With one hand, Wyoming lawmakers throw support behind the declining coal, oil, and gas industries, providing public investment and political support. With the other hand, they gut sectors where women work like healthcare, education, and retail. No wonder we have the nation’s worst gender wage gap.
Every 10 years the Wyoming Legislature redraws the voting map that determines which lawmakers represent which people. On its face, “redistricting” is dull. But it’s a critically important process that often invites creativity—as well as creativity’s relatives, corruption and abuse.
Political economist Sven Larson worked 10 years for Gore’s Wyoming Liberty Group. In a new statement, he condemns Gore’s plot and states she has “wiped out whatever credibility she had.”
Political spies with ties to the Wyoming Liberty Group, Project Veritas, and Blackwater founder Erik Prince targeted Better Wyoming as part of a yearlong operation to gather intel and make secret recordings to weaponize against the organization.
The Legislature’s Joint Revenue Committee will take up Medicaid expansion this week, with a focus on translating some of the $1.4 billion Wyoming will receive from the American Rescue Plan into sustainable healthcare funding for low-income residents.
The Legislature cut more than $100 million from the Wyoming Department of Health’s budget this session, including tens of millions from mental health and substance abuse programs while the state is experiencing a suicide crisis.
Wyoming’s new voter ID law will suppress turnout, as similar laws have in other states. But by forcing Wyoming residents to show IDs at the polls, the new law also eliminates the main argument against Wyoming adopting online voter registration, which increases youth voter turnout.
In a last-day legislative surprise, lawmakers from the Wyoming House and Senate failed to agree on the details of a bill that would have dramatically cut public education funding. As a result of legislators’ failure to govern, K-12 schools will be spared budget cuts for now. But the structural problem of our education funding model remains.
The House and Senate have come up with two different versions of an education funding bill: One that cuts public school budgets, and another that cuts them even more. Lawmakers will end the session tomorrow debating which version will prevail.
Two identical bills to update Wyoming’s Medicaid program came before the same Senate committee this session. A senator who supported the first bill flipped and killed the second. But not before a movement coalesced that will continue to fight for affordable healthcare access in Wyoming.
