June 21, 2023 12:58 PM UTC

Republicans Aren't Taking Lauren Boebert Seriously Anymore

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: Boebert is really running out of friends, as The Daily Beast reports:

You can’t hear today’s interaction between Reps. Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, but you can pick up the gist from the body language alone:

Saw this conversation… not sure if it was a friendly one pic.twitter.com/tpz3z2Phtv

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 21, 2023

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Congressperson Lauren Boebert’s shtick is stuck.

Nobody who is at all familiar with the two-term representative from Colorado’s third congressional district would ever accuse Boebert of being a public policy powerhouse or a clever political strategist. But after barely winning re-election in 2022 and failing to learn some important lessons from her 546-vote squeaker over Democrat Adam Frisch, Boebert is finding that just shuffling through the same playlist isn’t going to be enough in 2024.

As The Hill newspaper reports, Boebert’s fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives are sick and tired of her pointless performative politics:

House Republicans teed off Wednesday on one of their own colleagues, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), over her stunning move to force a vote this week to impeach President Biden.

While no fans of the president, Boebert’s GOP critics said her move to stage an impeachment vote this week is wildly premature, harming the Republicans’ ongoing efforts to investigate the Biden family’s business dealings while undermining potential impeachment efforts in the future.

At a closed-door meeting of the GOP conference on Capitol Hill, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) took the remarkable step of urging his troops to oppose the impeachment resolution when it hits the floor later in the week, a House Republican told The Hill. [Pols emphasis]

“I don’t think it’s the right thing to do,” McCarthy later told reporters.

“This is one of the most serious things you can do as a member of Congress. I think you’ve got to go through the process. You’ve got to have the investigation,” McCarthy said. “And throwing something on the floor actually harms the investigation that we’re doing right now.”

McCarthy told reporters that he called Boebert on Tuesday and asked her to talk to the closed-door House GOP conference meeting about her impeachment resolution before moving to force a vote. McCarthy said Boebert told him she would think about it, but then went ahead and made the privileged motion Tuesday anyway. [Pols emphasis]

[mantra-pullquote align=”right” textalign=”left” width=”60%”]“This shouldn’t be playground games, in my view. This should be serious. If there’s real facts for impeachment then you go there. But doing this is wrong, and I think the majority of the conference feels that way…

…It’s a person thinking about themselves instead of the team.”  

     — Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) on his opposition to Boebert’s resolution to impeach President Biden[/mantra-pullquote]

Boebert didn’t bother to attend today’s meeting, instead going on Steve Bannon’s radio show to defend her decision to buck her party leadership so that she could have something cool to Tweet about. Instead of just making her case directly to the members of her own caucus, Boebert used her appearance on Bannon’s show to argue that Republicans to oppose an expected Democratic motion this week to table her not-even-half-assed Biden impeachment resolution.

House Republicans did not hold back on their anger over Boebert’s latest antics. Again, from The Hill:

“I think that things like impeachment are one of the most awesome powers of the Congress, it’s not something you should flippantly exercise in two days. And I think that it actually undermines efforts to hold people accountable in the future,” Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.)

He said the “right way” to go about the matter is through regular order, “empowering the committee chairs and members.”

“It’s important for the Republican conference to act together in unison to counter the bad policies of the Biden administration,” Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.) said. “And therefore, if members want to suggest or bring up the idea of a privileged motion, they ought to come to the conference to discuss that in advance and have a collective discussion of it before they take the decision to do it.”

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was mad at Boebert for a sillier reason:

“I had already introduced articles of impeachment on Joe Biden for the border, asked her to co-sponsor mine, she didn’t. She basically copied my articles and then introduced them and then changed them to a privileged resolution,” Greene said. “So of course I support ‘em because they’re identical to mine.”

“They’re basically a copycat,” she added.

Of course, this is not the first time that Boebert (or Greene) has tried to impeach — or “imeach” — President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Greene is definitely first, for whatever that’s worth; she actually filed articles of impeachment in Jan. 2021, before Biden had even spent a week in the White House.

Boebert has since kept the drumbeat alive. Just nine months later, Boebert’s office sent out a breathless press release with this title:

Boebert also hasn’t limited her “imeachment” calls to just the White House; last August, Boebert made a show of trying to impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland.

[Note: We haven’t mentioned anything about WHY Boebert thinks any of these officials should be impeached, because there is no real reason worth discussing. It’s just a thing she does.]

This is all familiar ground for Boebert. What has changed is that her own caucus has grown tired of her antics, which include screaming her opposition to Republican-sponsored legislation and then not even bothering to show up for the vote. Her habit of taking credit back home for things she voted against in Washington D.C. has earned her the public ire of colleagues such as Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Denver).

Boebert’s constituents are equally perturbed by her steady stream of nonsense. Recent polling shows that voters in CO-03 think Boebert is more interested in posting to social media and supporting Donald Trump than actually serving the people she represents.

Boebert built her short political career by turning herself into an interesting caricature of a human being: She portrays herself as a cute young mother who wears high heels, carries a handgun, and “speaks truth to power.” This was enough to get her through a Republican Primary in 2020 against the painfully-boring (and possibly sleeping) incumbent Rep. Scott Tipton, and she was new enough to carry a safe Republican district against Democratic challenger Diane Mitsch Bush. Boebert continued to build her name ID through a steady stream of performative obstruction leading up to her near-loss in 2022, but 2023 has demonstrated the limits of this act.

We’re not surprised that Republicans are starting to think more about why they even bother dealing with Boebert. In Colorado, Boebert is more helpful for Democrats than she is for Republicans. Boebert does nothing to help other Republicans via fundraising, and her antics are a constant headache for a House GOP conference that desperately needs to prove that it is serious about governing.

The quotes reported by The Hill newspaper above feel like the dam is starting to crack. Once it bursts, nobody will be coming to Boebert’s rescue.