OPINION:
Looking at the enormous volume of media coverage, it seems obvious that the Republican primary in Wyoming’s U.S. House of Representatives race was the most-watched election in the world so far this year. While incumbent Rep. Liz Cheney received an outsized amount of attention, the race was never about her – it was about the people of Wyoming who deserve a member of Congress who represents their values in Washington, D.C.
And as people in Wyoming know already – as those in Congress will soon learn – I am more than just the woman who beat Liz Cheney.
We won a resounding victory – by a huge margin of more than 37 percentage points – and it’s because we made clear that our lone representative in the House should work for us, and not the other way around.
I have been doing exactly that over the last 25 years as a Wyoming attorney: Fighting to protect our water rights, our property rights, and our constitutional rights. In my career, I have taken on the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Forest Service, just to name a few, and won.
These are the fights that I will now take to the halls of Congress, where I will make dismantling the administrative state my signature issue.
We want a Congress that actually legislates, not one that delegates its lawmaking authority to far-flung agencies in violation of the very foundation of our constitutional structure. We want representatives who fight for our small businesses and families, not politicians who abdicate their legislative responsibilities while blaming the unelected bureaucrats for the mess that we are in. We want a government that works for us and not one that only works for the elites and the well-connected.
We want representatives in Washington who are focused on protecting us, on furthering our agenda, and we want people who put America First.
Right now, we have the most dangerous, most destructive administration in U.S. history. President Joe Biden and the radical Democrats are responsible for record-breaking inflation, record-breaking illegal immigration, record-breaking human trafficking, record-breaking drug running, and record-breaking energy costs.
The Democrat wreckage that we are seeing is not by accident, but by design. Their extreme agenda is meant to cause massive upheaval in our daily lives and to force behavioral changes through policies meant to bend the rest of us to their leftist vision. To counter this, we must focus like a laser beam on blocking any further damage to our Republic. In the next Congress, which I hope will be majority Republican, we should not waste any time taking action to stop the destruction of our country.
In Wyoming, our voters spoke on behalf of everyone who believes that we can control the levers of power when we engage, when we participate, and when we hold our elected officials accountable. And while it may not be easy, we can dislodge entrenched politicians who believe they’ve risen above the people they’re supposed to represent.
Wyoming, with our single seat in the House, has put elites everywhere on notice that we are no longer going to tolerate elected officials who don’t represent us. We are done being governed by the Washington, DC “Uniparty” – those Democrats and Republicans who don’t really care which party is in power, just as long as they are.
The world caught a glimpse of Wyoming leading up to our August 16 primary, with news crews from D.C., New York, England, Italy, Germany, Norway, Japan, and even Australia traipsing all across our landscape. We are a large state with the lowest population in the country – some of us like to say that we’re basically like a small town with very long streets.
Reporters visited rodeos because they make for good television and, for the same reason, interviewed people wearing cowboy hats. And everywhere they turned, they heard the same message from voters – people are fed up with being ignored by the Uniparty and treated as less than an afterthought.
The media swarm is mostly gone now, their souvenirs purchased, stories written, and satellite trucks garaged. But we Wyomingites, we’re still here, and we’re eager to begin to take our country back. And we know that there are tens of millions of Americans spread across every state who feel the same way.
There is still the matter of the November general election, which I intend to win in a state that voted for President Donald Trump in 2020 with his widest margin of victory anywhere. And when I get to Congress, I will join the new majority and begin to restore our government to what it was meant to be: of, for, and by the people.
• Harriet Hageman is a Wyoming native, a constitutional attorney, a former Republican National Committeewoman from Wyoming, and the Republican nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives in Wyoming.
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