Attorney Says Wyoming GOP Can’t Claim Autonomy When It ‘Sat On’ Rights For 40 Years

The Wyoming Republican Party can’t use its autonomy rights as a defense when sued if it “sat on” those rights for 40 years, an attorney suing the party argues.

A group of Hot Springs County Republican Party leaders sued the Wyoming Republican Party, its Dispute Resolution Committee and a few of its officials last year, alleging that the party violated state law by giving voting power to outgoing officials who weren’t precinct delegates chosen by a vote of the people.

While this case has been unfolding, the Wyoming Republican Party announced that it’s going to quit following the state laws that pertain to it in light of a 1989 U.S. Supreme Court case, Eu v San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee, affirming parties’ rights to dictate their own fate as private groups.

“We are reasserting, not asking for our rights,” Wyoming GOP Chair Bryan Miller said at the state party’s April 23-25 convention. “Wyoming will have to fight this if they want to fight this.” 

Miller also said that, “the party’s rights have been violated for nearly four decades.”

Why Didn’t They Say So Before

The state GOP cited that same case and filed that same defense in the Hot Springs County case.

The plaintiffs’ new attorney Kate Mead, who replaced the original attorney Clark Stith as the latter is now a judge, told a court Friday that this logic doesn’t work.

That’s because of a legal concept called “laches.”

It means that when someone takes “unreasonable delay” in asserting his rights, and others suffer for that delay, the court will deny relief to the person who caused that delay, according to Black’s Law Dictionary.

Mead pointed to Miller’s comments to the convention’s bylaws committee.

“The chairman of the WRP’s statements … were the first that plaintiffs learned that the WRP had sat on its constitutional rights argument for nearly 40 years,” wrote Mead in her argument. “Why hasn’t the WRP sought review of Wyoming election law prior to this case?”

Mead noted that the Wyoming Supreme Court told a subgroup of the GOP, the Uinta County Republican Party, how to notify the Wyoming attorney general when launching a constitutional challenge during its 2023 case on these same arguments about autonomy.

“WRP’s delay of nearly 40 years, according to their own chairman, is undeniably inexcusable as a matter of equity,” wrote Mead. “WRP failed to file a direct constitutional challenge against the state, instead causing the plaintiffs here untold disadvantage, injury, time and money.”

Mead noted that the 2023 Uinta County case stemmed from the same basic dispute about which party leaders can vote, and whether the party can rely on its own bylaws rather than state law for that decision.

“And, as expected, here we are again,” she said, chalking the recurring dispute up to a lack of clarity and the party’s delay in vindicating its rights in court.

She’s asking the case judge, Uinta County District Court Judge James Kaste, to let her add her argument into this case.

Kaste is also expected to make a decision in the coming days on whether to dismiss the case or keep it alive for trial, a phase called “summary judgment.”

But That’s New

That’s not the whole story, Miller told Cowboy State Daily in a Wednesday phone interview.

The party has long had clashes over its rights and the restrictions state law places on it, but he didn’t know about the Eu case until Jan. 17 of this year when the party’s attorney, Caleb Wilkins, unearthed it for him, Miller said.

Before that point, the existence of that case was a theme of “scuttlebutt,” Miller said.

“I had heard there was a case out there. I’ve since found out that they tried to bring it up in the Uinta County case,” he said.

But Frank Eathorne was the state GOP chairman at that time, and Uinta County waged that case apart from the state party besides, said Miller.

He said the Eu case probably would have changed the outcome for Uinta County GOP, but the Wyoming Supreme Court wouldn’t hear that argument.

That’s because no one notified the state attorney general that the state’s laws were under attack as unconstitutional, as the law requires, court documents say.

“I’d been bugging our attorney, you know, for a couple months, December timeframe,” said Miller “Then January he goes, ‘I found the case you’re talking about.’”

Miller told bylaws committee members on April 23 that the party intends to challenge Wyoming in federal court to vindicate its rights.

He told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday it’s getting close to filing.

Meanwhile, The AG

Wyoming Attorney General Deputy Megan Pope is defending Wyoming’s laws in this case and asserts they’re constitutional. 

While Pope has acknowledged the power of Eu, she’s also pointed to later cases setting up a tiered test by which a state may survive a party’s claims of autonomy by showing that its laws only burden the party minimally.

On Friday, Pope added another argument: the state Republican Party is not wholly private. It manages public functions.

Wyoming law tells major parties that their county central committees must comprise people elected at the primary election from within their respective neighborhoods. 

It tells them to help fill vacancies when partisan elected officials leave office mid-term, as the party matching the incumbent’s affiliation chooses three nominees to replace him.

And state law tells the major parties they can’t financially back one candidate over another in the primary election. That’s generally read to mean the parties can’t endorse candidates in the primary election.

Party leaders at the convention April 25 said the party wants to endorse candidates, impose loyalty tests and assert its autonomy in other ways.

“These statutes do not intrude on private associational rights,” wrote Pope in her new Friday argument. “Instead, they regulate the composition of party committees that perform public functions.”

She pointed to cases addressing that quasi-public category.

“The First Amendment protects a party’s right to organize itself and conduct its own affairs,” wrote Pope, with a  reference to the Eu case, “But when a party exercises powers ‘traditionally exclusively reserved to the State,’ it is treated as a state actor and its actions become subject to constitutional constrain under the public function doctrine.”

The quote within Pope’s quote there is from the 1974 U.S. Supreme Court case of Jackson v. Metro Edison Co. — addressing the public functions of public utilities.

This case is ongoing, and Kaste has not yet ruled whether to dismiss it as too legally settled for trial or let it go to a jury.

Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.