation:This year, legislators tried again, introducing two more bills that would have halved the state's grocery tax and raised the cigarette tax by $1. Barbour didn't even lift his veto pen this time around--the bills died at the hands of Senate finance committee chairman Tommy Robertson. Oddly, Robertson had been a vocal advocate of previous tax-swap bills. Earlier this year, however, he and two other Republican legislators--who, in their day jobs, are lawyers--had received a $1.2 million contract from the Mississippi Development Authority, which is overseen by the governor, to help homeowners finalize their Katrina grants. The contract raised more than a few eyebrows. (In an interview, Robertson said the contract--which was cleared by the state ethics commission on a party-line vote--had "absolutely nothing" to do with his stance on the tax swap.)
Sure Tommy.
Albeit inadvertently, the Republican Party finally has done something nice for Amy Tuck. With Rep. Chip Pickering's resignation, the outgoing lieutenant governor becomes a presumed frontrunner for the Third District seat that Pickering vacates.
Conventional wisdom assumed that Tuck, whom term limits prevented from seeking re-election this year, would be left on the outside looking in at the political world until Pickering ran for the U.S. Senate after Trent Lott or Thad Cochran call it quits. But with Cochran poised for one last campaign, that would've left Tuck out of a job until 2012 at the earliest.
If Tuck chooses to run and wins, then she'll have a five-year head start on that scenario and be in prime position for a Senate seat that, until today, was never a realistic possibility for her.
