The Wyoming Senate voted 22-9 on Monday to cut $70 million from a legislative war chest set aside to sue the federal government for environmental policies seen as detrimental to the state.
The vote on an amendment proposed by Sen. Mike Gierau, a Democrat from Teton County, came after days of debate over whether the lawmaking body should have litigation funds separate from Gov. Mark Gordon’s executive branch. Perhaps paramount in the vote, which left $5 million in Senate File 41, “Federal acts-legal actions authorized,” was the new administration in Washington, D.C.
“What’s changed for me, frankly, is the President of the United States,” Sen. John Kolb, a Republican from Rock Springs, said as he outlined his support for the reduction. He represents an area heavily reliant on federal property managed by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service.
“All of a sudden we’ve got … two pots of money working against each other.”
Sen. Mike Gierau
Some 48% of Wyoming’s land is federal land, owned by all Americans. Federal initiatives to preserve wildlife habitat, scenic and historic sites and other natural resources on that land have rubbed some fur the wrong way. In Kolb’s Sweetwater County, for example, a BLM conservation-balanced management plan for 3.6 million acres, an expanse larger than Connecticut, sparked growls and howls.
“I think we have a very less adversarial condition between our state and the presidency,” Kolb said of the consequences of President Donald Trump’s election.
Armed and dangerous
Gordon vetoed a similar bill the Legislature passed in 2024, Sen. Bob Ide, R-Casper, told members of the Joint Agriculture, State and Public Lands & Water Resources Interim Committee earlier this year. That body voted to sponsor the measure.
Senate File 41 is “a shot across the bow to protect our state, our lands, against federal acts — [National Environmental Policy Act] and [Federal Land Policy Management Act] — that affect our state,” Ide told the committee.
“We need to be armed and dangerous to fight back against this and act like we’re a real sovereign state,” he later said on the Senate floor. The bill says: “We don’t want you [the feds] pushing us around like you have been for a long time.”
Many lawmakers balked at the prospect of the Legislature firing off its own lawsuits. For various reasons, the Senate Appropriations Committee did not support the measure, which went to the whole Senate nevertheless.
The bill would allow a majority of the Legislature’s Management Council — only six lawmakers — to initiate a suit.
“We had a situation where we can’t export our coal to places that would like it through our ports in America because we didn’t sue in a timely manner,” Sen. Darin Smith, R-Cheyenne, said in support of the bill and its quick-trigger Management Council authority.
“This is timely,” he said. “We’re going to be sorry if we don’t gear up and fund this and if we do, then we might just intimidate the feds out of the Rock Springs land grab that they would like to try to do.”
Two’s a crowd
Republican Sen. Charlie Scott of Casper, Wyoming’s longest serving lawmaker, called the bill “a mistake,” because suing on behalf of the state is a function of the executive branch. “Lawsuits require people who are experienced in litigation to supervise whatever lawyers we’re actually using,” he said.
Having Wyoming represented in court by two different entities could be counterproductive, Gierau said. “All of a sudden we’ve got … two pots of money working against each other,” he said.
In a recent failed petition by Utah to get the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case demanding the federal government divest itself of 18.5 million acres in the Beehive State, Wyoming had three positions.
In amicus briefs, the state officially backed Utah only by outlining its economic reliance on federal lands. U.S. Rep Harriet Hageman was more strident, claiming federal ownership of land in the West was equivalent to a wartime occupation. And 26 Wyoming lawmakers filed a brief saying their support for Utah didn’t mean they would stop at taking back just BLM-managed lands. Wyoming’s subsequent claims might extend to National Forests and National Parks, they said.
Gordon’s executive branch has been doing fine, and the Legislature should stick to passing laws and setting policy “but not try to litigate,” Casper Republican Sen. Jim Anderson said.
“We are not good litigators,” he told fellow senators. “This bill could employ more attorneys than we have in the state.”
For Sen. and attorney Tara Nethercott, lawmakers too often have “a knee-jerk reaction to litigate every time and without, maybe, justification.” Such immediate response comes without deep thought about consequences, costs and other things, the Cheyenne Republican said.
The bill’s funding expires on June 30, 2028. The measure must pass a third reading in the Senate before it goes to the House.
The myth that I often hear from people here in Wyoming is that the federal government stole land from the state of Wyoming. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of the state was part of the Louisiana Territory, with the rest of what is now Wyoming part of Mexico and the Oregon Territory. Louisiana was purchased from France by the federal government in 1803, The Louisiana Purchase. It never belonged to the State of Wyoming because there was no State of Wyoming. The same goes for the former parts of Mexico and the Oregon Territory. The state should not waste any more money on these lawsuits, which they always lose, because the federal government can do what it wants with the land that it owns.
— Thanks for the good reporting, Angus. I guess the laughable falsehood that the United State of America “stole that land from Wyoming” will always be tossed out by misguided people.
— Folks, go visit the dramatic Tri-Territory Site north of Superior, where the Louisiana Purchase and the lands taken from Mexico by force and the long-disputed Oregon Territory of Great Britain meet. Rightly or not, control of all that land was held by powerful European nations, and it was the efforts of the United States of America that brought it to us. “Wyoming?” There was no “Wyomingite” anywhere, and the name rested at the site of a sad massacre of pioneers from Connecticut in the French and Indian War, at a place called Wyoming near Scranton, Pennsylvania.
— The Wyoming Historical Society has a good page on the Tri-Territory Site online: https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/tri-territory-site-outpost-invisible-empires
— The Site is a classic Wyoming place – large and empty and alone. It makes you think. If the entire USA had not worked long and hard to get that land from France and Britain and Spain, three European flags would fly today over all the land some thoughtless folks say was “stolen” from a group that did not exist.