Every home needs one – a drawer in the kitchen where all the knickknacks, leftovers and broken tools are deposited, out of sight and out of mind.
You have one in your own kitchen. Open it up and you’ll see the dead batteries, broken scissors, matchbooks, packets of soy sauce, an old potholder, a rolled-up tube of superglue, rubber bands and other stuff that has outlived its usefulness, but which you just can’t convince yourself to throw away.
The only useful thing in it is perhaps a can opener hidden somewhere. But you need to dig through all that other crap to find it.
The junk drawer.
When the house was first built, the architect designed that drawer to be part of a functional kitchen, meant to hold heirloom silverware, finely embroidered table linen or useful cooking utensils.
But after the house has been lived in for a few years, the junk drawer morphed into a catch-all for things unnecessary.
Wyoming’s political kitchen is almost screaming out for a political junk drawer these days.
And the Constitution Party might be just what we need to hold all the clutter.
The Constitution Party has been a minor political player in Wyoming for a while now . But it has heretofore been most closely associated with the marginal and feckless statewide campaigns of perennial candidate Rex Rammell.
However when Rebecca “Checkgate Becky” Bextel hightailed it out of the GOP to run for governor on the Constitution Party ticket, she immediately drew the spotlight to her new political home.
She got landslid in the election, but drew 31,000 votes - presumably from disaffected Republicans, since the Constitution Party only has about 600 registered members.
That vote total was enough to confer “major” party status on the Constitution Party, under Wyoming statute, and positioned it to serve as the junk drawer of Wyoming politics for at least the next election cycle.
Think about the possibilities!
If all 31,000 of Checkgate Becky’s voters migrated with her to the Constitution Party, they would create a new home for all of Wyoming’s political misfits and malcontents.
The disgraced Freedom Caucus would find a sanctuary city, and wouldn’t have to contort themselves trying to convince us that they are Republicans.
Our political goofballs would have a party all to themselves, complete with all the precinct and county machinations that go along with that.
They could conduct meetings and conventions where they could craft platform planks that address the serious problems of chemtrails and UFOs.
The Constitution Party could insist that we build a wall along our southern border to keep our kids safe from Bolshevism.
They could compile a list of books that should be banned in Wyoming and push for laws that lower hemlines in public. There would be no conspiracy theory that they couldn’t vote to accept without question.
They could adopt Bigfoot as a party mascot, instead of a donkey or an elephant.
The crayon-eating kids in the back of the room who throw spitballs during history class deserve a party they can call their own. And Checkgate Becky is showing them the way. Here’s hoping they follow her lead.
The net effect of putting all our political odds and ends in their own junk drawer would be a cleaner political household in the Big Empty.
The orthodoxies of the Wyoming’s Democrat and Republican parties would be tidied up, and they could resume their partisan jousting without the weirdness of fringe ideologies.
If we can’t rid our body politic of the influence of parties, then we should have more than just two of them monkeying around in our lives.
We could use a political junk drawer of a party that does nothing but segregate strange political ideation from the rest of the house. And the only way we know its even there is the screechy whine we hear when we open the drawer.
Rod Miller can be reached at: RodsMillerWyo@yahoo.com
