Running to Unchain Wyoming

Like many other politicians who have tried to explain themselves and the country since 2015, Liz Cheney would like you to think that today’s Wyoming primary is about nothing more and nothing less than Donald Trump–in particular, his “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen.

There’s more to it, obviously. Cheney made Trump central in her political identity and has prevented any attempts to unseat him. Her primary rival Harriet Hageman, for her part, has enjoyed the considerable benefit of Trump’s endorsement, and a blockbuster Trump/Hageman rally, in a state he won by huge margins in 2016 and 2020. She doesn’t consider herself a Trump supporter, but in her “We’re fed-up” speech Trump is only mentioned once. This was to show that Cheney and his January 6 Committee were not justified in pursuing Trump’s persecution.

“I’m an America First candidate,” Hageman told me in a June interview, explaining why she would have voted against the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine that Cheney supported. She says Wyomingites care about protecting energy jobs, border security and inflation. I think about the needs of Americans. “I think about what Americans need,” Liz Cheney says What do Lockheed Martins require? “

But, the confrontation between Cheney and Hageman shows more than Trump’s enduring power. Cheney and Hageman are rival elites that offer rival explanations of America’s problems.

In her policies and her work, Liz Cheney is a symbol of the GOP establishment over the past half century. Meanwhile, much has been made of 2022’s political outsiders–class-traitor populares such as Blake Masters and J.D. Vance–who could coalesce to form a counter-elite of “new right”.

Hageman does not fit the description. She is not a flame-breathing MAGA populist like Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene. Hageman is a reemergence of an older and rarer type: a local elite, rooted in the provinces rather than the capital, in possession of its own long-standing reasons to fight both Washington and a Republican establishment that has made its peace with Washington.

One type of elite is most concerned with the arts and sciences of empire. / Making peace and war in the world by your own magnificent way. / To subdue the proud and the fetter-slain to freedom. This practice is usually used on barbarians along the frontiers, but can be applied to any other recalcitrant community in the provinces. Another type of elite is focused on protecting the homeland against the domestic manifestations of empire. This includes the unaccountable rule of a bureaucratic government and the detrimental economic, cultural, and environmental policies implemented by those in power.

” Our future is dependent on us gaining control over the administrative state and on the legislature regaining legislative power from executive branches’ administrative agencies,” Hageman said to me. I believe in our republic .”

Imagine, for a moment, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of Noble Wyomingites.

Liz Cheney, and Harriet Hageman are only years apart. They represent two different types of American aristocracy. They both followed in the footsteps of their fathers and were influenced by their fathers’ politics.

After a childhood in Nebraska and Wyoming, Dick Cheney discovered his political vocation in 1966, during graduate studies in Wisconsin. He was soon climbing the ladder in the Nixon and Ford White Houses, before taking up Wyoming’s lone Congressional seat in 1978. He represented the state for ten years, before returning to Washington as the Secretary of Defense.

James Hageman’s career was considerably more modest than Dick Cheney’s–and entirely Wyoming. Hageman, who was born, raised and educated in Wyoming, served in Germany in the Korean War. He returned to the United States immediately after the war ended to manage a sheep ranch. He was active for decades in local and statewide civic and political organizations, from the county school board to the Wyoming Woolgrowers Association, and served 24 years in the Wyoming Legislature, at various points chairing the committees for agriculture and education, which is to say, trying to cultivate the land and the youth.

Liz Cheney has spent her career more focused on Washington than her father. After graduating from college, her first job was at the State Department. After earning a law degree at the University of Chicago, she was able to work in the post-Cold War period as a World Bank consultant or USAID officer in ex-Eastern Bloc capitals. Her Foggy Bottom stints in the 2000s focused on the softer side of the Bush/Cheney vision–promoting democracy, economic development, and education–though she dabbled in the harder side of American empire as head of the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group. Cheney returned to Wyoming only in 2014, for a failed bid for Senate, before winning her father’s seat in 2016.

As with her previous career, so are her priorities. When asked recently about the biggest challenge facing Wyoming, Cheney gives three answers. When Cheney was asked recently about the biggest challenge facing Wyoming, she gave three answers. Cheney didn’t mention Wyoming in her response.

Harriet Hageman claims Wyomingans are more concerned about “inflation”, the open border/illegal immigrants, and protecting our fossil fuel industries. However, Hageman says that our challenge is that people have lost the basic understanding of what government does .”

