December 09, 2019 01:11 PM UTC

Ken Buck's Spotty Impeachment Attendance Continues

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• by: Colorado Pols

Congressman Ken Buck (R-Greeley) moonlights as the State Republican Party Chairman (or vice-versa), so he’s probably a busy guy. But it would be nice if Buck would pay a little more attention to his taxpayer-funded position in Congress.

Buck showed up briefly at a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week to ask some inane questions of witnesses, but otherwise he’s generally been hard to find on Capitol Hill when it comes to hearings on impeaching the President of the United States. As the Colorado Independent reported earlier this month, Buck missed most of the closed-door impeachment hearings this fall — he has yet to offer an explanation for his truancy — and he was largely absent again at today’s open hearing:

The congressman’s spokesperson says Buck is watching the impeachment hearing from his office and speaking with his staff. #copolitics

— Justin Wingerter (@JustinWingerter) December 9, 2019

You can see the video yourself from today’s House Judiciary Committee hearings; the C-SPAN camera pans to an empty seat in front of Buck’s name placard during a procedural voice vote. As you can also see for yourself, the overwhelming majority of committee members — on both sides of the political aisle — are in fact sitting in their seats doing their jobs.

As we mentioned earlier, this is not the first time that Buck has wandered off in the middle of testimony. Here’s Justin Wingerter of The Denver Post last Wednesday:

Rep. Ken Buck has returned to the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearing after several hours away.

Buck’s time to question the witnesses is coming up within the next half-hour. #copolitics

— Justin Wingerter (@JustinWingerter) December 4, 2019

Lawmakers may not want to be spending so much time on impeachment questions, as Rep. Jason Crow (D-Aurora) acknowledged to Wingerter last week, but most of them have the good sense to at least pretend to be engaged in their work.