By Rod Miller, columnist
Rod Miller is a life-long Republican and Wyoming native. Born into a ranching family that has been in the Cowboy State since 1867, he ran against incumbent Liz Cheney for Wyoming’s lone U.S. House seat in 2018.
There’s a growing stack of the public’s unfinished business that is being neglected by Wyoming’s dominant political party. Things will only get worse unless we, the voters, draw a line in the dust and tell the Wyoming Republican Party that “Enough’s enough!”
Wyoming’s traditional revenue stream is drying up and our public institutions are feeling the pinch. Local governments struggle to provide the customary services that keep our communities safe. Hospitals are consolidating in large urban areas, leaving rural folks isolated from good health care.
Plywood is covering shop windows on the Main Streets of our towns, and the streets themselves are pot-holed all to hell. Aging municipal water systems make turning on the tap a real adventure for a lot of our fellow Wyomingites.
Skyrocketing property taxes make it nigh on impossible for young people to buy a home in the Cowboy State, or for older Wyomingites to stay in the family home that has been theirs for years. The diaspora of our best & brightest accelerates and our daughters and sons only come back to the 307 for Christmas.
Hard working ranchers and farmers are squeezed by the integration and consolidation of their industries that puts an increasing share of producers’ profits in the pinstriped pockets of Big Business processors. Input costs rise and output prices fall in a heinously artificial market that favors out-of-state corporations.
There’s a whole lot more, but I think you get the picture.
Wyoming really has only one political party, the Republican party, and faced with this daunting to-do list of the public’s business, they have dropped the ball with a resounding thud. Instead of rolling up their sleeves to get to work, the Wyoming GOP spends its time, energy and attention in an intramural pissing match to see who is most loyal to Donald Trump.
Worse still, the Wyoming GOP is trying to project this gnarly schism on the voters of Wyoming and trying to enlist us in their political food fight. They want us to forget about the work in front of us and join them in their culture war. It’s almost like they expect us to work for them, and not the other way around.
This pisses me off, both as a Republican and as a native son of the rich, deep Carbon County soil. It should anger you as well. This is an epic failure of leadership on the part of a political organization in which Wyoming has placed its trust.
The Equality State deserves much better. We want to read headlines proclaiming that the Wyoming GOP has fixed the water supply in Pavillion, opened a few new clinics out in the Big Empty or taken steps to reduce suicide among our neighbors.
I am sick and tired (and I hope you are, too) of reading headlines about who in his party Frank Eathorne considers a RINO. With so much serious work remaining undone, that just makes the GOP look like blithering idiots.
Wyoming is better than that. And its past time for the citizens to impress upon Eathorne et al that we expect work horses and not show ponies. We can communicate our disappointment to them through the voting booth, or by withholding our hard-earned dollars from them.
But this culture war nonsense in the Cowboy State must come to a screeching halt. If they don’t get the message, they should be put out to pasture.
