The really interesting part of this story is how Freedom Caucusers went after the accusations the day they made, and rather indignantly, including two who received checks, although apparently they did not receive them on the House Floor. One prominent WFC member even derided the claims saying that if they were true, they'd amount to bribery, so they there.
Bear and Neiman should be resign, or be unseated by the legislature. Their conduct in attacking the claims is completely reprehensible. They attacked the people telling the truth. The event was caught on camera. Now they're backpedaling by telling the "truth"
Well, Rodriguez-Williams and other self righteous WFC members. Is it "unethical".
Now that you know what happened, do the right thing.
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.
Cont:
The Governor and Chief Justice spoke.
Senate File 51, allowing for transferable landowner tags, a terrible wildlife privatization concept, died on introduction.
Prohibiting infanticide, I'd note, is something I agree with, but it's the far right's fault that it was preserved in Wyoming, which they need to wake up to.
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.
February 10, 2025
The Confederate Caucus isn't starting off with much success. Wyoming voters apparently have awakened about them and their representation is taking note.
School funding bill dies in Wyoming House: The Legislature is constitutionally required to undergo so-called ‘recalibration.’ The bill, drafted in the legislative off season, was unpopular among educators.
It is, although it does point out the need to end the WFC's chapter in Wyoming politics, as next year may well be different.
Wyoming Freedom Caucus calls foul on committee bill decimation: In a blow to the Republican group’s majority bloc, 21 committee bills failed introduction on Monday in the House— more than twice the number the caucus killed in the last budget session, when it was in the minority.
Funny, the Confederate Caucus was just beginning to make a stumbling effort to counter the growing "you're batshit crazy" movement countering them with "it's democracy", dragging out Cassie Cravens to with some potted meat, when now they're crying foul about how democracy works.
Amongst the WFC's members, a fellow in the news a lot recently had a bad result.
It's interesting in part as Steinmetz, the author, is an "ally" of the WFC, and she's breaking ranks.
I will say the "hidden" aspect of this is complete crap. Anyone who paid attention, including anyone in the WFC who was following, knew that this would gut local entities like a fish. For the most part, they simply didn't care.
Indeed, the carpetbagger element of this is really strong here. WFC supporters include a fair amount of carpetbaggers who moved in here from other state, bought property at inflated values, and don't want to be taxed. They really don't care if towns and cities don't have services or if kids aren't educated. They raised their kids elsewhere and, American style, abandoned them somewhere else. They're happy to sit i in their McMansions in a town with no local services as they're old and they aren't going to use them.
But now legislators are hearing from people who are from here, and who want a police department, a fire department, decent towns, and to educate their kids.
On the last item, the ghost of the constitutional amendment regarding "health care" now appears in the legislature, which provided the reason that some Republicans voted against the bill.
February 14, 2026, Valentine's Day.
Wyoming Freedom Caucus in Cheyenne.
Well, the first week of the legislature is over and it proved to be an interesting, and surprising, one.
The Confederate Carpetbagger Caucus went into the session with its orders from out of state interests and extreme right wing agenda and ran right into, well, Wyomingites.
It also ran into its own ignorance.
Full of piss and vinegar, the collection of carpetbaggers and carpetbagger drones simply figured it had the numbers and it was going to return the state to November 11, 1620. It forgot, apparently, that in a budget session it needs a supermajority to introduce legislation, and while it may have the majority, it doesn't have that.
It was also taken off guard by a sudden rise in attention to it by regular people from the state, which now that they are more informed, are starting to organize against it. They haven't been able to get back on their feet from that, with perhaps the most pathetic response being Cassie Craven's "but don't you still love us?".
We never did.
All this is bad news for the WFC as it may have shot its bolt. Candidates are starting to come out to take them on, as evidenced by the Mayor of Bar Nunn coming out against Freedom Caucuser Bill Allemand.
And the exposing of their money supply hasn't been a good thing for any of them, even though those who were watching them carefully knew about it all along. Likewise, that they were fed canned legislation was well known, but it was not known that they were basically fed instructions on what to do.
Amongst those whom its not good news for is Chuck Gray, who turned the state's voters roles over to his beloved, Donald Trump, because Donny asked for them. Gray adores Trump like a teenage bride adores her husband and is making that the gist of his campaign, Trump Love, but he's responsible for a bunch of WFC voting bills that went down in flames. He's running for the House against Jillian Balow, Reid Ransner and David Giralt. I suspect that this sort of thing really starts to boost Balow. Gray is really detested by a lot of people to start with, and Giralt to unknown. Rasner is a gadfly. Gray's term as Secretary of State end in January, 2027 and if he doesn't secure the House his political career in the state is at an end.
