Some of the emails that are sent to your legislators never arrive in your legislators’ inboxes. All members of Wyoming’s legislative Management Council know this. What they don’t know is how many, and whose?
The ten elite lawmakers of the Management Council considered a draft bill at their last meeting (November 20, 2025) that would give them answers to those questions. After a cantankerous argument, five of them didn’t want to know, and five did.
The division is becoming all too familiar. Four senators, Tara Nethercott, Bo Biteman, Mike Gierau, and Barry Crago, voted with Democratic Representative Mike Yin to kill the transparency measure. Four representatives, Chip Neiman, John Bear, Scott Heiner and Jeremy Haroldson joined Senator Tim Salazar to advance it.
The meeting got contentious—and personal. Instead of talking about which emails, exactly, are being diverted from legislative inboxes and segregated as “spam,” or “quarantined,” much of the discussion focused on Honor Wyoming.
Honor Wyoming is one of the few conservative lobbying organizations that actually has some money. Frosty comments and saccharine smiles communicated that there was little love lost between its main spokesman, Drake Hill, and the five. It was this organization that discovered that emails from its constituents were not reaching legislative inboxes.
Perhaps if a different lobby group had discovered the problem, its concerns would be handled differently. Who knows? Maybe the emails of competing lobby groups are being handled differently as well.
We still don’t know how many emails are being diverted. And we don’t know what percentage of them are constitutionally protected communications from Wyoming citizens to their elected officials.
No Wyoming citizen can ever be 100% sure that his email will make it to the legislator’s inbox. But what we do know is that some in the Council think that the word “blocked” is not accurate. Biteman called it “disingenuous” and Nethercott named it “a falsehood.”
Okay. If you want to parse words, we can do that. But is anybody seriously disputing that “diverting” emails to a spam folder has a “chilling effect” on speech? That—and not “blocking”—is the standard set by the Supreme Court. The debate should have centered on the definition of “chilling effect,” not on the definition of “blocking.”
By dragging a red herring through the hearing, they managed to keep the Management Council distracted. And those of us who email our legislators are left to wonder which go to spam and which are delivered.
When they weren’t talking about “blocking,” the talk turned to “platform.” Apparently, there is a secret exception to the First Amendment that citizens who use a “platform” to reach out to their lawmakers don’t deserve to be heard. Who knew?
As long as concerned citizens take the time to compose an individual email to an individual legislator, they deserve to be heard. But if they use a machine to duplicate that email and distribute it to other legislators, the government is entitled to restrict its distribution.
I wonder if Samuel Adams was familiar with this secret exception. Perhaps he could have avoided jail time for his printer Daniel Howe if he wrote out his criticisms of the government in long hand, rather than use that annoying printing machine. I think they called it a “press.”
But even that is off the point. The bill draft that the Management Council was considering would have done nothing to force the government to deliver email that it judged annoying.
The only thing that the draft proposed to do was to let people know when their speech was chilled. The five who voted against it don’t even want you to know that you are not being heard.
That’s the real kicker.
If I were to write this bill, I would have forbidden any government email system from any discriminatory treatment of emails based on content. And if they couldn’t manage that, I would vote to shut down the “wyoleg.gov” email domain altogether.
Is it anything more than a relic of the early internet before everyone in the world already had an email address of his own? Those days are long gone.
Today’s problem is not that people lack an email address. A more pressing problem has evolved. Now electronic communications are funneled through non-government corporations that have been known to selectively suppress important and true information.
I applaud Speaker Neiman, Bear, Heiner, Haroldson, and Senate Vice President Salazar for keeping up to date. Blind trust in the technology is no longer warranted.
Even though the Management Council quarantined the bill on Wednesday, I hope that those who understand the real problem will deliver it to the governor’s inbox in February’s budget session.
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.
