You're 'Going to Have a Heart Attack,' Lawmaker Tells Crowd

Town hall meetings have been getting raucous lately, and one in Wyoming on Wednesday night may have been the rowdiest yet. Attendees let GOP Rep. Harriet Hageman have it via shouts, profanities, and rounds of loud booing, but she let them have it right back.

• The Cowboy State Daily estimates that three-quarters of the crowd of roughly 500 people in Laramie were opposed to Hageman, who ousted Liz Cheney in 2022 thanks to the latter's opposition to Donald Trump. ("Hageman Doesn't Back Down as Hostile Crowd Curses Her" reads the headline.)
• Some of the loudest jeering came as she defended Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Mediaite notes that after she mentioned Musk's name, "the booing became so loud that Hageman stopped talking for a moment to clap along with the noise." (She was also joining in with supporters applauding in the front rows.)
• You can get a sense of things in this Forbes video.

• "I get that there are people here who dislike me," she said near the start of what turned out to be a 45-minute appearance, per the Cowboy State Daily. "But there are also people here who want to hear what I have to say. If you have so little respect for our process and for what we are in this country, then I would ask you to leave."
• "It's so bizarre to me how obsessed you are with federal government," she said later, per CNN, after being interrupted by boos while defending the cuts of DOGE.
• "You guys are going to have a heart attack if you don't calm down. I'm sorry your hysteria is just really over the top," Hageman said, per the Laramie Boomerang. "What DOGE is doing is ... the closest thing to zero-based budgeting that we've seen. Why would you be opposed? Why would you be opposed to us looking on a line-by-line basis for every agency? Why would you be opposed to that?"

(More town hall meeting stories.)