The Wyoming Freedom Caucus held a virtual Town Hall this week. The video is only half an hour long, and it is well worth your time. Find it on Facebook and have a look.
Rep. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams (R-Cody), chairman of the caucus, hosted four members of the Wyoming House of Representatives who talked about some of the important debates that will be heard in Cheyenne at the upcoming budget session.
Rep. John Bear (R-Gillette), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee spoke about the proposed budget.
Rep. Chris Knapp (R-Gillette), chairman of the House Corporations Committee, spoke about election integrity.
Rep. Darin McCann (R-Rock Springs), discussed important parental-rights legislation responsive to the complaints of parents like Sean and Ashley Willey in Sweetwater County.
Finally, Rep. Ann Lucas (R-Cheyenne), spoke about minors accessing sexual content in our libraries and about judicial transparency.
The Town Hall itself was an important step toward transparency.
I don’t recall seeing anything like it in many years of watching Wyoming’s legislative process.
Those of us who want to engage have learned to frequent the Wyoleg.gov website and scan bill proposals as they are dropped randomly in the weeks leading up to the session.
But this is both time-consuming and only marginally useful.
Oftentimes, the most important and hotly contested bills will not appear on Wyoleg.gov until the very last minute.
This leaves the ordinary citizen scrambling to get up to speed on bills that have been in other hands for months.
That gives lobbyists and insiders an inherent advantage in prepared talking points that push emotional buttons, even if they are less than honest.
So, for a caucus to go public with its priorities and details is very much appreciated.
I wish that every caucus in the legislature would follow the lead of the Freedom Caucus.
It can only contribute to a more informed conversation and reduce the chances that emotionally charged rhetoric, intended to obfuscate the issues, will prevail.
Of the bills presented, Rep. Lucas’ bill on judicial transparency may be the most non-partisan and the biggest no-brainer.
For more than a quarter-century, the people of Wyoming have been given ever more transparency into the legislative process.
The power of the internet has given citizens access to proposed legislation and has allowed them to follow the votes of their representatives and senators.
This access has empowered Wyoming citizens both at the ballot box and in communication with elected officials.
Weirdly, the judiciary has not followed suit.
Our district and circuit courts are still operating as if “Al Gore” never invented “the internets,” as Dubya would say.
Even though court filings are routinely scanned into PDFs and put on servers that could be accessible to anyone with a computer, Luddite rules suppress free access to public information.
Wyoming citizens are forced to travel, in person, to the county courthouse. Only there can you access case filings.
But even though you can access them, you are prohibited from downloading filings for further study.
In my judicial district, I am allowed to take pictures of the filing, or pay a buck a page for copies.
But when I cross the hallway to the circuit court, I am prohibited even from taking photographs of the screen!
I can transcribe the cases by hand, word-for-word. But I cannot snapping a picture with my cell phone is strictly verboten.
And if you want to buy copies, it’s cash, up front — exact change only. Don’t expect the clerk to give you any change.
Ridiculous.
Lucas’ judicial transparency bill would bring the Wyoming court system into the 21st century and give Wyoming citizens the same access to public information that citizens in other states have had for years.
I don’t know why anybody would want to argue against this bill. But I am confident that someone will.
Maybe they’ll project wild calculations of prohibitive I.T. costs.
Or, maybe they will trot out lachrymose violin music to pine away for the court clerks who will have to click a mouse to make PDFs accessible instead of walking to the photocopier to hand out piles of paper.
Thankfully, any such objections have already been swept away by the Wyoming Supreme Court.
For many years, those documents have been available online. It is only the District and Circuit Courts that are stuck in the paper past.
Again, I am tremendously thankful for the heads-up that the Wyoming Freedom Caucus has given to the people of Wyoming.
I hope that other, anti-Freedom Caucus groups follow suit.
The rush of Wyoming’s four-week budget session is not friendly to careful deliberation seasoned by the passage of time.
The more that Wyoming citizens can know in advance, the more powerful their voice.
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
