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Freedom Caucus should identify themselves

Dear Casper,

Being in an election season, no doubt you, like me, have received plenty of ad impressions and flyers in your mailbox from candidates vying for office. In this season, I have these four observations:

First, every candidate, regardless of their convictions, will run based on being a “Conservative” and having “Wyoming Values.” These terms are typically either not defined or vaguely defined.

Second, every candidate in our inbox is running in the Aug. 18 Republican primary, meaning that they are telling us that they align with “Republican values.”

Third, there is a concerted effort among traditional Republicans to demonize and attack members of their party who align with a group known as the “Freedom Caucus.”

Fourth, most politicians attacking the Freedom Caucus appear to hold similar views on expansion of government, use of state power to control behavior, and the use of tax-and-spend redistribution of wealth to accomplish political ends.

In other words, they act like Democrats. They are tax-and-spend liberals, by 1990s standards, with different patrons and voter bases.

Freedom Caucus members call these people “Republicans in Name Only” — RINO — versus conservatives. However, I would challenge this label based on the Noah Webster 1828 definition of “conservative:” “Preservative; having power to preserve in a safe or entire state, or from loss, waste or injury.”

Meaning: they can use the “conservative” label and continue to favor the currently established liberal agenda, which includes inflation-inducing deficit spending at a level of $2 trillion per year, 20%-plus increases to the city budget, spending on surveillance state technology that violates the Fourth Amendment, kill switch mandates on new vehicles, and continuing to support tax and spend redistribution programs.

They can use this label because they are preserving the status quo, which has been the modus operandi for the bulk of the Republican party since Bush. They pay lip service to Reagan, invoke Trump, govern like Bush and maintain the programs of Obama.

They are also very good at leveraging PAC money to tell you the Freedom Caucus, of whom many Wyoming politicians who are fighting to roll back or eliminate this overreach and spending, are the “bad guys.”

Bush was very good at this “good versus bad” messaging, as is our current Republican president, who has done a very good job at “conserving” to the degree that he primaried out one of the loudest Freedom Caucus voices in Congress, Thomas Massie.

Many have written opinions demanding that Freedom Caucus candidates should identify themselves. I agree with them, we need to know who the Freedom Caucus candidates are. Based on Webster, they may be more revolutionary than conservative, but based on the good men and women I know who are running under this label, they hold to the values of the American founders: that citizens, versus government, own this country. This view may not be “conservative” anymore, but it’s the values of many Wyomingites. In fact, many of us voted for this exact thing two years ago.

As such, we need to know who the Freedom Caucus candidates are, look unbiasedly at their positions, and vote accordingly. We should vote for government versus citizen rights and be confident in that vote. If you believe in the current path of expansionistic government and its results, please feel free to vote your conscience. However, do it with complete information rather than based on demonization, propaganda and attacks.

Writing independently for a Free Wyoming.

Chris Willis
Casper

Voters deserve healthcare answers

Dear Casper,

This year, Wyoming posted the largest Affordable Care Act premium increase in the country. For a 60-year-old earning roughly $63,000 a year, average monthly premiums are rising 421% — in a single year. No other state comes close.

The arguments over who broke healthcare first are 16 years old, and everyone already knows their lines. What they don’t seem to know much about are solutions. What matters now is that Wyoming is down to two insurers in the individual market after Mountain Health Co-Op pulled out citing unsustainable losses, that we’re one of only nine states that has never expanded Medicaid, and that we have none of the reinsurance or state-exchange tools that kept other states’ increases in the low teens this year.

Whoever’s fault you believe that originally was, it’s now a Wyoming problem.

I own a small retail business in Casper. My household’s premiums, for two reasonably healthy people in our early 50s, run over $45,000 a year. It’s painful when the bill lands in the mailbox alongside the slick campaign mailers, but in my case it gets paid, and I consider myself fortunate to be able to.

For every small business owner who can grit their teeth and absorb that, there are far more Wyoming workers and families who can’t — and who are the ones actually skipping coverage or going without care.

In a campaign season with open races for Senate, our House seat, and the governor’s office, I haven’t heard one candidate, from either party, offer a real answer. Not Medicaid expansion, not a reinsurance pool, not anything beyond pointing fingers at past or present administrations.

The current campaign trail, and my mailbox, is full of national cable news talking points, trolling, and straw men that seem to have precious little to do with the actual pressing issues in Wyoming.

I don’t need every candidate to agree on the fix. Reasonable people can disagree about Medicaid expansion, or about the state’s role versus Washington’s. But disagreement requires a position, and right now nobody running has stated one. Before the primary and the general election, I’d ask voters and reporters to put the question to every candidate directly: what would you actually do, today, about Wyoming’s ACA market?

Wyoming is currently number one in a contest nobody who lives here should want to win — the worst state in the union for healthcare costs.

Voters deserve to know if anyone running to represent them has a better idea than pointing backwards.

Donovan Short
Casper

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