I have often been asked why this column is so critical of the Freedom Caucus. The answer is simple. They are posers.
As a living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the posers make promises they cannot keep, lie about their results, and keep their instructions from their puppet masters secret.
My first complaint is making promises they cannot keep. They charge headlong into issues without understanding the whole situation, and then they break things because they haven't taken the time to understand what they're doing. Look at school finance, after-school activities and rural emergency services for example.
A clear example comes from Crook County, where Ogden Driskill spent twelve years learning how things worked before he became Senate President. His leadership tenure, in legislative terms, was productive and relatively controversy-free.
Chip Neiman, also from Crook County, is a nice enough guy and a smooth public speaker, but he greedily accepted a leadership position after two years in the legislature. He did not take the time to learn how things worked. As a result, his term as Speaker was marked by huge legislative gaffes.
In his first year as the Freedom Caucus's Speaker of the House, the legislature completely failed to pass a budget at all for the first time in recent memory.
In his second year as Speaker, the House spent two full days and nights debating 200 budget amendments, even adding an extra day to the session to get through them all. The Freedom Caucus voted as instructed on the amendments.
Then, in fifteen minutes, the Freedom Caucus-controlled budget conference committee adopted the Senate's version of the budget, abandoning the Freedom Caucus created budget.
When a Freedom Caucus candidate tells you they saved billions of budget dollars, you know it isn't true, because they never passed a budget of their own making. You cannot cut dollars if you adopt someone else’s budget.
Instead, they use fuzzy politician accounting to say they “slowed the growth of government.”
The first year, they stuck with the biennial budget created by prior legislature; the second year, they adopted the Senate's budget. The Freedom Caucus budget did not save squat.
Then, in the second year of Neiman’s tenure, Checkgate happened: a lobbyist — now a gubernatorial candidate — handed out checks on the floor of the House (or, in Neiman's case, in the Speaker's Office) to members who would ultimately vote for a bill she wanted passed. The House investigated the whistle blowers.
The legislators who accepted the cash claim that since they voted for the bill in the last session, nothing was wrong. Uh-huh.
A bill was pending, cash was paid, votes were made by those to whom cash was paid.
As recently as last week, Speaker Neiman has shown no remorse for this stain on the history of the House.
The Freedom Caucus passed property tax relief, and you can't check your mailbox these days without finding a flyer from one of their candidates bragging about it. Of course, the problem is they crippled local services in the process.
To fix the problem they created, they want to “backfill” with someone else’s money. Now, the Freedom Caucus (who blames other people for their failing) blame the lack of "backfill" on the Senate. They say “backfill” is an easy thing.
What the Freedom Caucus ignores is the backfill money has to come from somewhere. To backfill, they can either tax someone else, tax the same taxpayers in a different way, or tax our children by spending our savings. The bottom line is backfill money comes from taxes, and someone has to pay those taxes. Money does not grow on trees.
It seems empty poser promises grow on trees.
Probably the biggest factor creating poser status is that Freedom Caucus members are puppets of a larger network.
The Freedom Caucus receives text messages from some hidden source telling them how to vote.
When the puppet master sends out a command, the collective buzz of the caucus's cell phones going off during the legislative session sounds like a gang of Harleys thundering by. After the rumble of the silenced phone buzzers end, some 30 legislators look at their phones and vote as instructed.
The caucus has been asked, several times, to show the voting public their secret text messages and disclose their instructions from their puppet master.
And, collectively, they have shown the citizens of the state their flippy finger, choosing instead to keep their marching orders secret.
Voters do not have to put up with their government being controlled by puppet masters dictating to their minion posers how to vote.
If a Freedom Caucus member, or aligned legislator, refuses to disclose the secret messages, show them the door. The biggest threat to our free society is a government run behind closed doors.
We deserve better than posers.
Tom Lubnau served in the Wyoming Legislature from 2004 to 2015 and is a former Speaker of the House. He can be reached at: YourInputAppreciated@gmail.com
