President Donald Trump will soon have a chance to appoint a new judge to the U.S. Court for the Nothern District of Mississippi.
Last Week, U.S. Court Judge Sharion Aycock announced that she would be taking senior status on the court effective on April 15, which means she will have a lighter caseload, and the president can now appoint a new judge to the court.
Aycock was the first women to be confirmed to a U.S. District judgeship in Mississippi.
“I have been so fortunate during my entire legal career,” she said.
Aycock began her judicial career as a private practice attorney in Fulton until 2002 when she was elected to serve as a circuit judge in the state’s first judicial district. In 2007, former President George W. Bush appointed her to the federal court, and she was later confirmed by the U.S. Senate in October of that year.
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Recently, Aycock has been overseeing a lawsuit between the State Board of Election Commissioners and the American Civil Liberties Union disputing the lines of the state’s supreme court districts.
Mississippi’s supreme court comprises of nine judges from three districts, with three judges from each district. The court’s district lines have not been redrawn since the 1980s, and the ACLU has argued in the suit that the lines currently dilute Black voting power.
A staffer for Aycock confirmed with the Clarion Ledger that Aycock is still making a decision on the case and will continue to oversee it.
Trump, who will now have his pick for the court, has already appointed two other federal judges in Mississippi, Kristi Haskins Johnson and Taylor McNeel, who were both appointed to the Southern District of Mississippi in December 2020.
In his first four years, Trump appointed and had confirmed more than 200 federal judges and added three judges to the U.S. Supreme Court, according to research by the Pew Research Center.
House Minority Leader convinced Legislature’s redistricting plan did not go far enough
Last week, attorneys representing the NAACP and the State Board of Election Commissioners gave arguments to a three-judge panel on whether it should accept a plan put forth by the Legislature to redraw several House and Senate districts that were found in 2024 to be diluting Black voting power.
Attorneys representing the NAACP argued the state’s recently submitted plan does not go far enough to correct the dilution of Black voting strength while the state argued the Legislature’s plan did.
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The three judges did not at last week’s hearing say when they would issue a ruling.
House Minority Leader Robert Johnson III, D-Natchez, who watched the hearing unfold, later told the Clarion Ledger in his mind the Legislature was more concerned with the number of lawmakers having their districts changed than fixing the voter dilution.
“The House was trying to make sure that we didn’t have too many elections, which is worth consideration, but my consideration is doing as much as we can to maximize black voting strength in those areas,” Johnson said.
During the 2025 Regular Session, legislative leadership frequently expressed two goals for the redistricting, which were to comply with the 2024 federal court order and to prevent as many lawmakers from having to run for reelection or run against each other due to the draw as possible.
Lawmakers voted to redraw five House districts near and in the Golden Triangle but without creating a new Black majority district with no-incumbent. Instead, lawmakers approved making Republican Rep. Jon Lancaster’s district in Chickasaw County a now majority-Black district.
Lawmakers also created a new Black-majority district in Desoto County and the Hattiesburg area with no incumbents. To account for the new districts, lawmakers corralled some members in pairs to then run against each other in other districts.
MS auditor writing up more government waste reports
Mississippi State Auditor took to social media last week, proclaiming his office was back at the task of recommending changes to eliminate government waste.
“Massive ‘MOGE’ report coming soon from Mississippi’s Musks,” White posted to X, formerly Twitter, on April 8. “Was just reviewing our latest draft report on government waste. It’s 800+ pages of recommendations (you’ll need a lot of coffee to read this in one sitting!) to make everything from state agencies, to school districts, to government programs more efficient.”
In 2024, White released what is has become a controversial $2 million government waste study that sought to identify up to $335 million in government waste via several state agency spending and policies. White contracted out the work to Boston Consulting Group, a Massachusetts-based firm.
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Later, State Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office wrote an opinion stating that White did not have the authority to bid out the work or spend state dollars to conduct a study making “managerial recommendations” without approval from the Legislature.
Grant McLaughlin covers the Legislature and state government for the Clarion Ledger. He can be reached at [email protected] or 972-571-2335.
This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: State politics: Trump to appoint new federal judge in MS
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