GOP lawmaker comes out blazing
Spectacle is the point for freshman congresswoman
WASHINGTON — As lawmakers entered the Capitol on Wednesday for one of the most solemn enterprises in American government, the impeachment of a president, Rep. Lauren Boebert was causing a spectacle before even making it into the chamber. She pushed her way through newly installed metal detectors and ignored police officers who asked her to stop so they could check her with a hand-held wand.
This reprised a standoff from the evening before, when Boebert, a freshman Republican from Colorado, refused to show guards what was inside her handbag as she entered the building. In both cases, she was eventually granted access, but not before engineering a madefor-Twitter moment that delighted the far right.
After joining her colleagues Wednesday, Boebert took to the House floor to denounce the vote on impeachment that passed a few hours later.
“Where’s the accountability for the left after encouraging and normalizing violence?” Boebert asked loudly, arguing that Democrats had tolerated excessive violence last summer during the unrest over racial justice. “I call bullcrap when I hear the Democrats demanding unity.”
The standoff at the metal detectors was a characteristic stunt by Boebert. She is only about two weeks into her term but has already arranged several episodes that showcased her brand of far-right defiance as a conspiracy theorist who proudly boasts of carrying her Glock handgun to Washington. She is only one of 435 House members, but Boebert, 34, represents an incoming faction of the party for whom breaking the rules — and gaining notoriety for doing it — is exactly the point.
In the same way Republican leaders had to adapt to the tea party over a decade ago, House leaders must now contend with a narrow but increasingly clamorous element of the party that not only carries President Donald Trump’s anti-establishment message but connects with the voters who are so loyal to him — and so crucial to future elections.
In the process, Boebert and her cohort have exasperated other lawmakers and Republicans.
“There is a trend, in both parties, of members who seem more interested in dunking on folks on social media and appearing on friendly cable networks than doing the work of legislating,” said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist and former press secretary for House Speaker John Boehner. “They seem to see public service as more performance art than a battle of policy ideas.”
In recent days, Boebert and a group of other freshman Republicans, including the QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, a 25-yearold freshman who claimed he was armed during the Capitol riots, have questioned or outright flouted guidelines meant to protect lawmakers from violence, intruders or the spread of the coronavirus.
In her short time in office, Boebert has already sparred with a Republican colleague over security lapses at the Capitol and expressed interest in bringing her gun to work. Her Twitter account was temporarily suspended after she spread the falsehood that the presidential election was rigged.
She also faced criticism, and some demands that she resign, for tweeting out information about some lawmakers’ locations during the siege at the Capitol by a violent mob.
The behavior exhibited by Boebert and some of her fellow freshman Republicans prompted Timothy Blodgett, the House’s acting sergeant-at-arms, to send a memo to lawmakers Tuesday notifying them that security screenings would be required for members seeking access to the chamber and that lawmakers who declined to wear masks would be removed from the House floor.
Several Republicans responded by yelling that their rights were being violated as they passed through the metal detectors, behavior that has exasperated Democrats.
“I don’t know what the consequences are going to be for people who hold power and don’t ever want to be held accountable,” Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, told NPR about lawmakers who bypassed security measures in the Capitol. He added that defiance by lawmakers was “a sign of how obnoxious things have become for some of these folks who were supporting Donald Trump. The rules don’t apply to them.”
Boebert unofficially started her campaign for Congress in September 2019 in Denver, announcing to the Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke that he would not be taking one of the most potent symbols of rural autonomy: her guns.
“I was one of the gun-owning Americans who heard you speak regarding your ‘Hell yes, I’m going to take your AR-15s and AK-47s,’ ” Boebert said to O’Rourke at the time. “Well, I’m here to say, ‘Hell no, you’re not.’ ”
She has expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy group, though she has tried to temper that by saying she is not a follower.
Boebert was running a restaurant in Colorado’s ranch country — where she encouraged the servers to openly carry guns — when she stunned the state’s Republican establishment by defeating a five-term incumbent in the primary and then winning the general election.
“She was so inexperienced,” said Dick Wadhams, the former head of the Colorado Republican Party. “I don’t think she even knew she had no chance, which turned out to be a good thing for her. She caught everyone by surprise.”
So far, she has had the same effect on Washington.
On Wednesday, the Capitol Police and Boebert’s office declined to respond to requests about whether she had been carrying a gun either time she had trouble getting into the chamber.
Boebert has said that she has a concealed carry permit, issued through the District of Columbia, for her gun and has claimed on Twitter that she has the right to freely carry within the Capitol complex, which is not true.
Once a reliably red state, Colorado flipped with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, and Republicans have struggled to regain a foothold. Democrats now hold both Senate seats, the state House and the governor’s office.
Republicans seeking to keep viability in the state regard Boebert’s behavior warily.
“I think most Republicans here are still behind her,” Wadhams said. “But she can’t just pick fights in Washington. She has got to pay attention to the issues in her district too: in water, natural resources, mining. If she doesn’t do that, she’s in real trouble.”