Americans are done with business as usual. House leadership gets that. Senate leadership, not so much.
The contrast was on display for all Wyoming to see last Tuesday.
The House of Representatives, led by Speaker Chip Neiman (R-Hulett) and Majority Floor Leader Scott Heiner (R-Green River), worked overtime to bring to the floor every single bill that passed the Senate.
They burned the midnight oil to give them all an honest up-or-down vote.
Senate leaders, on the other hand, burned daylight.
They slow-walked their short docket of House bills until they could no longer avoid those that they despised most.
Then, they took an extended recess to fritter away the remainder of the people’s time so that they could kill the last ten bills without going on record against them.
Of course, this is as legal as hand-delivered campaign donations. And both chambers of the Capitol have been using this tactic for decades.
What else are you going to do when you want to vote some legislation down, but you know that your constituents want you to pass it? If you actually vote it down, they might vote you out.
The real news is not that Senate President Bo Biteman (R-Ranchester) and Majority Floor Leader Tara Nethercott (R-Cheyenne), continue to play the same old games.
It is that the House leaders didn’t. Rather than running out the clock on those bills that they opposed, House leaders brought them to a vote on the floor and went on record to vote against them.
Their transparency is a breath of fresh air. It is now part of the permanent record, which bills Neiman, and Heiner opposed and which ones they favored.
Their constituents can study their voting records and then make an informed vote.
But the constituents of Biteman and Nethercott will never see that they voted against punishing county clerks who cook the post-election audit books (HB 84). Because they never actually took a vote.
The Senate leadership did not go on record as opposing the only bill that would restore Wyoming’s constitutional requirement to make ballots and not machines, the basis of electoral power.
So, they murdered HB 52 “Elections-hand counting for recounts” without leaving any fingerprints at the scene.
They stopped HB 117 “Stop harm-empower women with informed notices” without letting any women speak from the floor of the Senate. They let them sit at their desks - prepared speeches in hand - and no one to listen to them.
They let another year pass without protecting the innocence of children. HB 10 “Sexually explicit materials in libraries-requirements” could have prevented kindergartners from stumbling across graphic depictions of sex acts. Kids that were unborn when the issue first surfaced, are now old enough to read.
They could have stopped woke school districts from secretly transitioning kids (HB 157), but shucky-darn they just ran out of time.
They could have stopped schools from muzzling students who support Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA (HB 159). But it’s a budget session, you know, and we had more important things to do.
All of this might have gone under the radar, but someone snapped a picture. With daylight burning in the window of President Biteman’s office, he is munching on a slice of pizza while Barry Crago (R-Buffalo), Stacy Jones (Rock Springs), Chris Rothfuss (D-Laramie), Joey Corenti (vice chair, Carbon County Republican Party) and Apollo Pazell (Utah, lobbyist) pass the time.
Six years ago, this picture might have passed unnoticed. That was before the Great Unveiling.
Before COVID, John Q. Public didn’t pay much attention to what happened in the backrooms of government. Content that people with the right initial after their name had been elected, they assured themselves that they would automatically do the right thing.
Back then, parents never would have suspected that their own party might deliberately leave their school children vulnerable to censorship, grooming, or secret indoctrination.
They never would have dreamed that their own elected officials might sacrifice women’s meaningful consent on the altar of Big Abortion. Never in a million years would they believe that leaders of the Republican party would knowingly relax the enforcement of election laws.
That was then, and this is now.
We have now lived through the two years of “two weeks to flatten the curve.”
We watched the Great Fauci of Oz tell us that masks would do nothing to protect us, only to demand universal mask mandates. And before you could say Wuhan Wet Market, John Q. Public woke up.
Friendly advice: The old way of frustrating the will of the people is as effective as a paper mask. Business as usual doesn’t cut it anymore.
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.
