Two Powell lawmakers are set to face off in August’s Republican primary election, with Rep. Dan Laursen challenging Sen. R.J. Kost to represent Senate District 19.

After serving in the state House for the past eight sessions, Laursen wants to move up to the Senate and attempt to make the Legislature’s upper chamber more conservative.

“I’m not happy with the way the person in there right now is voting and I think it should be more conservative,” Laursen said, referring to Kost. “So we’ll see what the [voters] think.”

Kost, meanwhile, said he’s seeking a second and final term in the Senate. The first term, he said, required learning the ropes, and over the next four years, he feels he can be more effective.

“I feel comfortable that I’ve worked hard for the people that I’m to represent, for the people of the Big Horn Basin,” Kost said. “And if they like that, great, they can vote for me. And if they don’t like it, they’ve got two other candidates to pick from.”

While Kost and Laursen are the only Republicans who’ve launched bids for the seat, former state Sen. Ray Peterson of Cowley said Wednesday that he is “considering” a run. Peterson represented the district from 2005 through 2018, when he was defeated by Kost by roughly 8 percentage points in the Republican primary.

Under the redistricting plan recently passed by the Wyoming Legislature, Senate District 19 covers eastern Park County and northern Big Horn County — including Powell, Garland, most of the Willwood area, Frannie, Deaver, Cowley, Lovell, Byron, Greybull and Shell.

GOP fighting

In recent months, Kost has come under heavy criticism from the Park County Republican Party. Party leaders, who wanted the Legislature to more forcefully push back against federal COVID-19 mandates, accused Kost of having a conflict of interest on the subject because he also serves on the Powell Hospital District and Powell Valley Healthcare boards; in December, the Park County GOP called on the Wyoming attorney general to open a criminal investigation.

When Laursen announced his plans to run for SD 19 over the weekend, the vice chairman of the Park County Republican Party, Bob Ferguson of Wapiti, wrote that it was “great news.”

“It’s about time we got rid of that RINO [Republican In Name Only] Kost that is only there to be on the hospital’s payroll,” Ferguson wrote in a Facebook comment.

While the remark referenced payroll, Kost’s positions on the hospital boards are unpaid and offer no compensation. Kost has said he has no conflict and has pushed back against the criticism, saying in September that some members of the local Republican Party are “looking for somebody to be their puppet.”

Speaking Monday, Kost said that he’s “not going to listen to any one or two people that want to tell me how to vote,” and instead tries to figure out, “what is it that I feel the 18,000-plus [people] that I’m supposed to represent would prefer?”

Laursen feels that the people of the district and Wyoming want more conservative lawmakers. As one example, although it was smaller than past years, he wasn’t excited about the more than $2.87 billion biennial budget recently approved by the Legislature.

“We sure spent a lot of money; everybody’s got their own little project,” he said. “But I don’t think the citizens are doing that well out there right now.”

Laursen has also been frustrated by what he sees as legislative leaders thwarting various bills favored by conservatives — such as one that would have prevented Wyoming voters from switching their party affiliation in the months ahead of primary elections and another that would have prohibited biological males from playing women’s sports.

He and about 16 other lawmakers tried to bring those and other bills to the floor for debate, but were unsuccessful.

“More liberal Republicans have the majority,” Laursen said, “so we don’t hear a lot of the stuff that I want to hear.”

Perhaps the biggest reason Laursen is now eyeing a move to the Senate, he said, is that he hopes the smaller, upper chamber can be changed more quickly than the House. With six conservative members now in the Senate, Laursen figures that only nine more are needed to get a majority, versus needing perhaps 14 to 18 more conservative representatives in the House.

“That’s what everybody wants, try to get the leadership … so you can at least control the agenda,” Laursen said.

‘Some interesting things going on’

In a Facebook post last week, Sen. Tom James, R-Rock Springs, identified himself and five other senators as being part of a group that will pursue those who are “corrupt” and “evil.”

“With every breath we shall hunt them down and expose them for who they really are,” says a portion of James’ post. It warns those who cross into “true corruption” that “one day you will look behind you and you will see we six, and on that day, you will reap it.”

The post is a modified version of the closing speech in the movie “The Boondock Saints,” given immediately before the film’s protagonists execute a mafia boss in front of a courtroom audience.

James noted that he had removed and changed the “life threatening” portions of the speech. For example, in the movie, the protagonists say, “With every breath we shall hunt them down. Each day we will spill their blood until it rains down from the skies.”

Laursen commented on the post, saying he was glad to be friends with James and the five other senators, but in an interview, the representative said he was not familiar with “The Boondock Saints” and did not know the speech’s origins.

“I don’t think we need to be saying that, referring to something like that,” Laursen said.

Sen. Kost described James’ post as “kind of scary.” It followed an earlier posting in which James accused several lawmakers of violating the Government Ethics Act for various conflicts of interest, including Kost for his seat on the Powell Hospital District Board.

“There’s some interesting things going on,” Kost said, adding that, “I feel a lot of it is not good for our Legislature.”

Over the past four years, he generally said there’s been some frustrating things, “but it’s been an enjoyable challenge to try to see if I can work with people in the Legislature, and try to make some differences of how we look at things and how we try to work together on things instead of ‘my way or the highway,’ so to speak.”

As for Laursen, he said he’s excited to run for the Senate.

“I’m ready,” Laursen said. He added that a couple like-minded friends in other parts of the state are also thinking about running for the upper chamber, and he wondered if that could open the door for more conservative Republicans to take over the leadership of the Senate.

Meanwhile, former Senator Peterson and other potential legislative candidates still have a couple months to decide whether to run. The official filing period opens May 12 and continues through May 27.