Latest news with #CindyHydeSmith
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Harrison: Hyde-Smith hopes ‘26 will be first easy Senate campaign in Mississippi
The recent announcement that state Agriculture and Commerce Commissioner Andy Gipson plans to run for governor has fueled speculation about who will be running for what office in a wide open 2027 Mississippi election cycle. Will all or any of the combination of Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, Auditor Shad White, Attorney General Lynn Fitch enter the gubernatorial donnybrook? Who will be the Democratic Party standard bearer, and will Democrats field competitive candidates for any of the other down-ticket statewide offices that could be vacant based on who is running for governor? Perhaps, most importantly, will billionaire businessman Thomas Duff of Hattiesburg enter the gubernatorial race after showing numerous signals that he intends to? But before the 2027 elections roll around there will be another consequential statewide race in Mississippi: for the U.S. Senate in 2026. Incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith will be running in her third U.S. Senate race, and she surely hopes it will be her first easy one. Her first race, a special election in 2018 after longtime Sen. Thad Cochran retired, was the closest non-party primary U.S. Senate race in modern Mississippi history. Hyde-Smith, running then as the interim appointment of former Gov. Phil Bryant, captured 53.6% of the vote compared to 46.4% for Espy in the special election held to fill out Cochran's term. Trent Lott's first race for the U.S. Senate was almost as close in 1988, when he won 53.9% to 46.1% against 4th District U.S. Rep. Wayne Dowdy. And in a 2008 special election, Republican Roger Wicker, appointed by Gov. Haley Barbour to fill a vacancy left when Lott retired, garnered 55% to 45% by former Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove. But after those relatively close elections, both Lott in 1994 and Wicker in 2012 had easier second elections. Lott captured 69% of the vote against former state Sen. Ken Harper of Vicksburg. Wicker, on the other hand, had a little tougher race against Albert Gore, winning 57% to 40.6%. Gore was little known and underfunded, but was in many ways an attractive candidate with a noteworthy resume. Interestingly, Gore, like Wicker, was a Pontotoc County native. In Hyde-Smith's second race, she again faced Espy in a rare Mississippi campaign when the Democrat raised more money than the Republican. It is practically unheard of in the South — and assuredly in Mississippi — for a Democrat to raise more campaign funds than an incumbent Republican senator. Espy did. Still, Hyde-Smith, who remains Mississippi's only woman elected to a federal office, won 54.1% to 44.1%, but the campaign was far from easy for her. The trend for decades has been that once a U.S. Senate seat is won in Mississippi, the incumbent holds the post for a long time with minimal opposition. Hyde-Smith is still looking for that minimal opposition race. Will 2026 be when Hyde-Smith finally has an easy path to victory like other incumbent Mississippi senators normally have in their reelection efforts? Perhaps hoping to ensure that easier path, President Donald Trump already has endorsed Hyde-Smith for her 2026 campaign. But Trump also endorsed her in 2018 and 2020. Those endorsements did not result in easy campaigns for Hyde-Smith. In both of those campaigns, Hyde-Smith underperformed Trump's Mississippi results. Democrats Ty Pinkins and Albert Littell, both of whom have military backgrounds, already have announced their candidacy for 2026. Speculation is that District Attorney Scott Colom of Columbus also will challenge Hyde-Smith. And on the Republican side, author Sarah Adlakha, a Gulf Coast resident who works in health care, also has announced her campaign. Whether other candidates emerge remains to be seen. And whether Hyde-Smith can experience a less stressful 2026 also remains to be seen. So far the campaigns have not been as easy for her as for other incumbent U.S. senators from Mississippi. This column was produced by Mississippi Today, a nonprofit news organization that covers state government, public policy, politics and culture. Bobby Harrison is the editor of Mississippi Today Ideas.
