Wyoming Constitution; Article 1, Section 20...Every person may freely speak, write and publish on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right; and in all trials for libel, both civil and criminal, the truth,when published with good intent and for justifiable ends, shall be a sufficient defense, the jury having the right to determine the facts and the law,under direction of the court.

 

 

February 7, 2005

 

            All Legislators take an oath to uphold the State Constitution, and of course there are a lot of interpretations to the language, but read the following language and see if you agree that it is fairly clear.

 

            Wyoming Constitution; Article 3, Section 34…The general appropriations bills shall embrace nothing but appropriations for the ordinary expenses of the legislative, executive and judicial departments of the state, interest on the public debt, and for public schools. All other appropriations shall be made by separate bills, each embracing but one subject.

 

            In my opinion, most of the members of the Legislature are blowing off that section of the Constitution, and thereby violating their oath. The current supplemental budget bill working its way through the legislative process, as well as all other budget bills in the recent past, have been stuffed full of a legislative device called a ‘footnote’.

 

            Footnotes are linguistic directives, contained within the budget bills, that call for specific actions by some part of our state government. This is a problem for a couple of reasons, and it should be stopped immediately.

 

The action violates the constitutional language from the section quoted above, and in the process hides the intended action from the public view. The authors of the Wyoming Constitution knew full well that budget bills could be a wonderful vehicle for pulling the hemp over the eyes of the citizens, and so attempted to prohibit it from happening.

 

I did a little research on the budget bills of years gone by, and big surprise, those budget bills followed the language of the constitution. Those bills had rows of dollar appropriations for specific agencies of state government, and not much else. The legislators of the past took a much more conservative view of the words of our state constitution.

 

The current liberal approach started at least 25 years ago, and has been getting worse year by year. If you care to see for yourself, just go to this link……..

 

 

http://legisweb.state.wy.us/2005/Introduced/SF0001.pdf

 

You can start on page 48, and see that there is an immense amount of policy being dictated by the language in the budget bill, and that is wrong, wrong, wrong!!!

 

When I was an elected type, I always voted ‘no’ on budget bills, because I believed in abiding by my interpretation of my oath of office, but then again you know how truly conservative us Wyoming hippies are!!

 

Keith