"Why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"
Matthew
7:3
With the current hyper-sensitivity over campaign donations, it’s a good time to look at some past campaign funding stories to compare and look for similarities.
At the beginning of the Biden Administration, the entire country was looking at the possibility of a nationwide vaccine mandate. There were lots of questions as to how that would be imposed on states. Conservative legislators in Wyoming didn’t waste any time in trying to call a special session. Almost paradoxically, it would be no small feat.
According to the Wyoming Constitution, the legislature or the governor can call a special session. Gordon wouldn’t do it, so it was up to the legislators themselves. Presumably, it shouldn’t be a big lift for a supermajority of Republicans to oppose a very Democrat President. This being Wyoming, it should have been a routine matter.
Because this is Wyoming, it turned out to be very difficult. First, legislators had to convince a majority of House membership to vote for a special session; then a majority of the other house. In the end the vote in the Senate to hold a special session was 17-7. In the House of Representatives, 12 voted no.
Most of the state legislators who were opposed to it, are no longer in office; but there are a few who still spend the early part of the year in Cheyenne.
With the exception of two legislators, Sen. Cale Case and Rep Lloyd Larsen, every single other person who voted against having a special session took campaign money from Pfizer, CIGNA, the Wyoming Medical PAC or the Wyoming Hospital Association. Some of them, took campaign donations from a combination of these entities. In one case, Rep Lloyd Larsen took money from Pfizer one month after the special session.
In what is perhaps the most shocking campaign donation surrounding the COVID special session, according to the Wyoming Campaign Finance system, Rep Landon Brown took a $400.00 donation from CIGNA on October 26, 2021—the first day of the session in which he voted on a multiplicity of COVID and medical related bills. The vast majority of Rep Brown's votes were against any ban on vaccine, mandatory testing or mask mandates.
This isn’t to suggest the existence of a quid pro quo with any of these campaign donations but it certainly raises the specter of one. It especially does when it is the legislators themselves who filed the campaign finance records.
For seven days lawmakers debated numerous bills related to the covid vaccine mandate and others. When the session concluded, every bill that would have banned vaccine mandates had been killed by the liberal Republican majority.
Correlation does not necessarily equal causation. And all of this could be purely coincidental. But the optics on these campaign donations are horrible.