Wyoming politicos will meet at the state Capitol in Cheyenne on April 8 to decide what subjects interim committees should focus on during the legislative off season.

Cloud seeding, corner crossing, the use of restraints on students in schools and tribal healthcare agencies are all among the potential subjects joint committees could take up this summer. Once interim topics have been formalized and chosen by the Legislature’s top leaders, public hearings will be held, and draft legislation could come from the summer’s proceedings.

“It’s a marvelous process,” said Sen. Cale Case (R-Lander). “It is mostly educational, and I am proud of the way we do it in Wyoming. I think the Legislature needs to be proud of the committee work as well.”

Even more election bills?

Representatives from the House, which is controlled by the Wyoming Freedom Caucus and those who align with it, hold majorities on most joint and standing committees.

That includes the Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee, which Case co-chairs.

In a phone interview with Wyoming Public Radio, Case said some ideas submitted to the committee have to do with getting rid of voting machines and paper ballot usage, two election overhaul policies that died during the recent general session.

But he and several county clerks told WPR that voter fraud and machine tampering aren’t common in Wyoming. Case plans on inviting several clerks to the committee’s hearings to give them the chance to explain and demonstrate how election management works, including voting machine demonstrations.

“[Fraud is] absolutely rare, and it’s true that we have incredibly good elections by any analysis,” he said. “I want to give the clerks and everybody else a chance to showcase that, and then if we find out we have things to address, and the committee wants to move it forward, more power to them. Take it up.”

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, lists only four instances of voter fraud in Wyoming since 2000, all of which were the result of people with criminal convictions attempting to vote. Despite that fact, Case believes a potential foray into Wyoming’s elections by the committee wouldn’t be a waste of time or taxpayer money.

“When we have the time and we can get away, we can drop off the rhetoric and the sloganeering, and drop down to what’s actually happening,” he said. “[We can] educate the public about how their elections work.”

That opportunity for education is a philosophy shared by at least one member of Senate leadership, Sen. Tara Nethercott (R-Cheyenne), who told WPR in a recent interview she hopes committee chairs educating freshmen in their respective bodies might prevent so-called committee bills from being killed during legislative sessions. Those kinds of bill deaths have been increasing in recent years.

That’s led some lawmakers to worry about the purpose of having an interim season at all.

But Case isn’t one of them. He said that with the Freedom Caucus squarely in the driver’s seat in selecting who will chair committees on the House side, the caucus’s appreciation of institutional legislation will necessarily change.

“All of a sudden, they’re part of the establishment,” he said. “It’ll change the whole tenor. It has to. It’s the way it works.”

Wind River Reservation affairs

Meanwhile, the Select Committee on Tribal Relations might hear updates from law enforcement agencies on investigations into missing and murdered Indigenous people (MMIP).

As one of its topics, the committee could discuss how tribal, state and federal law enforcement manage crime on and around the Wind River Reservation.

Rep. Ivan Posey (D-Fort Washakie) co-chairs the committee. He’s a former Eastern Shoshone Business Council leader and an enrolled member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe. He’s also the only Native American legislator in the state.

“In some places like Riverton, Lander, somebody’s arrested [and] the next day it’s in the paper, or a couple days, it’s in a paper,” said Posey.

That sort of public information isn’t nearly as plentiful on the reservation, he said. He said more information sharing between law enforcement agencies and the general public is a matter of grave importance, and he plans to travel to Cheyenne next week to advocate for the topic’s inclusion.

“The people in the federal system on a reservation really don’t have that luxury of knowing who’s been arrested or what they’re arrested for,” Posey said. “We’re probably the most checkerboard jurisdiction area in the state of Wyoming. We have the [Bureau of Indian Affairs] law enforcement. We have the FBI. We have [Fremont] County, as well as the Wyoming Highway Patrol, as well as our Fish and Game and tribal courts and federal courts.”

There’s often as many as three separate jurisdictions involved in criminal cases, including the feds, according to Posey.

That jurisdictional quagmire frequently plays into felony-level criminal cases involving tribal members on the reservation. Following the passage of national legislation by Congress in 1885, some felonies committed by Native people on tribal nations automatically go federal, and tribal members can be separated from their communities and taken to far-off federal prisons where they’re likely to have less support.

In the same vein as improving communication, Posey said another of his priorities for the interim is to have a committee hearing take place off the reservation so that more non-tribal members can attend. In 2022, the group met in Laramie and Riverton, but since then, hearings have happened in either Fort Washakie or Cheyenne.

“There’s still a lack of understanding or lack of knowledge on tribal issues,” Posey said, mentioning that can include some of his fellow lawmakers. “I’ve always felt that we need to branch out on that, because if we do a bill, or this process develops a couple bills, some legislators in other districts may not truly be aware of some of the issues that face the reservation.”

Other topics that might be considered by Posey’s committee include tribally operated healthcare services and illegal waste dumping on the reservation.

This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.