Dear editor:

This is in response to David Hill’s column on Civics and Civility in the Nov. 24 Powell Tribune. He talks about the “growing schism between people on the same side of the political aisle” but never gets to the real heart of the matter. The fact is that there are Democrats and Republicans in the Republican party. A party is going to have internal fights when interlopers are trying to take over.

David says that he doesn’t believe that Wyomingites care what particular ideology a legislator has but that they are more concerned that legislators are able to work collaboratively. I think he’s wrong. The people in Wyoming are Republican and many move here believing we are a Republican state. They care which party is in office.

There is a group called the Institute for Legislative Analysis at limitedgov.org. They are the “new data and policy hub for national conservative and liberty-minded organizations.” The team previously served together for nearly a decade at CPAC and the American Conservative Union. They have looked at the voting records of seven states so far and did a vote record analysis of 4,488 votes in Wyoming. If you aren’t familiar with the voting records of our elected officials, the outcome will shock you. They say that Democrat lawmakers control the Wyoming House of Representatives, with 36 Democrats to 26 Republicans, and that Republicans have a slight lead in the Senate with 17 Republicans to 14 Democrats. That’s rather odd information considering that voters elected 57 Republicans and five Democrats in the House and 29 Republicans and two Democrats in the Senate. The time when voters could trust in the integrity of those on the ballot and vote for a person just because they had an R behind their name is long past.

If you go to the above site, you will see where your congressmen and women rank on a scale of 0-100% as to whether they are philosophically Republican or philosophically Democrat, with Republicans being the higher numbers and Democrats being the lower. I’m positive that when a voter elects a Republican, they want that person to be a Republican. They want someone who follows the Republican Platform at least 80% of the time. That is not what is happening.

David mentioned two other sites, WyoRino.com and wyomingcap.com. They are run by Wyoming people and have totally opposite information. Compare both to the ILA site and see which one is telling the truth and which one is another effort to blatantly lie and fool the voters. As someone outside of Wyoming’s political class, ILA CEO Ryan McGowan says, “Unfortunately, it appears a large number of philosophically Democratic lawmakers have decided to mislabel their party affiliation as ‘Republican,’ perhaps in an attempt to confuse voters. This fraudulent practice should be of great concern to the people of Wyoming as it is resulting in the passage of some of the exact same policies our research team finds in progressive states like California or New York, places with values I don’t think are shared by many in the Cowboy State.”

We do have two parties and I am sure the Democrats would love participation in their party. It is a matter of integrity to register for the party that you truly belong to. When that happens, we will no longer see the schism in the party that David Hill was discussing in his article. It’s that easy.

Dona Becker

Powell