CBS News
20-05-2025
- Health
- CBS News
RFK Jr. tells farmers, GOP not to worry about his report targeting pesticides
RFK Jr. says he doesn't think people should take medical advice from him Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sought Tuesday to reassure farmers and one Republican senator about his upcoming report on how pesticides are driving up rates of childhood chronic diseases, acknowledging that chemicals like glyphosate that he has long criticized are widely used for growing crops in the U.S. "I have said repeatedly throughout this process, that we cannot take any step that will put a single farmer in this country out of business," Kennedy said at a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee. "There's a million farmers who rely on glyphosate. 100% of corn in this country relies on glyphosate. We are not going to do anything to jeopardize that business model." The White House in February tasked Kennedy with leading a "Make America Healthy Again commission, which is producing a report assessing the threat of a range of issues that might be causing disease in children. Targets include the "potential over-utilization of medication, certain food ingredients, certain chemicals, and certain other exposures" in children. Kennedy said their report was due to be released Thursday. "Your information about the report is just simply wrong," Kennedy told Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi in response to a question about the report. "The drafts that I've seen, there is not a single word in them that should worry the American farmer." Hyde-Smith had told Kennedy that she was "deeply concerned" that the report will "unfairly target American agriculture, modern farming practices and the crop protection tools" that U.S. farmers use. "We all know what confirmation bias is. It's no secret that you were involved with pesticide litigation, prior to becoming secretary," Hyde-Smith told Kennedy. What has RFK Jr. said about pesticides like glyphosate? Kennedy has criticized the use of several pesticides in the U.S. food supply, including as an environmental attorney during court battles with chemical manufacturer Monsanto over accusations that its widely-used weedkiller Roundup — made from the chemical glyphosate — was causing cancer. "If my life were a Superman comic, Monsanto would be my Lex Luther. I've seen this company as the enemy of every admirable American value," Kennedy wrote in a 2020 Facebook post. During his longshot independent presidential campaign, Kennedy pledged to get toxins out of the food supply, warning that "toxic chemicals like glyphosate" were widely contaminating what Americans were eating. He continued that criticism in the months ahead of the 2024 election as he stumped in support of President Trump, recalling how his son resolved his "really agonizing" eczema by switching to eating pasta made in Europe. "As soon as he comes back here and he eats the pasta in this country, he gets eczema," he told Donald Trump Jr. on a podcast in September of last year. "And you know, they don't have the glyphosate like we do, that is sprayed on the wheat at harvest time. So it's going right into the food." What will be in RFK Jr.'s "MAHA Commission" report? One of Kennedy's top HHS advisers, Calley Means — whose sister Dr. Casey Means was nominated by President Trump earlier this month for the surgeon general post — said that the report is aimed at outlining "obvious" ways that children are "being poisoned through areas that there's not even that much scientific disagreement on." "Obviously, it's because of environmental toxins," Means said, speaking at a May 15 event hosted by the Kennedy-aligned MAHA Institute. "We produce and ingest 25% of the world's pesticides. The leading herbicides and pesticides that we use in the United States, many of them are phased out or banned in every other country in the world." Means said that the report was not intended to result in "a European nanny state system" to crack down on pesticides, pledging instead to come up with "pro-innovation policies to solve this issue" under Kennedy. He blasted lobbyists for opposing the report's release. Beyond "environmental toxins" like pesticides, Means listed a number of other issues he alleges are making American children sick, including ultra-processed foods, added sugars, seed oils, sedentary behavior, lack of sleep, overprescriptions and vaccines. "They're saying it's going to scare the American people to get facts out. They're putting so much pressure on President Trump, so much pressure on Secretary Kennedy to not release facts," Means said last week. What power does RFK Jr. have over pesticides? The Department of Health and Human Services does not directly set the limits on how glyphosate and other pesticides are used. That is left up to the Environmental Protection Agency. However, HHS does oversee the major research that underpins how the EPA regulates chemicals. Studies into pesticides like glyphosate to inform the EPA's limits often come from the federal health agencies within HHS. For example, the National Institutes of Health's National Toxicology Program published results in 2023 suggesting that glyphosate is "unlikely" to be genotoxic, which had been one of the main ways international experts previously suspected it might cause cancer. Results from a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study published in 2022 found that diet was likely a factor in how much glyphosate people were being exposed to, based on urine samples taken in adults and children. Through the Food and Drug Administration, Kennedy also has authority over how glyphosate levels in food are tracked and the EPA's limits are enforced. The last round of published sampling by the FDA in 2022 found that 54 samples of human food had detectable amounts of glyphosate out of 731 analyzed. Corn and beans were among the most frequent detections.
