Remember when Wyoming Republicans put country first

Once upon a time, Wyoming was beyond partisan politics. As I listened to Robert Mueller testify, I recalled a time when we would not tolerate presidents who set themselves above the law. Back then, the state’s most conservative Republicans put country above party.

Forty-five years ago. No Fox. No Hannity. No Limbaugh. Conservatives did their own thinking. The Senate Watergate Committee released a report detailing Richard Nixon’s obstruction of justice and abuses of power, not unlike Mueller’s report on similar conduct by President Trump.

The Watergate report resulted from a lengthy public process. The three-hundred-nineteen hours of hearings were nearly all broadcast live on commercial television stations. National Public Radio provided gavel-to-gavel coverage. The entire country was mesmerized. Voters listened and learned.

The nation that gave Nixon a landslide victory less than two years earlier now believed it had elected a crook. Wyoming had given Nixon 70% of its vote in 1972. I remember the night it became apparent the Wyoming winds had shifted.

July 1974. Tip O’Neill, then Majority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, traveled to Cheyenne to support the re-election of the last Democrat Wyoming ever elected to the U.S. House, Congressman Teno Roncalio.

I was a member of Teno’s staff, assigned the task of driving O’Neill from the Cheyenne airport to the Hitching Post Inn for the fundraising dinner and back to the airport later that night.

When Teno and the Majority Leader arrived, they were greeted by more than 500 people. Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike drove from all parts of the state for the event. Iconic reporter Jimmy Breslin wrote about it in his 1975 book “Notes from an Impeachment Summer: How the Good Guys Finally Won.”

Breslin accurately observed that the banquet hall was filled with “the backbone of influence” from across Wyoming. They had come to hear what this important national figure had to say about the President. O’Neill had come to gauge the temperature of rural, conservative America as the House moved inevitably closer to a vote on the impeachment of Nixon.

As he began speaking of the issue atop everyone’s mind, O’Neill quoted Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. “Decency, security, and liberty depend on the system in which no man is above the law. This mandate is a daily thing, answerable at all times and on all matters.”

We looked across the large crowd and noted, as did Breslin, that nearly every head was nodding, followed by a standing ovation. Breslin wrote about O’Neill’s reaction. “You’ve got to be kidding. If he doesn’t have a vote here, how the hell can he hope to get one anywhere?”

Later, we drove back to the airport. O’Neill smoked a cigar. He and Teno visited. The Democratic Leader of the House was stunned by the anti-Nixon reaction from conservative Wyoming. He’d seen it with his own eyes, heard it with his own ears. O’Neill was convinced that if Wyoming was ready to impeach, so was the rest of the country.

Within a couple of weeks it was over. Nixon resigned. The new President, Gerald Ford, announced, “Our long national nightmare is over.”

That was then. Today is different. Wyoming’s “backbone of influence” stands with Trump despite ample evidence that he obstructed justice, knowingly obliged unlawful Russian influence in the 2016 election, and lies as routinely as he abuses the powers of the Presidency.

Why were the state’s conservatives open to the truth in 1974 but not so much 45 years later? What’s different? First, the Wyoming Republican Party is more doctrinaire today. The deeply partisan congressional delegation has no interest in providing voters an honest critique of Trump’s dishonesty.

The most significant difference is the existence of Fox News and talk radio, dispensing Orwellian-like misinformation 24/7. The vast majority won’t read the Mueller report. All they know is what they’ve been fed by Trump’s Tweets and those questionable sources.

Happily oblivious to the truth, they would indeed watch silently if Trump shot someone to death on 5^th Avenue.