September 02, 2025 12:58 PM UTC

Lauren Boebert Takes GOP Budget Blame Game Beyond Belief

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• by: Colorado Pols

Colorado’s carpetbagging controversy-chasing Rep. Lauren Boebert, now representing Colorado’s Eastern Plains after a moment of manual indiscretion nearly sent Boebert back to the now-shuttered Shooters Grill, keeps her millions of social media followers satiated and her enemies off balance with an unfailing firehose of hot takes on the issues of the day–a torrent that has with only a few brief pauses like recalibrating her response to the Epstein files non-disclosure never failed in terms of news cycle timeliness.

But sometimes this instinct to engage early and often comes back to burn Boebert, like this morning, as Boebert tried to shift the blame for the cuts to Medicaid coverage announced by Gov. Jared Polis last week following the special session of the state legislature to address the federal “We’re All Going To Die Act” budget that Boebert herself voted for:

On the one hand, Boebert is doing exactly what Republican strategists hoped–blaming Democrats in Colorado for the budget cuts made necessary by the Republican federal budget bill. But as Mario Nicolais wrote over the weekend for the Colorado Sun about this audacious blame-flipping strategy, success relies on Colorado voters not understanding how anything works. Which may be true of Lauren Boebert, but hasn’t been for a majority of Colorado voters for many years:

The only reason Republicans did not make the choice is because they have no real say in a state where Democrats hold all levers of political power. But the crisis was caused by their Republican brethren at the federal level.

Basically, Republicans will hope that voters are too naive and the policy too complex for them to be held accountable. That is the plan. Bet that you can lie to voters’ faces and they will not know the difference.

In Boebert’s attempt to blame Gov. Polis for the cuts her vote in Congress set in motion, we can see the political wisdom in the legislature’s decision to defer as many cuts as possible to our term-limited governor, depriving Republicans of an election-year message against state Democratic lawmakers. But even without that layer of political insulation, nobody is going to believe this transparent attempt by Republicans to shift the blame for the intended result of the federal budget bill–consequences Boebert and her endangered freshman colleague Rep. Gabe Evans are happy to celebrate in less adversarial settings. Every one of these ends the same way–an anecdote that doesn’t nearly add up to the actual budget hole. This time, it’s “housing the illegal aliens.”

Because Republicans have very little factually to defend themselves with before voters who overwhelmingly disapprove of the GOP budget bill, we expect the debate over the cuts this year and the even bigger cuts to future state budgets resulting directly from the federal budget to be an ongoing game of local Republicans like all-but-declared candidate for governor Barb Kirkmeyer dodging the blame for their own party’s actions in Washington, while Democrats clean up the mess as best they can and hope voters see through a deception reliant on a combination of rank ignorance and partisan denial.

If anything, Boebert’s blame-gaming is so over the top that it amplifies the message Republicans don’t want you to hear.

This is all happening because people with an (R) after their names wanted it to happen.