December 27, 2020 10:13 AM UTC

Lauren Boebert's Getting Kind of Scary

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• by: Colorado Pols

In the weeks since the election as outgoing defeated President Donald Trump’s half-baked legal challenges and shockingly unscrupulous pressuring of everyone from low-level election officials to state governors to overturn the election continue, Rep.-elect Lauren Boebert, Colorado’s “QAnon”-familiar pistol packing hard-right Congresscritter-elect from the Third Congressional District, has cheered Trump’s refusal to accept the results vociferously–even as Colorado’s GOP chairman Rep. Ken Buck belatedly acknowledged Joe Biden’s victory, and then tried to assure local Republicans that the nutty conspiracy theories at the heart of Trump’s claims didn’t affect Colorado elections.

The growing cognitive dissonance among Colorado Republicans over our own all-mail ballot elections counted in almost all cases by Dominion Voting Systems hardware being fair and accurate, as Rep. Buck and Colorado’s Republican county clerks insist they were, and the stilted conspiracy theories requiring all of these same systems to have been massively defrauded in other states, is a serious problem for any local Republican who is trying to argue the President’s case with anyone capable of basic critical thinking skills.

Now that the Supreme Court has rejected Trump’s Keystone Kop legal challenges, and the Electoral College has voted, and Republicans from Mitch McConnell down through the ranks to Colorado’s GOP chairman have acknowledged reality, you’d think that even Lauren Boebert would see the writing on the proverbial wall.

And, well, you’d be wrong.

We need THE PEOPLE to put pressure on AZ, GA, PA, NV, WI, MI state legislatures to rescind their certifications.

Then we need THE PEOPLE to put pressure on their Senators and Congressmen to object on the 6th.

WE THE PEOPLE!

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) December 27, 2020

This morning, as unemployment benefits expire for millions of Americans and desperately needed economic relief legislation sits in limbo, Rep.-elect Boebert is exhorting “the people” to “put pressure” on state legislatures in six swing states–Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin–to “rescind” the certification of their states’ elections. That’s the certification that paved the way for the Electoral College vote that took place on December 14th making Joe Biden President. Obviously that’s not going to happen, but to flat-out ask for such a wildly undemocratic action so late in the process puts Boebert in the outer limits of the Trump dead-ender movement with such figures as Michael Flynn. We haven’t seen a call yet from Boebert to impose martial law, but that’s really all that’s left from here in terms of lawful (or even questionably lawful) escalation.

By now you’re probably wondering: what does the “pressure” Rep.-elect Boebert wants “we the people” to put on state legislatures look like? In 2020, in each of the states Boebert specified as targets for “we the people’s” wrath, “pressure” looks like this:

Before Lauren Boebert became Rep.-elect Lauren Boebert, her low-information extremism was more of a point of ridicule than a legitimate concern–at least that was the judgment of a slimmer than average majority of CD-3 voters who let it all slide, because voting for a propeller-headed Democratic wonk was something they just couldn’t manage.

Now that Boebert is about to be sworn into Congress in a matter of days, it’s crucial that she be made to fully explain her allegations about the 2020 election and the limits of her prescribed remedies. She’s put herself in the position of being Colorado’s leading elected Trump dead-ender mouthpiece, and now it’s time to own that responsibility. It would help Boebert’s credibility if she acknowledged the many points along the way where she revealed she doesn’t have a clue how anything works, but obviously we don’t expect that. Short of that, Boebert needs to tell Coloradans exactly how her conspiracy theories about the election do not apply to Colorado’s elections including her own. And if they do, she needs to tell us why Rep. Buck and Republican county clerks in her own district are lying, and why her own narrow election should be considered any more legitimate.

And above all, the voters of CD-3, to whom Boebert is still technically accountable even as her Twitter following grows exponentially, need to know how far she is willing to go. Will Rep.-elect Lauren Boebert make the unequivocal statement today that violence is an unacceptable means by which to resolve the 2020 presidential election?

If she will not, forget Scott Gessler or Jenna Ellis or John Eastman.

Colorado has a much more frightening and immediate concern.