By Phil Roberts
Wyoming voters went to the polls in November 2008 and voted for all three members of the state’s congressional delegation—both U. S. Senators and the U.S. Representative. It was the first time since direct election of U. S. Senators that such an unusual election had occurred with all three up at the same time.
Before 1913 in Wyoming and every other state, U. S. Senators were elected by the state legislatures. The country’s Founding Fathers made U. S. Representatives directly answerable to the people with elections every two years and they gave the House the power to set taxes. But the Senate theoretically represented the States—six year terms, staggered so that no two from the same state were elected in the same year (except in rare occasions of filling vacancies).
Little wonder that delegates to Wyoming’s constitutional convention left Senate selection criteria to the legislature. That’s who “elected” Senators—that’s who would decide how vacancies ought to be filled.
In those days, the Wyoming legislature met only every two years. If a Senator died in office, reconvening the legislature quickly wouldn’t be practical. Big Horn Basin legislators, in order to even get to scheduled winter legislative sessions, had to take the train to Billings, ride across Montana and South Dakota, south to Nebraska to catch the UP into Cheyenne.
The legislature gave their U. S. Constitutional-directed power to the governor to fill any Senate vacancy.
The governor didn’t need to use it often. No vacancies occurred mid-term until Francis E. Warren died in office in 1929. And it didn’t happen often. In the 103 years that the system existed, the governor appointed to vacancies just four times.
After 1913, the system changed nationwide. U. S. Senators stood for election, just like House members– and the legislatures had no part in the process. Yet, Wyoming’s vacancy-filling remained the same—until 1993.
In a rancorous, highly partisan session of the Wyoming legislature, the power to fill vacancies was taken from the governor and handed over, not to the legislature, but to the political party of the individual who created the vacancy by death or resignation. And the bill passed—over Gov. Sullivan’s veto.
Direct election of Senators—subject of the 17th Amendment—conceded that Senators represented the PEOPLE of a state and they chose the senator—no longer just the majority party in the legislatures.
The current Wyoming system of filling vacancies returned us to those times—and then some . At least when legislatures chose senators, the majority party in those legislatures—effectively the group choosing the senators—faced election by ALL of the people. The central committees of the parties are not chosen that way. .And in the current procedure, the governor now has a tiny role, choosing from three who likely hold very similar views.
The House seat, by constitution, is filled by special election and that only happened once in Wyoming—1989 when Dick Cheney became Defense Secretary. What’s wrong with applying the same system to the U. S. Senate? The old pre-1913 election rules have changed; the people elected the Senators in elections.
U. S. Sen. Craig Thomas died less than two years into his term. Under the new selection system, the State Republican Central Committee chose three candidates, State Sen. John Barrasso, State Treasurer Cynthia Lummis, and Tom Sansonetti, former party official, aide to Sen. Thomas, and assistant attorney general and head of the Environment and Natural Resources Division in the U. S. Department of Justice.
The law required that Gov. Dave Freudenthal, even though a Democrat, to choose one of the three. He selected Barrasso as the Thomas successor who ran for the remaining four years in the term the following year.
The only other time, that all three were elected in the same election, happened in 1890 when Wyoming became a state and all three Congressional offices had to be filled. The voters cast ballots for the U. S. House member, but in those days, the state legislatures chose the two U. S. Senators. (That all changed with the 17th amendment to the U. S. Constitution, ratified April 18, 1913).
During that initial election, two of the “grand old men of Wyoming politics” who had been instrumental in bringing about statehood, Joseph M. Carey and Francis E. Warren were chosen by the legislature to fill the two Senate seats. Even though U. S. Senate terms are for six years, in the initial election just to get it started, one Wyoming senator got a two-year term while the other, a four-year term in order to set up the staggered terms in future elections. Carey was elected first by the legislature and he got the four-year term, leaving the two-year term for Warren. Both men were Republicans, long-time friends, the two richest men in the state, and both lived in Cheyenne.
Both were confident they would each get a regular six-year later on. But it was not to be. The Johnson County War intervened. The secret invasion launched by representatives of the large open-range cattle companies ended ignominiously with their surrender to the army before Buffalo residents could wreak revenge on their murder of two owners of small ranches in Johnson county and the threats they had made to Buffalo officials.
Both Carey and Warren were suspected of having a role in the incident. Voters that fall took out their revenge against the Republicans (even though some invaders were also Democrats). The legislature did not want to send Warren back to the Senate, but it deadlocked on who should be the U.S. Senator. For two years, Wyoming had been one senator–Joseph M. Carey. His later defeat, said to have been engineered by
Warren, began a 20-year feud between the former friends. Carey, rebuffed by the “Warren Machine” in 1910, won the governorship, running as a Democrat. He failed to be reelected in 1914 because, in the Presidential election two years earlier, he did not support the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. He abandoned both parties, in fact, supporting the insurgent Republican, his old friend Theodore Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” run.