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If you walk past the Wyoming Republican Party’s tent these days, beware. You may have to dodge members being thrown out of the three-ring circus. 

On Saturday, the party’s overachieving central committee censured Sen. Cale Case of Lander, denied support to Republicans running as independents in November and condemned the actions of a legislative committee and 10 GOP lawmakers.

The state party told Case, a Republican lawmaker for the past 30 years, to join a different party or run as an independent. Karl Allred of Uinta County bluntly delivered a similar message to Republicans who plan to challenge GOP primary winners as independents: “Get the hell out of the party.”

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Case’s punishment, which is merely symbolic, was meted out for his failed effort to find someone to run against Rep. Chuck Gray (R-Casper), the party’s secretary of state nominee, in the November general election. No stranger to bucking the party’s extreme-right, Case was joined in his efforts by other “mainstream” Republicans and a few Democrats.

The party’s establishment is justifiably horrified that without a challenger, Gray — an election denier who has claimed without evidence that there are “tremendous problems” with the security of Wyoming’s elections — is virtually guaranteed to win the job supervising Wyoming’s elections. 

Gray defeated Sen. Tara Nethercott (R-Cheyene) by about 13,000 votes. That’s a pretty decisive victory, but he captured only 49.5% of the total. Ironically, if the Legislature had bowed to the state party’s demand for a run-off system that requires winners to get more than 50%, the pair would have faced off again in the general election. 

Instead, Case went searching for a conservative to oppose Gray. He set his sights on former Republican legislator Nathan Winters, head of the “pro-life” Family Policy Alliance of Wyoming. Winters declined and endorsed Gray.

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Now that he’s censured, the party won’t provide any financial or other support to Case. That’s no great loss, of course. Accustomed to being labeled a RINO —  the derisive term for a “Republican in name only” — Case wasn’t exactly counting on state-party backing. Nor does he need it. Party apparatchiks can’t make Case remove the “R” behind his name on the ballot, and he is committed to remaining a Republican even if party leaders object.

Case is a member of the Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee, which is trying another way to keep Gray’s hands off the state’s elections. The panel is drafting a bill to put the secretary of state’s elections division under a new commission — a bit of free-thinking that earned the group its own dose of central committee ire.

Other Republican members include the co-chairs, Sen. Ogden Driskill of Devils Tower and Rep. Dan Zwonitzer of Cheyenne; Sens. Brian Boner of Douglas and Nethercott; and Reps. Jim Blackburn of Cheyenne, Aaron Clausen of Douglas, Danny Eyre of Lyman, Shelly Duncan of Lingle and Joe MacGuire of Casper. The only Republican spared from condemnation was Sen. Charles Scott of Casper, who spoke against the idea.

The party has zero leverage on at least five of the members. Blackburn and Eyre didn’t seek re-election, and Clausen, Duncan and MacGuire lost their primaries to more conservative opponents. 

Case didn’t attend the meeting where he was censured, but released this statement: “I am sorry that the Republican Central Committee has regressed to the suppression of ideas, intolerance and a lack of civility, and the punishing of mainstream Republicans who do not embrace the more extreme elements of their thinking.”

One might consider Case guilty of violating his party’s “11th Commandment” to not speak ill of fellow Republicans like Gray. But the party itself threw that convention out the window long ago (along with other traditional GOP values like integrity, independent thought, civility, honesty and competence). Look no further than the routine attacks on any member who dares disagree with leadership’s edicts.

By throwing its support to primary winners and kicking any independent candidates to the curb, the committee may actually be paving the way for some RINO victories.

Rep. Lloyd Larsen of Lander, for example, ran unopposed in the Republican primary, and doesn’t face a Democratic challenger in the general. But despite serving as a quintessential conservative for years, the anonymous Republican attack site WyoRINO claims he only votes with the party 20% of the time. It labeled Larsen, who like Case has angered GOP officials by supporting Medicaid expansion, its “RINO of the Month” in December 2020.

Jeff Martin, on the other hand, is a Republican who decided to run against Larsen as an independent because he believes he’s ideologically more of a Republican than Larsen is.

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With their opposition of such candidates, would-be party king makers are spurning just the type of loyal lap dogs they want to see in office. 

Case is a traditional conservative with libertarian leanings, and generally viewed as a moderate in a Senate that moves further to the right each election. One of the reasons cited for Case’s censure was an op-ed he penned in April that called for Wyoming Republicans to again embrace former President Ronald Reagan’s guiding concept of a “big tent” that welcomes diverse opinions.

If that doesn’t sound seditious, it’s because it isn’t. 

In 1967, as California’s governor, Reagan told his state’s Republican Assembly “there is room in our tent for many views; indeed, the divergence of views is one of our strengths. … Unity does not require unanimity of thought.”

Case described a Wyoming Republican philosophy that has strayed far from the party Reagan envisioned.

“At every turn, the Republican State Party leadership gives voice to a minority viewpoint that will not tolerate disagreement,” the senator wrote. “Tactics include censure and RINO-labeling of any dissenting viewpoint.”

