February 9, 2026.
The 2026 Wyoming legislature commences today.
It'll be the first one controlled by the Confederate Carpetbagger Caucus and therefore the first Wyoming legislature ever that doesn't have a strong element of moderation built into it. The carpetbaggers of the WFC captured it, backed in no small part by riding the Trump wave, the collapse of the stability of the oil and gas industry (which was never all that stable) and oddly enough a series of warm winters that would have sent a lot of these people back to where they were from. Instead, they stayed and brought their Dixiecrat disgruntlement into the state.
It seems that people are actually starting to wake up to them in numbers for the first time. They're gutting UW, education, and local governments, as people living in 1930s Alabama don't need none o' that stuff. They've brought in with them a certain American sort of far right Evangelical view as well, something extremely foreign to the state. And they're backed by money from out of state, one of which sends around Instagram messages as "Honor Wyoming" but which does anything but.
Wyomingites who thought the WFC were just conservative have been shocked to find that ain't so.
The thing is, it might be too late. Or it might not be. They have the numbers not to do a lot of things, but they don't have the numbers to override vetoes.
This is a budget session, so it should only have 20 working days. That hasn't stopped legislators from trying to introduce all sorts of things in the past, and it won't this year. Here' are the prefiled bills:
There are a lot of weird laws in this pack, but I'm just going to start off with this WFC one. HB 01119 would ban the use of "foreign law" in Wyoming, and under its own terms, accidentally wipe out the complete body of civil law in the state, which specifically was adopted as being English Common Law.
This is an example of the sort of ignorant paranoia on the far right that preserved abortion in Wyoming.
Footnotes:
*In past years I ran the table of bills and much of the text of various bills on the trailing thread for that year's legislature. It made for lots of threads that grew really long.
That's hard to slog through, so this year I'm trying something different and putting that stuff on a seperate page. It's up as a link now, but it'll likely go down as a link, although still be possible to bring up from the threads, when the 2026 Legislature is thankfully over.
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