Amongst the bill casualties so far has been the bill on abortion. This also signifies, fwie, a return of Wyoming politics to the middle. I'm opposed to abortion so I would like to have seen that bill advance, but it's the case that for eons Wyoming Republicans opposed abortion more or less, but wouldn't act to make it illegal. The first time that the legislature ever passed anything doing that was right after Dodds, and that's the statute, or statutes, that died in court. It was killed there by an amendment to the constitution that was designed to protect individual health care decisions from the fantasy of AHCA death panes, and it became a death panel itself. So effectively the state returns to the status quo ante on abortion, thanks to the GOP in the first place.
I suppose it shouldn't surprise anyone too much to learn that Bextel, the check giver, is from Alabama, although she lived in Guatemala as a Protestant missionary, that part of the world having Protestant missions that seek to convert people who are already Christians. She's been in Wyoming about twenty years.
It'll probably turn out not to be criminal, but the act of giving out checks on the floor was monumentally dumb, as was the act of receiving them that way.
Her blunder in dispensing checks on the legislative floor reveals something that people tracking things should already know. We have our current populist regime in the legislature due to carpetbagger cash, although the amounts handed out here were not huge.
And the recipients?
I’ve been involved in the Freedom Caucus, both nationally and within the state, and I know these people. I’ve gotten involved and think they are good people.
I'm frankly not keen on this at all. Playing sports and being in activities are vital parts of school. They help socialization. Parents who seek to avoid socialization are harming their children and there are nwo a lot of private school options that would be better choices for those seeking to evade the perceived dangers, often fictional, of public schools
This is what happens when a dumb, paranoid, amendment to the Constitution is made.
The amendment that brought down the state's abortion laws was passed due to right wing paranoia that the AHCA would create "death panels". That fear was frankly stupid, but it was adopted by far right Republicans who really believed it. The prime architect of the amendment has gone on record that he'd feel awful if the amendment caused the abortion laws to fail, and in fact he should feel awful.
I'll confess that when I first posted this, I was harsher on the paranoia of the Wyoming Republican Party that gave us the dumbass head in the sand amendment to the Wyoming Constitution based on fear of the ACHA. I'm obviously being less kind here.
Anyhow, the Tribune notes:
Wyoming Republicans seek to amend constitution
The flaming dipshits that passed the amendment that caused this to occur in the first place ought to just repeal that amendment. Indeed, they ought to cal lit "B______ B_________was a dumbass paranoid moron amendment repeal".
They won't, as the best thing to do when somebody does something rampagingly stupid is to double down on the stupidity, apparently. After all, look at the ongoing Republican support for Donald Dipshit Trump.
Anyhow, they're going to address their failure with a proposed amendment to the Constitution. That amendment will fail to get support from the electorate, which they'll find basically likes the idea of killing babies as it means they can complain about gays and the transgendered while being sexually immoral themselves.
Wyoming Democrats, I'd note, are making the classic blunder. They should simply say nothing at all, and not go out to own a result that they don't really own. The Wyoming Supreme Court's ruling came about as the far right of the Wyoming GOP went out and shot itself in the foot. Now it's going to go to the voters. A smart Democratic policy would be just to sit back and do nothing at all. But, they just can't help themselves:
Chances are high that not enough Wyoming voters are going to vote for the proposed constitutional amendment for it to pass, and if there are, the Democrats are going to effect that anyhow. Indeed, by making it an issue and embracing abortion, it'll drive GOP voters who likely would vote against the amendment or sit the election out, into voting as they'll want to vote against the Democrats. Given the immorality of abortion, it's truly an example of errare humanum est perseverare diabolicum.
My opinion, of course, is harsh, but frankly many of the Dukes of Hazzard crowd in the Freely Dumb Caucus don't trust education. People who are educated don't believe the same dumb stuff they do, so they don't like it.
And they're going after the Wyoming Business Council.
This one at its core is a completely unthinking objection to socialism. We don't like socialism, because it's socialism. Not much more thought behind it than that.
I'll often hear that the WBC picks "winners and losers" which might be right, but the state's economy otherwise is pretty much making all Wyomingites losers.
Jacob Wasserburger came up with this bad idea, but it sounds a lot like he's been sitting around with Mike Lee, the Senator from Deseret. He's signed on to the no prescription for Ivermectin act as well, these two things indicating that he's hanging out with, in not in, the Freedom Caucus.
.webp)
