Hageman hosts town hall meeting

Last Saturday, U.S. Representative Harriet Hageman held a town hall meeting at the Hot Springs County Fair Building where she updated the public on her efforts and held a question and answer time with the audience.

When Hageman ran for office, she made a promise to hold a town hall in every county in Wyoming. Hageman said, "I think that they're important because it gives me a chance to give you an update on what I'm doing, what's important, what my agenda is. But more important than that, it gives you an opportunity to engage with me."

Hageman first mentioned her work helping fellow congressmen and women, particularly with Minnesota's Representative Pete Stauber on managing wolves in his state. Hageman previously in Wyoming spent 15 years delisting wolves. 

Regarding the House's second minibus bill passed on March 22, Hageman said the bill was 1,102 pages long, costing $1.2 trillion and they had 32 hours to read it. Hageman added, "I oppose that bill because I think we have got to fundamentally change the way that we are budgeting and allocating money in this country...We've gotta stop legislating by crisis."

Hageman said that they passed seven of their 12 appropriations bills and sent them to the Senate, which refused to take them up. She said those bills "took an enormous amount of work to put those appropriations bills together. It's why they haven't done it for 20 some years."

On April 8, Hageman presented her first bill as the chairman of the Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs, which is within the Natural Resources Committee. Hageman's bill is to increase the time so that tribal nations can lease their property for up to 99 years. Currently, they are only allowed to lease up to no longer than 25 years. This prevents them from bringing in businesses or economic development in their land. 

On April 12, the House passed the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, a bill that was to reauthorize a Section 702 of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was set to expire on April 19th. Hageman said, "FISA is the act that our intelligence communities have been using to spy on us...The FBI, especially, has been violating our fourth Amendment rights and searching the FISA database and gathering information on American citizens. When they first got caught, we know that they had done over 3 million searches on American citizens under FISA, in violation of the Fourth Amendment. After they got caught, they still did almost 250,000 such illegal searches."

Hageman is on the Judiciary Committee and they did extensive reform to Section 702 of FISA. However, Hageman said, "But there was one piece missing that made it so that I refused to vote for that reform bill, and that is that they killed our amendment to make it so that these agencies had to get a warrant if they were going to search American citizens' data." The bill passed without Hageman's support and the warrant requirement was not included.

However, Hageman had positive news when they introduced a bill called "The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act." This bill closes the loopholes intelligence agencies can use to purchase data from data brokers.

Regarding the passage of the $95 billion foreign aid package for Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, Hageman voted against the Ukraine portion. She said that the money that was intended to go to Taiwan would end up being sent to Ukraine. Hageman added that Ukraine "is a notorious corrupt government, and we cannot get any information as to where our money's going and accounting. And they will not tell us the metric by which we know whether we're winning or losing this particular conflict."

Regarding Hageman's work on the Postal Act, she said, "We have been trying hard to save our postal distribution centers here in Wyoming, and we tried to work with the postmaster general. He won't even return a phone call at this point. He refuses to talk to anybody. So we introduced the Postal Act that states that essentially every state has to have at least one distribution center." Hageman said the postal issues can affect elections and the distribution of veteran medications.

On April 16, they passed a bill that reforms the BLM abuses of what are called the expression of interest fees for oil and gas companies. The BLM has been taking the money but refusing to process the paperwork. The bill said that the BLM doesn't get the money until they process the paperwork. 

Hageman is a member of the Select Committee on Weaponization of the Federal Government and they introduced the Censorship Accountability Act with Dan Bishop. The bill says that for any federal employee that violates your First Amendment right, you can sue them personally, and you can get your attorney's fees.

Hageman discussed her debate with Deb Haaland, the Secretary of Interior about energy. She said, "We're not reducing the energy demand in this country. And if you are going to remain a first world country, you have to have energy." Hageman described the importance of affordable energy and added, "That is the thing that they have worked the hardest to take away. And when you think about it, you actually then understand the agenda. And it has nothing to do with global warming. It has everything to do with making us serfs, making us children of the state."

According to Hageman, "One thing that I think we've done very, very well and that I'm very proud of, and that is that we have exposed a lot of the corruption that you never would have known about had we not won and taken the house two years ago."

One of the items Hageman said regarding the exposure of the January 6th Investigative Committee was a 100 page report Representative Barry Loudermilk produced. Hageman said, "Some of those are the depositions of the people who were involved in the discussions where President Trump ordered the National Guard. Remember, one of the things you can watch is a video of Liz Cheney saying it is a lie that Donald Trump ever ordered the National Guard. They deleted the transcripts of the people involved with that."

Hageman took questions from the audience. Some of the topics they discussed was Title 9 regulations, debating "What is a woman?", freedom of speech and the use of pronouns, cultural Marxism, the RMP startup in Rock Springs, the EPA's authority under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, the way BLM is supposed to be managed, creating a pilot project in Boulder, Colorado to test no fossil fuels only use electric in a real-world test before transitioning to the entire nation, blanket asylum issues of illegal aliens, preventing New York and California from counting illegal aliens for redistricting purposes, Social Security benefits, child trafficking, border security, higher education and endowments, the abolishment of the Department of Education, grizzly bear delisting, House Speaker Mike Johnson and the Republican's slim majority, the 30/30 initiative, and natural asset companies.