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There are many names and phrases that one can use to remind Americans to return to republican self-government. Hageman always returns to the same name. She says that Philip Hamburger, a brilliant lawyer mind, is Hageman. Hageman, a Wyoming politician, has overfilled Hudson’s town hall (pop. 458), in what will be the first of three campaign visits to my county in five months. To my knowledge, Cheney never visited this county in all four years that I have lived there. Fauci and Putin are two names that everyone knows, but Hamburger, who is a Columbia University constitutional law professor, is even more interesting. She names him again two months later, talking with a couple dozen voters at a coffee shop in Lander, and cites his 2014 Is Administrative Law Unlawful? . (Hamburger’s and Hagemans’s answers are an overwhelming “Yes”). Hageman outlines the argument: Administrative law refers to the improper delegation of legislative power away from elected officials to bureaucratic experts, which is a violation Article 1 Section 1 Constitution.

” “Fighting administrative state will become my signature issue,” Hageman said to me during our interview. “I have fought regulators and bureaucrats in court; now I will do it in Congress.” It is certainly consistent with her last 25 years. Harriet Hageman took Nebraska before the Supreme Court to challenge Wyoming’s rights in watersheds in the North Platte River. Liz Cheney worked for the World Bank in Central Europe. Cheney, who was working at the State Department to promote economic investment in Middle East and inspire regime change in Iran was there. Hageman was defending Clinton-era rules within the US Forest Service as well as Obama-era regulations for the livestock industry. Cheney’s career has been defined by the Pax Americana and the military undergirding it. Hageman is a Sagebrush Rebellion-based political identity.

“Harriet is wonderful,” Hamburger told me. I met her many years ago, and she impressed me immediately. So much so that I called my wife to tell her I had met exactly the sort of lawyer I wanted to hire at the New Civil Liberties Alliance,” a public interest pro bono law firm founded by Hamburger “to protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the Administrative State.” Hageman joined the NCLA in 2019 and is currently Senior Litigation Counselor. Hamburger stated that Hageman is “a committed defender of constitutional right.”

What does that mean in 2022? Hamburger’s NCLA doesn’t mince words: “Although Americans still enjoy the shell of their Republic, there has developed within it a very different sort of government–a type, in fact, that the Constitution was designed to prevent.” This is not just deregulation for deregulation’s sake; it is a statement about the partially-accomplished transformation of our regime from a self-governing federal republic to an ungoverned centralized administrative state.

Hageman offered her own sober and legal version of Bannon’s battle cry, “Deconstruct The Administrative State .”

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” I don’t want just deregulation, but I want to reform administrative state.” It is necessary to update the Administrative Procedure Act and for agencies to be required to create actual rules. They must not issue “fact sheets” or “guidelines” which lack legal force but act as a threat and compels compliance. While she lauded a number of Trump’s executive orders that brought transparency to federal agencies and argued for such policies to be codified in law, Based on her experiences working with Congress members, she believes that many politicians lack the experience to fight regulatory agencies and are therefore unable effectively oppose the administrative states. At a campaign event, she was asked if red states should seize power rather than fighting federal overreach through political and legal channels. She calmly, but firm, answered “No.” This is my country. I won’t give it up

“We may now have entered a new era,” Peter Wallison wrote recently, reflecting hopefully on the implications of West Virginia v. EPA, “one where a conservative Supreme Court seems ready to take back from administrative agencies the power to define what Congress has or has not said in legislation.” If that restoration does come to pass, it will likely require not just the efforts of the judiciary, but a coordinated, full-court press of the three Constitutional branches of government against the fourth, un-Constitutional branch. President Trump’s October 2022 Schedule F executive order was a last-minute attempt by the executive to “bring the deep state to heel.”

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Should Trump, or a likeminded successor, win the White House in 2024, a fight with the bureaucracy will be even more urgent, open, and vicious than it was in 2016-20. Hageman’s extensive experience as an attorney and connections to those who are most hostile of the “administrative threat” suggest that she, even though she is a newcomer to the House, could be a leading voice in the fight against the administrative government.

The Trump presidency showed the extent to the which the United States was governed not just by the regulatory agencies, but also the military, national safety and federal law enforcement bureaucracies. The latest manifestations of the military-industrial complicated have been brought to public attention by a number of notable events during his presidency. These include the failed withdrawals from Syria, Afghanistan, and the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. Some rising American right figures now see that structures designed to support the American Empire are slowly eroding the last pillars.

Liz Cheney is an example of that part of the Republican Party which has become so obsessed with the imperial foreign-policy aspects of it that it cannot tell the difference between the republic and the empire. Harriet Hageman is not a fan of the American grandeur in foreign policy. She has always been focused solely on Wyoming’s unique concerns and how they relate to Washington, D.C. The time is coming when right-leaning politicians will recognize that both the central administrative state (and the national security institution) are just inward-facing manifestations the same imperial tendencies.