Two Wyoming lawmakers asserted this week that their colleagues were being fed scripts that steered their actions in committee meetings.
The legislator accused of distributing the scripts conceded he’d done so, but said it was so that he could run his own budget tweaks through other lawmakers while he was confined to the stricter mediator role of committee meeting chairman that tradition generally upholds.
More controversy followed, during which House Appropriations Chair John Bear, R-Gillette, called Sen. Ogden Driskill, R-Devils Tower, a “doofus,” and Driskill pushing back on the timeline of Bear's explanation.
But First, Jake
It was halfway through a four-day budget-planning marathon the legislative Joint Appropriations Committee undertook this week when Driskill appeared on Cowboy State Daily’s "Morning Show With Jake" and said he was “handed a script” Sunday at the state Capitol.
“(It dictated) here’s who makes the motions to do the cuts, and here’s what they are,” Driskill said. As the week unfolded, the committee majority voted to cut or deny hundreds of millions from Gov. Mark Gordon’s proposed $11.13 billion budget for the upcoming two-year cycle.
“If you go back and watch the (meeting video) for yesterday,” said Driskill, “you’ll see people getting prompted by the chair – ‘Oh are you going to make this motion?’ – and they make it.”
Driskill indicated that House Appropriations Committee members were using the script when making budget tweaks, but the Senate doesn’t “go by scripts.”
He said Monday’s and Tuesday’s meeting yielded “no honest debate on anything.”
Sen. Mike Gierau, D-Jackson, confirmed in a Friday phone interview that the scripts appeared Sunday, and said they were from House Appropriations Chair John Bear, R-Gillette.
“(He) wanted me to make motions too,” said Gierau.
Gierau added a caveat: scripts are not unheard-of in the Wyoming Legislature.
For example, chamber leaders may use scripts during the rigid procedural statements that drive a debate phase called “committee of the whole.”
Gierau will also ask legislative staffers to help him with the wording of his own motions if they’re highly technical, he said.
To Gierau, however, this week’s effort seemed different.
“(There were times) you know it was a script because when asked the question, ‘What are you talking about?’ they couldn’t answer it,” he said. He specifically referenced an incident in which Rep. Scott Smith, R-Lingle, made a motion to deny a $170,480 increase meant to fund an inflationary increase to the K-12 schools’ phone bill.
Rep. Trey Sherwood, D-Laramie, pressed her Republican House colleagues all week for explanations on their more controversial budget motions. She did so to Smith that Tuesday afternoon.
“Can I phone a friend?” asked Smith, who then asked Sherwood to let him review her budget-tracking spreadsheet.
Smith’s motion died on a tie vote.
Republican Reps. Jeremy Haroldson (of Wheatland) and Ken Pendergraft (of Sheridan) delivered their motions with much more understanding than Smith and Republican Rep. Bill Allemand (of Midwest), said Gierau.
Nope
That’s because Allemand and Smith are relatively new to the Legislature and still need the occasional help, Haroldson countered in his own Friday interview.
Allemand and Smith are both in their second terms.
So is Pendergraft.
Haroldson, conversely, is in his third term, having been elected in 2020.
Pendergraft, Allemand and Smith did not respond by publication to phone requests for comment.
For Rep. Abby Angelos, R-Gillette, Bear paused the meeting Tuesday when she said she did not know whether a funding request she was making to cover trades education was to be one-time or perpetual.
The timeout was because she wanted guidance from the other legislators — including Sherwood, the House side’s lone Democrat — on which funding mechanism would be best, Angelos said in a Friday text message.
“No, we are not scripted,” wrote Angelos. “If I had a script I would have known how to respond to (the) question and not requested a timeout to confirm with all members what the agency’s intention was in the funding.”
Haroldson also said he doesn’t receive directives from a script and was never given one.
He did refer to notes in the “traveling document” spreadsheet all committee members use to craft the budget, Haroldson added in a Friday phone interview.
Yes, But
Bear confirmed to Cowboy State Daily on Friday that he distributed scripts to legislators — but said it was because he was chairing the meeting all week, and tradition confines the chair to a mediator role.
So he chose to run his numerous motions through other members since he couldn’t himself, he said.
“It’s a nothingburger,” Bear said, adding that the Senate Committee Chair, Tim Salazar, R-Riverton, had asked him to chair that week, as had others.
Salazar did not respond to a request for comment.
As to Driskill’s state of alarm Wednesday on the "Morning Show With Jake," that’s “because Senator Driskill is a doofus,” answered Bear, adding that Bear and Driskill may be trying to explain the many votes they lost this week, against significant budget denials and cuts.
Confronted with a text message containing Bear’s insult, Driskill replied, “I would expect no less from John Bear. I will not lower myself to name calling. Disparagement and name calling are classic Freedom Caucus.”
The Wyoming Freedom Caucus is a coalition of Republican House legislators. At least five members sit on the House Appropriations Committee: Bear, Pendergraft, Allemand, Haroldson and Smith.
Here Driskill volleyed a round back at Bear:
“By the way — the script was handed out a full day before it was agreed that he would chair all days.”
Bear parried yet again, saying he only wrote a script for Monday.
‘I Don’t Have Any Scripts’
Confronted with Bear’s acknowledgement that he had distributed scripts, Haroldson maintained that he had not received one, and pointed to his own independence.
For example, Haroldson broke from other Freedom Caucus members and urged them not to deny $6 million the University of Wyoming had requested to catch its athletics program up to the new NIL landscape and other factors.
“There’s not a paper in my desk you can’t look at,” said Haroldson. “I don’t have any scripts, nor have I been told how to vote.”
In a follow-up interview, Bear said he wouldn’t know whether Haroldson had received a script, and said he, Bear, had technically given the scripts to Pendergraft, who physically handed them out for Bear.
Pendergraft did not respond to a voicemail request for comment.
A Back-And-Forth About The Website
The script controversy wasn’t the only Bear-Driskill clash this week.
During one of his three impassioned requests for a $16 million grant for the rare earths industry, Driskill said even the Wyoming Freedom Caucus website supports the concept of energy “grants.”
“I’ll read to you off your own website… this is your energy policy folks,” said Driskill on Tuesday, reading aloud from his phone. “Provide supportive government policy, favorable tax strategies, grants, and loan programs to encourage investment in energy projects.”
Moments later, Bear countered, “Our website – I don’t know if there’s some fake news out there, some AI that’s doing something different.”
He then read the same sentence from his phone, but without the word “grants.”
“Nothing about grants in there,” said Bear.
Cowboy State Daily has obtained an undated screenshot of the earlier webpage and the phrase that Driskill read.
Bear in his Friday interview acknowledged the word “grants” was in the site narrative prior but said he didn’t know when it was purged. He said he urged its deletion a year ago, because “we don’t believe in grants.”
Senate Appropriations Committee members Tim French, R-Ralston, and Dan Laursen, R-Powell, did not respond by publication to requests for comment.
Sherwood told Cowboy State Daily she didn’t have a script, and she used her own notes from committee testimony to drive her debate.
She also said pauses like the one Angelos took to confirm a detail on a motion aren’t unheard-of.
And she said she’s grateful to all the media attention toward the committee this week.
“It doesn’t matter what party or which politician is making a motion the public likes or dislikes,” said Sherwood, “It’s so important for us to be held to task and be called out in the media.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