“We are not a group of people who use cronyism to ‘stack the deck’ and control the narrative,” the state Republican Central Committee claimed in its censure resolution against Case. It’s a hollow defense of the group’s tactics. To name just one bit of contrary evidence, the party’s not-so tacit endorsement of congressional candidate Harriet Hageman against U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney and other rivals epitomized deck stacking, . 

Cheney, of course, was censured by both the national and state GOP for her vote to impeach Donald Trump and subsequently clobbered by Hageman in the primary. But Case survived his pre-primary censure by Fremont County Republicans.

“I honestly think [the censure] helped me,” Case told me after he defeated his extreme-right opponent by 10 percentage points. “It got my people out to vote.”

Case, who doesn’t have a general election opponent, will be back in his Senate seat in January. Let’s hope he continues to serve as a thorn in the side of his party’s hierarchy for four more years, calling out its dictatorial demands and hypocritical positions.

In the meantime, WyoRINO is chastising Republicans who do have opponents. Take Rep. Jared Olsen, the September “RINO of the Month.” It gave him a 20% rating in adherence to the party’s “ideals,” and blasted him for funneling more tax dollars “to the extremely woke University of Wyoming.”

I’m a Democrat who admittedly fails to recognize many fine Republican achievements. I must give WyoRINO and state party officials credit for doing a bang-up job going after their own members. 

It takes a special kind of political acumen to know that censuring, condemning and rebuking so many people is the only sure way to get a slate of “pure” candidates who agree with the party bosses about everything. But if they keep treating people with so little respect, eventually they’ll have more on their “naughty” list than they have obedient soldiers in their culture wars.

I know my party will welcome those rejects with open arms. We aren’t afraid of candidates who think for themselves and offer new ideas, so any victims of the Republican purge should know they have a new home waiting for them. I hope voters feel the same way.

Veteran Wyoming journalist Kerry Drake has covered Wyoming for more than four decades, previously as a reporter and editor for the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle and Casper Star-Tribune. He lives in Cheyenne and... More by Kerry Drake

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One can only recall the “purity purges” of Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong. And Jesus Christ and Malcolm X were “neutralized” by their own kind. There’s nothing worse than a heretic.

How dare Senator Case question election or another elected official’s integrity! It is terrible that he wants to help Wyoming’s most needy citizens! He should go back to where he came from. LOL .. Wyoming Fascism is alive and feeding on its own. Big tent indeed, Wyoming’s Republican Party is run by an Oathkeeper. One who could not keep his oath as a police officer or a husband. Chuck Gray represents anti democratic fascism. The state government and it’s tRumpian citizens are rolling in the authoritarian manure and it stinks. Wyoming is the Mississippi of the Rockies; too ignorant and bigoted to know better. I guess Senator Case and I will be sent to the new Patriot Indoctrination Schools or Camps. Thank you for your informative article and perspective.

Well written piece. Calling out the Republican hypocrites will definitely hit them where they hurt.

As usual this “opinion” oozes with hypocrisy. Always okay to mover further “left” but never further “right”. Many of us “we the people” in Wyoming want the party to move more conservative…but “no no can’t do that you say”! Maybe we don’t want “mainstream Republicans and RINOs” and we have every right to do what is necessary to move our party more conservative. Would a “pro life group hire a pro abortion person as their spokesperson”? Someone with a completely different set of values that would use every opportunity they had to undermine the movement! Of course not. Would a McDonald’s hire someone who hates their food and loves Wendy’s so that at every opportunity that person can tell customers to go down the street instead? Of course not. Your quote of Case is a perfect example…Case can get “his people” out to vote, but conservatives are criticized for mobilizing “their people” which are true conservatives. Hypocrisy oozes like puss from an infected sore.

Chrump is openly and knowingly acknowledging qanon stupidity. And here we have those who are willingly encouraging it.

This is great news! It’s about time that the GOP excised these human pathogens from the party. The so-called Big Tent only serves to infect everyone who enters.

“….excised these human pathogens from the party.”

Nice dehumanizing language. Its clear that the angry old white base is hell bent on wrecking our form of government. Reagan was crap as a President but he did his dirty work with a smile and a joke….very similar to the avuncular but now deceased Mike Enzi.

Republicans are cheering on a second civil war and are happy to be ignorant all the while claiming to be christian. Reagan, the Clintons and the Cheneys are responsible for playing games with the electorate that allowed right wing media to continue to encourage Republican voting while they were being used to turn America toward fascism.

Hageman got in bed with Peter Theil, a wealthy, gay* man because he thinks the rich should run everything as they think they are smarter than anyone else. Our Founders were flawed but they were not as angry and self righteous as the republican voters in Wyoming. Keep up with that language because you are convinced you are right when you are clearly being used to destroy our government.

You republicans don’t have the numbers or the guts to put me on the train trip you seem to be planning for people that care about the USA.

* It pains me to use that descriptor but Peter doesn’t seem to recognize that there were jews that supported Hitler thinking this was just rhetoric. Those that study history know how that turned out.

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