Wyoming History In The Making: Janaury 30, 2014. Attorney General to ask for Hill rehearing.

The Attorney General of Wyoming indicated that the State would file a petition for a rehearing in the Hill case.

Rehearings are very rarely granted, and its even rarer for the justices to reverse themselves.  However, I have seen them do both, and have even seen an instance in which the court took a matter up on its own initiative and reversed itself.  The State must feel that with a 3 to 2 decision, it may be able to craft an argument to convince at least one justice, a gamble which in legal terms it is probably worth the State's time and effort to take.

As a practical matter, Mrs. Hill was elected in 2010 and her term of office is four years.  This position will accordingly be up for election in 2014 and Mrs. Hill has declared for gubernatorial campaign.  It will take some time for a rehearing petition to even be considered, which would probably place the decision on that question into late February at the earliest.  If the petition were to be granted, chances are high that the question wouldn't be heard until April or May, and the decision might not be made until June or July, by which time her term will nearly have expired, presuming that the Legislature doesn't determine to act on a Bill of Impeachment, which has not yet been filed but which was at least being considered.

Wyoming History in the Making: January 28, 2014 Wyoming S.Ct finds for Hill, 3-2

In a 3 to 2 decision, with a blistering dissent, the Wyoming Supreme Court struck down the decision restructuring the state Dapartment of Education in 2014WY15.pdf.

While Hill has, not without justification, declared this to be a victory, it isn't as complete as Hill may like to believe.  the Casper Star Tribune has come out urging the Legislature to try again, stating:

Now, Hill can not and must not be off the legislative agenda for the
session. Legislators, it's time to get to work. It's time to craft a
bill that can keeps Cindy Hill away from the Education Department -- one
that will survive a Supreme Court review.

The Supreme Court's
decision is not the victory Hill or her supporters pretend it is. By a
one-vote margin (and with a stinging dissent) the court left wide
latitude for the Legislature to write -- and narrow, even -- the job
description of the superintendent. It essentially said lawmakers went
too far with Senate File 104, the legislation that stripped Hill of most
of her powers, and said lawmakers broke the constitutional requirement
that demands the superintendent have "general supervision of the public
schools."

The Tribune further stated:

Cindy Hill has proven she's not not a good leader. She proven it time
and again in her short term as head of the department, as evidenced by
the number of employees who left rather than deal with Hill.

Her
return to the Department of Education is bad for the department, bad for
Wyoming education, and hence bad for Wyoming's children.

The Constitutionality of the Legislature's statute always seemed questionable to me, which doesn't say anything about Hill one way or another.  As for Hill, the Legislature recently undertook hearings on her conduct in which employees of the Department of Education testified against her, and the Legislature is considering impeaching her.  Employees of the department are now justifiably concerned over what her return means.  Hill is running for governor in an almost certainly doomed quixotic bid for that office.  This reprieve, while perhaps brief, gives her the opportunity to show that she can effectively and rationally run this office, but it will require her to have much different personal leadership behavior than she had before.

Lex Anteinternet: Keeping a Swimming Pool at NCHS

Lex Anteinternet: Keeping a Swimming Pool at NCHS: I was on the Natrona County High School swim team in 1978-1979 and 1979-1980.  I might have been in 1980-1981 as well, my senior year, but ...

Lex Anteinternet: Governor Hunt's World War Two Correspondence, Hear...

Lex Anteinternet: Governor Hunt's World War Two Correspondence, Hear...: The American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming has digitized Wyoming Governor Hunts papers , including correspondence he .received or sent concerning the Internment Camp at Hear Mountain.

Included in these, is a surprising example of somebody writing to the Governor to inquire about receiving a "Japanese girl" for work at her ranch home.  She was willing to pay wages, but still, its not something I'd expect to have found anyone inquiring about.  A surprising thing to read.

Lex Anteinternet: Watching the Morph. How the news gets spun by the...

Lex Anteinternet: Watching the Morph. How the news gets spun by the...: Wyoming has a very large Indian Reservation, the Wind River Reservation, which is home to part of the Shoshone Tribe* and also home to the ...

Wyoming History in the Making: January 6, 2014, Liz Cheney drops out of U.S. Senate race.

Liz Cheney dropped out of the primary campaign for the U.S. Senate citing a health concern within her family.  While some rumors indicate that one of her children has developed diabetes, always a serious disease and a particularly worrisome one in children, no official news has disclosed what that concern is.

Cheney, the daughter of former controversial Vice President Dick Cheney, mounted a controversial historic challenge of popular incumbent Mike Enzi.  Seeking to find a ground to stand against Enzi, she tacked to the right of Cheney in a campaign which drew a lot of attention, but at the time of her withdrawal was clearly failing.

While an internal party challenge to a sitting incumbent member of Congress from Wyoming isn't unusual, one that is such a serious effort is.  It is undoubtedly the most expensive such effort ever mounted in the state, and it started stunningly early.  While Cheney failed to gain enough adherents by this stage to make her primary election likely, she did polarize the GOP in the state, which seems to be emerging from a long period of internal unity, and which also seems to be beginning to move away from the Tea Party elements within it, much like the national party is. This could be the beginning of an interesting political era within the state or at least within the state's GOP.

It also served to bring up distinct arguments about who is entitled to run in Wyoming, with Liz Cheney's campaign apparently badly underestimating the degree of state identity born by many Wyomingites.  Voters appeared to not accept Cheney as a Wyomingite based upon her long absence from the state and appear to have also misinterpreted Wyoming's long re-election cycle for her father as a species of deep person admiration, rather than an admiration of effectiveness.  Late in the campaign she was forced to introduce television advertisements which did nothing other than to point out her family's connection (through her mother, her father was born in Nebraska and spent his early years there) to the state and which were silent on her career as a Virginia lawyer married to a man who is still a Virginia lawyer.

All in all, this early primary effort will likely remain a fairly unique historical episode in the state's history, but potentially one with some long term impacts.

New Feature: Wyoming History In The Making

In addition to continuing to post items on individual episodes of Wyoming's rich history here, we will are also starting a new feature in which we'll note something of significant present historical interest.

This is a bit tough, we realize, as many, many stories turn out to be hugely historically significant without that being realized at the time.  When the Chinese and Japanese fell into war in 1932, for example, who would have appreciated the extent that this would play into the global tragedy of World War II, or that it would lead to the fall of the Nationalist government in 1947, giving rise to Red China.  It turned out to be enormously significant, but at the time it was probably most viewed as a big, but not earth shaking, tragedy.

Anyhow, we'll try to note some stories from time to time that we think will at least have some historical value. That is, they'd be the type of thing you would expect to find on this website in some future daily entry.

Navigation calendar now up.

We have now added a navigation calendar to this site, so that people looking for any one day may easily hit on that date in the calendar and bring it up.

We are indebted for this feature to This Day In U.S. Military History, which provided the html for this feature to us.