Wyo4News staff, [email protected]
February 23, 2024 — Congresswoman Harriet Hageman held a town hall meeting Thursday night at the White Mountain Library in Rock Springs. Representative Hageman began the town hall with her recap of the latest developments in Congress and ended with an audience Q&A.
Hageman said that when elected, she promised to do a town hall meeting in every Wyoming county yearly. Last year, she finished her tour of Wyoming by June; this year, she said it will probably take a little bit longer because “there is so much going on back in Washington, DC, in terms of budget.”
Hageman told the audience about her position on the Judiciary Committee and the Natural Resources Committee. On the Natural Resources Committee, she was asked to chair the subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs. In that role, she oversees all 574 tribes in the United States. She addresses our relationship with our five territories: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam.
Hageman also serves on the Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries subcommittee, the Constitution and Limited Government subcommittee, the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust subcommittee, and the Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee.
Hageman stated that on the Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee, they have been working on “the violation of our First Amendment rights over the last several years.” “There has been an enormous amount of censorship that we have been able to uncover in everything from Homeland Security to the FBI, to the FISA courts,” said Hageman, “It’s absolutely unbelievable what our government has been doing to us, how they have been spying on us, as well as trying to label people who happen to be conservative catholic as domestic terrorist threats.”
Hageman told the audience about one of the bills she is developing called the Accountability and First Amendment Protection Act. “This is a bill that we can hold the federal government accountable for violating our First Amendment rights, our freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of petition to our government for redress. Right now, we have no mechanism by which we can hold government or individual employees accountable for violating our First Amendment rights,” Hageman stated.
Hageman then went on to talk about illegal immigration and told a story about how the Farmers are going broke in Uma, Texas, because of people walking through their fields as they cross the border. She then spoke about how illegal immigrants are causing problems with hospitals, how many people are being processed every day at the border, the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border, Fentanyl, how people are crossing the border illegally and therefore cannot seek asylum, the H.R.2 – Secure the Border Act of 2023, and stated, “Once we get a new President, we are going to have to do mass deportations.”
Hageman then claimed that Congress has “abdicated their responsibilities to legislate and has turned over the responsibility for legislating to unelected bureaucrats that are not accountable to the American people.” Hageman said, “I am working to introduce a bill to fundamentally change the Administrative Procedure Act to force Congress back into the legislative role, and to try to limit the authority of the BLM, the Forest Service, and the USDA. Congress has to make the decisions that those bureaucrats are making.”
The discussion then turned to the Rock Springs RMP and how the Wyoming Legislature is trying to fight it. “We wrote letters, we challenged what they’ve done, and what they are trying to do with the Rock Springs RMP is illegal,” said Hageman, “The legislature is putting $50M into a fund to sue the federal government over the RMP, and we need to demand that the Governor and the Wyoming Attorney General move forward with the lawsuit. States need to be independent and take the power back from the federal government.”
After Hageman finished speaking, she turned the conversation over to the audience members, who were allowed to ask questions. The audience questions ranged from immigration, the 2020 election, the need for people to become poll watchers, whether global warming is real, affordable energy, solar and wind energy, pulling the United States out of the United Nations, and how to get younger people to vote.
