Citizen involvement in the August primary election and the November general election brought radical change to Wyoming’s legislature. It shouldn‘t stop there. To convert electoral success into sound legislation, interested citizens need to stay engaged.
Too many well-meaning people, for far too long, entrusted political parties with the work of governance. Voters would pop up once every four years and pull the lever for the candidate put forward by their grandfather’s political party. Then they would return to their busy lives and never look to see how their elected officials actually governed.
But political parties proved easy to hijack. And voters never knew whether they were getting their vote’s worth.
To break this pattern, the first and most important thing you can do is simply to watch the process. Elected officials tell me that when concerned citizens are in attendance at the school board, the city council, or the county commission, they sit up a little straighter and think a little more responsibly.
If you want to know how powerful ordinary people can be just for showing up, look no further than the recent, 17,000-page report on the weaponization of government.
Ask yourself a simple question: Why would Attorney General, Merrick Garland threaten ordinary parents who showed up to school board meetings if they were accomplishing nothing? The answer is obvious. Citizen participation is effective.
The same principle works at the state level. Just watching is half the game. Don’t think that you have to know all the inside baseball or have a rock-solid opinion on every bill. Just watch. You will learn as you go. And your local representative will be encouraged by your participation.
“Encouraged” is the right word. I don’t mean “intimidated.” The best representatives will welcome your watchful participation. That’s because to be encouraged is to be infused with courage. Like watching your children play sports, you make them feel like it’s something special. And it is.
The halls of the Capitol can be disorienting and surreal. Everything seems topsy-turvy. Out-of-state players will try to gaslight your representative by claiming, ironically, that common-sense and local concerns are somehow driven by “out-of-state interests.” You can help them stay oriented by staying in touch.
Staying in touch is easier now than it has ever been. Not very long ago, the only way to watch the legislative process was to travel to Cheyenne and to sit in the balcony of the Senate or House. Now, the Wyoming Legislature has its own YouTube channel. Every committee meeting and every minute of floor debate is broadcast live and archived for later viewing.
You can put it on the big screen in the living room to listen in the background while you are doing household chores. You can put it on your phone to listen while you drive down the road. You sit down at your leisure any time of day or night and watch recorded sessions from previous days and years.
Of course, nobody has the time to watch it all. Sometimes friends divvy up the watching among themselves. Then they talk about what they saw. If you like reality TV shows, you will find legislative debate at least as interesting.
After watching, send your senator or representative an email. Tell him or her what you saw and what you thought about it. Compliment what you liked about it—always putting your positive comments up front. If you have a criticism, deliver it as you would criticize a friend. You will be heard and respected the most when you are the most respectful.
The Wyoming Legislature also has a great site for drilling down on any one of the bills that have been filed for debate. Currently, there are 250 bills up for consideration. See them all at: wyoleg.gov/Legislation/2025.
Browse through the bills or use the search engine to find keywords that interest you. Click on the bill number and it opens up a world of information. You can see who supports the bill, who voted for it, and who tried to amend it. But most of all, you can read the bill for yourself.
Don’t be intimidated. It’s written in ordinary language. If you can understand the newspaper, you can understand legislation. You will learn even more by doing. When it comes to learning how to stay engaged in the legislative process, there is no better way than just to do it. You will learn as you go.
It is a thrilling time to be alive in Wyoming. Your engagement in the political process has provided opportunities that could not have been dreamed just a decade ago. Now, your continued engagement can seal the deal.
The more you engage, the more confident you will become. And the more your elected representatives will feel supported and ennobled.
Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com.
