In Hot Springs County, the divide in Wyoming’s active Republican political base is actually a chasm.
That breach usually falls between the GOP faction more aligned with the Wyoming Freedom Caucus and the faction that tends to oppose it.
It resurfaced Monday night at the Hot Springs County Republican Central Committee meeting, where precinct committee people and their elected officers gathered to handle regular business.
One local delegate, Cheryl Aguiar, made a motion to nearly drain the party’s checking account by sending $4,000 to the Wyoming Republican Party. She didn’t explain the motion to committee leaders at the time.
Her motion failed on a 6-6 tie vote, after which five people, including Aguiar, left the meeting.
People on both sides of the controversy told Cowboy State Daily the voters’ departure left the party short of a quorum and unable to pay its other bills, including to local businesses.
Aguiar said in a Wednesday interview that she made the motion at the request of a large group to protest some members’ efforts last month to “sabotage” the party’s fundraiser dinner by hosting an alternate event on the same night, May 29.
“They literally tried to sabotage – to steal money from our yearly fundraiser; to hold an alternate event to punish the state (party),” Aguiar said. “Why come and punish the county if you’re mad at something the state (party) did?”
Aguiar said that for her part, she left the meeting Monday because the chair was letting attendees heckle and berate her – a claim Chair Joe Martinez disputes.
Multiple critics of Aguiar’s move countered in Tuesday and Wednesday interviews, calling the members’ departure childish.
“I think it’s pretty crappy to walk out on paying the bills for the (gala) that they all held,” precinct committeewoman Shurie Scheel said. “It’s one thing to be mad about it. It’s another to screw over the caterer.”
The party also owes other small businesses money, including the local newspaper, the Independent Record, for advertising, she said.
Scheel said she’s unsure if the local party will have a quorum again before new precinct committee people are sworn in next January, as it’s uncertain if the walkouts – whom she cast as sympathetic to the Wyoming Freedom Caucus wing of the GOP – will return to vote.
Scheel said she and her husband might have to pay the catering business, We Got Your 6 Catering, in the meantime.
A Court Case, Two Galas
Monday marked the first meeting after a district court judge reinstated Martinez as the local party chair and Scheel’s husband, Phil Scheel, as state committeeman. The judge ruled May 29 that the other people who’d been serving as chair and state committeeman for the past 15 months – Bradyn Harvey and Russell Lewis – were elected in a manner that violated state law.
Monday’s gathering was also the first meeting after the battle of two galas.
The Hot Springs County GOP planned a Charlie Kirk memorial fundraiser dinner for May 29.
Scheel had been organizing the dinner. But she quit planning it to support an alternate “Take Back Wyoming” dinner set for the same evening.
Scheel told Cowboy State Daily she backed the alternate dinner to protest the state Republican Party’s new bylaw declaring a right to donate to or endorse some Republicans over others during the primary election cycle.
State law forbids the GOP and any other major party from taking sides among its own candidates in the primary election. The party is free to back Republicans against Democratic candidates and others in the general election, however. The state party is suing Wyoming over the primary backing ban right now, saying the statute violates the group’s First Amendment rights.
“Take Back Wyoming: Non-Freedom Caucus Republican Candidates Shop Party,” the banner for the alternate May 29 gala says. “Supporting fair primaries and grassroots conservative values.”
Scheel told Cowboy State Daily she disagrees with the state party’s mission to overturn the state law because primary election day is “the day the voters of the Republican party choose their candidates. The party shouldn’t be choosing the candidates. The voters should.”
She used stronger language in a May 20 blog post: “It shouldn’t be a room full of party insiders who decide who the Republican Party nominee will be, and then tell the voters who to choose. And, the more I thought about it, the more pissed off I got about it.”
So We Carried On
In Aguiar’s telling, Scheel and others answered a state party maneuver with “retaliation” against the county party.
Aguiar said as one voter she doesn’t like the idea of the state party sending money to candidates pre-primary either, though she thinks the party should be able to endorse candidates during that phase.
For her, that’s beside the point.
“We had to spend – I think there were three of us that spent three solid days calling candidates” to arrange the party, Aguiar said. “We did a good job.”
Candidates such as U.S. House candidate Steve Friess and Secretary of State Candidate Rachel Williams (also known as state Rep. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams) attended the GOP dinner.
The event raised $1,466 after expenses, which included a $1,900 bill to the caterer, $146 in advertising and other costs totaling about $2,904.
Martinez attended the Charlie Kirk dinner, which Aguiar said is to his credit. Other than the alleged heckling incident, Aguiar also spoke favorably of Martinez as party chair.
Aguiar said her husband had also run a profitable gun raffle for the party.
Aguiar concluded that Scheel and the others involved in planning the alternate, protest dinner “don’t care.”
“These people do not care about the Hot Springs County Republican Party,” Aguiar said.
But after the judge’s order – filed the same evening as both dinners – the party leadership changed, and the party tilted toward the group not aligned with the more populist Wyoming Freedom Caucus.
“And for them to get the money that we raised, despite their sabotaging of the alternate event … I did not think it would be in good hands,” Aguiar said.
Aguiar said she and her husband, Bob Aguiar – who is also a Hot Springs County commissioner – left together, and Pam Phillips, to whom they’d given a ride, walked out as well.
She called it incidental that two more committee members, Michele Stevens and Russell Lewis, left the meeting at that time.
The ‘Walkout’
Aguiar was adamant that she didn’t make her motion to drain the account because of the judge’s order; she made it on behalf of a bigger group because of the dueling gala incident.
Martinez doubts that, he said Wednesday.
The Charlie Kirk dinner raised less than $1,500 after expenses, while Aguiar moved to shift $4,000 from the local party’s account to its statewide counterpart.
“I mean, if it was specifically (because of) the Charlie Kirk dinner then that dollar amount should have been consistent with the actual profit,” Martinez said.
Martinez said he doesn’t believe anyone was heckling or verbally abusing Aguiar at the meeting, though the conversation grew “emotional.”
“It was an emotional item,” he recalled. “People wanted to know what the reasons for sending that money to the state were.”
Cowboy State Daily has been working to coordinate a phone interview with Stevens and will update this story if she speaks to the incident.
Lewis told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday that the walkout wasn't coordinated. He said he walked out because of the dueling galas incident - not because of the court's order that removed him from leadership.
Sherman Skelton, a school board member who attended the meeting as a spectator, said the walkout seemed coordinated.
“I felt very much like those people (should be) there to represent me, our precinct. Not their personal agendas,” said Skelton said. "And it was probably one of the most childish things I’d ever seen in my life."
Shurie Scheel said the walkout appeared “staged," that Aguiar said, "OK, let's go everyone," and they all rose in unison and left. Scheel said that Aguiar acknowledged on her way out that the committee wouldn't have a quorum after they all left.
Aguiar for her part said party members in Scheel's camp merely have "Aguiar derangement syndrome" and that Shurie Scheel is unhappy that Aguiar's husband defeated Shurie's husband in the last County Commission race.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
