Lawmakers, the public and the press have had their hands full tracking some 555 pieces of legislation this session. For some, all those bills present more opportunities for the best ideas to win. For others, the sheer quantity makes it hard to shape well-thought-out policies.
Maggie Mullen: This is the Cheyenne Roundup, a weekly look at Wyoming’s legislative session, from Wyoming Public Radio and WyoFile. I’m Maggie Mullen, WyoFile's state government and politics reporter and with me is Chris Clements, Wyoming Public Radio’s statehouse reporter.
Chris Clements: Hey, hey, hey.
MM: This week, as bills start to head to the governor’s desk, we want to dig into a story you reported, Chris, on how the volume of legislation might be shaping policy.
CC: Yep, a whopping 555 bills were drafted this session. In my reporting, I went through past news releases and bill lists from the Legislature and found this is the most in the last 24 years.
MM: In the House alone there were 347 bills. More than half came from Freedom Caucus-aligned lawmakers, who hold the majority of seats in the House. The remaining were a mix of committee bills or sponsored by lawmakers not affiliated with the Freedom Caucus.
Chris: At the national level, in Pres. Trump’s first 100 days, he’s signed the most executive orders of any president in the last 40 years. At the same time, in my job as a reporter covering our state’s government, I started to pick up on a pattern here in Wyoming that seems akin to what's happening within the Trump administration.
There’s a lot of bills filed for introduction this session that you might call “unprecedented” for some reason or another. A lot of bills that could tie up our judicial branch if they ever make it to the light at the end of the tunnel. Whether this is a deliberate strategy at the state level isn’t fully clear, but it’s something I’ve been asking about when I talk to lawmakers and lobbyists.
MM: In my experience, bills have always outnumbered the press corps at the Capitol. But I will say that this session has felt fast and furious in a different way.
CC: It's not just the number of bills but also the kinds of bills. We're hearing from listeners that there’s a real sense of fatigue in reading so many headlines having to do with these controversial culture war issues. People just want to tune out.
It’s putting a strain on activists, advocates and even the Legislative Service Office (LSO). The LSO received 800 bill draft requests from legislators this session for an initial legal review, a high-water mark in terms of bills that’ve been sent to them from electeds, at least in the last 15 years.
MM: A lot of bills overlap with one another. So bills will often end up competing with one another.
CC: Jessie Rubino says that's a good thing. She's the Wyoming state director for the State Freedom Caucus Network, which is based in Washington, DC. The network’s leader has told news outlets in other states that it wants to expose what they call “fake Republicans” by pushing further-right conservative policies.
Rubino says that this session, similar to previous ones, she’s emailing members suggestions on how to vote.
Jessie Rubino: I read every single bill that's been filed in the legislature. I provide a summary and an in depth analysis from a liberty and constitutional perspective to the members.
CC: Bill summaries and recommendations are not uncommon on either side of the aisle, or from lobbyists. But something interesting Rubino told me had to do with where Freedom Caucus members get their legislative inspiration from, in addition to hearing from constituents.
Jessie Rubino: I would say that the shared faith in Jesus amongst the Freedom Caucus and our conservative allies in the Wyoming House and Senate doesn't just drive the legislative priorities that the members have. It drives everything that they do.
MM: Christianity has definitely been more pronounced at the statehouse this year, but let's get back to the volume of bills this session.
CC: Rubino told me she thinks it could be more effective for the Freedom Caucus.
Jessie Rubino: In the marketplace of ideas, the more ideas are better, because in the end, the best ideas will win out. And so the more bills there are, the more there is to work with, including if there are multiple vehicles to achieve the same policy goal. We see that with multiple ESG bills being introduced, one on the House side, a couple on the Senate side. And I think conservatives and Freedom Caucus members welcome the high number of bills for that reason.
MM: At the end of the day, the Freedom Caucus holds the majority in the House. They also decide which bills get heard and which end up languishing in the speaker’s drawer, like we talked about a couple of shows back. The speaker unilaterally halted about a quarter of all House bills. All to say, the Caucus has the last say in the House.
CC: Rubino’s point is that more bills means more policy ideas in play, and more chances for at least some of them to advance. We’re definitely seeing that on some issues.
For example, nine bills having to do with the trans community were introduced this session, compared to two in 2023.
Bills centered on abortion went from five in 2023 to eight in 2025. Two years ago, we saw abortion bills like the “Life is a Human Right Act,” which was struck down by a district judge last year, and a ban on medication abortion. This year, we’ve got bills aiming to reach a similar end result in Wyoming, which is: preventing abortions.
The vehicles for doing that are a little different this year, but the goal is the same. Cody Rep. and Freedom Caucus Chair Rachel Rodriguez-Williams laid the strategy out for me in advance of the session.
Rachel Rodriguez-Williams: I would say, as a member of the pro-life caucus in the Wyoming Legislature, that right now, everything is on the table.
MM: But not everybody agrees it’s good governance to just put everything on the table. Is that right?
CC: I’d say so. I wanted some perspective from a longtime lawmaker who’s seen the rise of the Freedom Caucus in recent sessions, so I reached out to former Rock Springs Rep. Clark Stith. He was part of the more moderate Wyoming Caucus of the GOP. Here he is talking about some of the immigration and abortion bills.
