When the Wyoming Senate rejected a bill last week that would abolish the state’s death penalty, most of the national attention focused on comments by a single lawmaker. “The greatest man who ever lived died via the death penalty for you and for me,” Lynn Hutchings, a Republican state senator, reportedly said. “Governments were instituted to execute justice. If it wasn’t for Jesus dying via the death penalty, we would all have no hope.” Her unusual rationale for opposing the bill quickly went viral.

What’s more remarkable is that Wyoming legislators came so close to scrapping capital punishment at all. The state House of Representatives passed the bill in a 36-21 vote earlier this month. Though similar measures had been introduced in recent years, none of them advanced past their initial vote on the house floor. Almost all of those votes came from Republican lawmakers, who hold a supermajority in both chambers of the state legislature, and with the blessing of some party leaders.

Opponents of the death penalty often make a moral case for abolition. In Wyoming, fiscal considerations also held sway. The state hasn’t executed anyone since 1992, and the last death-row prisoner had his sentence overturned in 2014. Nonetheless, the state still spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on the system each year. “It’s worthless,” Jared Olsen, the bill’s sponsor and a Republican, told Wyoming Public Radio. “All we do is spend [millions] of taxpayer dollars on it, and I think that’s a burden that the taxpayers have shouldered for too long.”

Wyoming isn’t the only state in the American West that’s moving toward abolition. Lawmakers in Colorado, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington—including many Republicans—are also considering bills that would abolish or effectively end capital punishment in their respective states, and at least some appear likely to succeed. The same ethical issues raised elsewhere in the country—wrongful convictions, racial disparities, the morality of the state taking a human life—still carry weight in the West. But there also seems to be a simple pragmatism to it: Capital punishment is expensive, increasingly complicated, and already moribund, so why not finish it off?

To say these states currently have the death penalty is somewhat misleading. The death penalty is illegal in 20 states, either because the legislature abolished it or the courts forbid it, and most of the other 30 states no longer practice it. Fewer than a dozen states regularly carry out executions, and even in those states, juries are sentencing fewer people to death. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement last year all but guaranteed that the Supreme Court won’t abolish capital punishment for at least a generation, and yet the system seems less stable than ever.