Taylor Vance

The committee is encouraging the public to participate. The public can offer comments at any of the eight public hearings, or submit a redistricting plan to the committee, according to the directions on the committee’s website.

When Tollison is sworn in, she will become the third woman on the court, serving alongside current justices Jenifer Branning from Philadelphia and Celeste Wilson of DeSoto County. This is the largest number of women who have served on the state’s highest court at the same time.

Now 78, Blackmon has spent his life using the law to build Black political power in Mississippi: suing to dismantle at-large electoral districts, redrawing legislative maps to more than double Black representation in the Legislature and even engineering the state's first majority-Black judicial subdistricts.

Tindell said he is “uniquely qualified” to serve as attorney general because of his legislative, judicial and agency experience. He specifically pointed to his initiative to reduce the time the public waits at driver's license bureaus and his efforts to reduce the autopsy backlog at the Mississippi Forensics Laboratory.

The lieutenant governor’s removal of Simmons from the committee comes after Simmons, House Minority Leader Robert Johnson and Legislative Black Caucus Chairman Kabir Karriem wrote a letter to Hosemann and House Speaker Jason White saying they did not believe lawmakers should redraw political districts now.

Construction will start next month and is scheduled to conclude toward the end of 2028. Most road closures are expected to occur at night and on weekends to minimize traffic disruption.

Hyde-Smith participated in a 2018 debate during a special election runoff with opponent Mike Espy. She did not debate Espy two years later when she was running for her first full six-year term.

Barnett in the past pushed for earlier release and shortened sentences for many incarcerated in Mississippi prisons, despite his father being shot to death in the early 1990s while Barnett was in the Army deployed to Iraq.

The state is asking for a new judge, in part, because U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate's staff last year used artificial intelligence to write a flawed order in the case, which drew national scrutiny, including from the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

Telle was a former longtime staffer and top adviser for the late U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, and helped lead federal efforts for the state's recovery after Hurricane Katrina.