Clark Stith: By having several of these relatively extreme bills, it perhaps dilutes the focus on any one of them.
CC: Another former longtime moderate Republican lawmaker, Dan Zwonitzer of Cheyenne, told me that filing so many bills ultimately isn’t effective.
Dan Zwonitzer: I guess you got some good press out of it, but you have some bad policy that the Senate will have to amend and fix.
MM: I didn’t encounter any sitting lawmakers, Freedom Caucus or otherwise, that said the high number of bills was any kind of intentional strategy. What I found was there are a lot of new lawmakers eager to bring ideas to the table and returning members bringing bills back that failed in past sessions.
But one area where we saw a really high volume of bills with a decent bit of overlap was legislation to overhaul the state’s elections. Lawmakers filed 45 election-related bills this session. If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is. Those bills accounted for 8% of all legislation in both the House and the Senate this year.
They run the gamut. Some would put new restrictions on the voter registration process. One would prohibit ballot drop boxes. Another would curtail the use of student IDs and Medicaid and Medicare insurance cards as acceptable forms of voter identification.
CC: What's been the effect of having so many election bills?
MM: For one, we saw House leadership assigning those bills to committees that don’t usually deal with election legislation because the House Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee was simply overwhelmed.
I’ll also mention that most election bills came out of the House and were brought by Freedom Caucus members. Democrats and non-Freedom Caucus members, for the most part, have a different perspective on what needs fixing when it comes to elections.
Casper Republican Sen. Bill Landen made this point as lawmakers discussed a resolution asking Congress to propose a constitutional amendment. It would allow states to establish limits on political contributions. Here Landen is talking about dark money being the real problem.
Bill Landen: It’s interesting that during this session we’re spending countless hours on the security of our elections. And it’s all about tightening up where you can go and how you can fill out your ballot, or you can’t throw it in a box or whatever, But this, actually, in my opinion, this kind of activity threatens the security of our elections here in Wyoming, when you really come right down to it.
MM: You can read more about that legislation in my election bill roundup story at wyofile.com.
CC: There's another way all these bills might factor into future elections. That is, as fodder for the campaign trail. University of Wyoming Professor Ryan Williamson explains.
Ryan Williamson: Political science has kind of well documented the fact that oftentimes, it's the position on an issue that is a more valuable commodity than the actual policy outcome. The ability to say to your supporters, your constituency, your party, ‘We're fighting the quote- unquote good fight.’ That's more important than whether or not a bill passes, in the minds of many people.
CC: Even if lots of bills meet their demise, Williamson said, the high volume makes it more likely at least some will cross the finish line.
MM: So switching gears now, let’s talk about bills heading to the governor’s desk.
CC: Not too long ago, Gordon shared a news release detailing how he’s going to consider which bills to sign and which ones to veto.
MM: That’s right. He laid out a rubric of five questions including:
- Is the bill Constitutional?
- Does it interfere with personal or private property rights?
- Does it erode local control?
- Does it grow state government or incur significant ongoing cost to the state?
- Will it make Wyoming better for our children and grandchildren?
CC: If lawmakers want the chance to override Gordon’s vetoes, they’ll need to get bills in by Feb. 28. We’re seeing a push for that with a bill to cut property taxes and some of those election bills. But it’s unclear to me if everything in the Freedom Caucus’s Five and Dime Plan will make it by that deadline.
MM: I followed up with the governor. I was curious if his announcement was about setting expectations. He sort of confirmed that.
He said there’s been a lot of discussion at the statehouse about him needing to prepare quote barrels of red ink, but he also said he wanted to remind folks that the Legislature makes the laws.
Gordon also said he wanted the public to have a reference point, where they could have a fuller understanding of this rubric he’s using when bills land on his desk.
CC: There’s still hurdles though for a lot of lawmakers’ priority bills. We’re expecting another culling on Thursday [Feb. 27], when bills need to make it out of committee again. Every subsequent day after that, bills must pass first, second and third votes by the full chambers. So we’re still very much in crunch time. Maggie, what’ll you be watching for?
MM: We spent some time today talking about bills headed to the governor’s desk, but we skipped over a critical step: joint conference committees. That’s where a bill goes when it passes both the House and the Senate, but the two chambers passed different versions of the bill thanks to amendments.
A Joint Conference Committee brings together three representatives and three senators, and they try to reconcile those differences into one unified bill to bring back to both chambers. In particular, I’m eager to watch the supplemental budget bill go through JCC [House and Senate versions] and Senate File 69. That’s a property tax cut bill that went through a whole bunch of changes this week in the House. How about you Chris?
CC: I’ll be watching to see if Trump calls out any more of our statehouse leaders on Truth Social. He did that not too long ago in support of the school vouchers bill, the Wyoming Freedom Scholarship Act, in a post to Senate President Bo Biteman and the whole chamber.
MM: Lots to pay attention to.
Thanks for listening to the Cheyenne Roundup, your weekly look at what lawmakers are up to during the 2025 legislative session from Wyoming Public Radio and WyoFile. New episodes drop every Friday throughout the session.
Editing and producing by Tennessee Watson and Nicky Ouellet. Follow our ongoing legislative coverage at wyomingpublicmedia.org and WyoFile.com. And thanks again for listening.
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.
