Opinion: Boebert lied to constituents about why she missed critical debt limit vote

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, who represents part of Eagle County and most of Colorado’s Western Slope, speaks during a House Freedom Caucus debt limit deal press conference on May 30 (C-SPAN).

If you miss a really important event after you said you’d be there, wouldn’t it be great if you could avoid the fallout by just telling people you were “unavoidably detained”?

Say you’ve got a presentation with a big client, but at the appointed time, you’re nowhere to be found. What if you could keep your job by telling your boss, “I was unavoidably detained.”

Or imagine you planned to meet your spouse for a fancy anniversary dinner, but you leave your loved one sitting alone at the restaurant. “I was unavoidably detained,” you say, and all’s forgiven.

It doesn’t work like that, as most people know.

But U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert apparently thinks it does.

In the run-up to one of the most consequential bills in Congress this year, the Silt Republican made a lot of noise about how she was going to vote “no.” The country came close to defaulting on its debt, thanks to reckless posturing by Republicans like Boebert, and the repercussions would have been disastrous for the U.S. and world economy. Republican leadership in the House struck a deal with the Biden administration that would avert catastrophe, and the compromise plan was put to a vote last week. Boebert wasn’t having it.

“We had a real opportunity to significantly cut federal spending, restore some fiscal sanity in Washington, D.C., and get our economy back on track,” Boebert said during a press conference the day before the vote. “Unfortunately, the bill we are considering does none of these things and is more Washington gimmicks from the swamp that kicks the proverbial can down the road.”

She was vocal not just about her opposition to the bill but also, specifically, about her intent to vote against it.

“I’m voting ‘no,’” she said in a video she posted to Twitter a little more than 24 hours before the vote. “I’m sticking to my guns on this one … I’m continuing to stand strong for you and hold the line.”

Then the vote came. Boebert wasn’t there. What happened?

She told her constituents one thing and the House another thing, and the two can’t both be true.

It wasn’t clear at first why the representative from Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District, who for days had issued fiery denunciations of the bill, failed to cast a vote. Now we know a lot more.

On the night of the vote on the bill, which passed, Axios reporter Juliegrace Brufke tweeted that Boebert had been seen running up the Capitol steps “right as they gaveled” the vote closed. But on Saturday, Boebert offered an explanation — she called her failure to vote a “protest.”

“I was ticked off,” she said in a video she posted. “They wouldn’t let me do my job. So I didn’t take the vote.”

Got that? She made a deliberate choice to skip voting, because she was mad.

But this was a lie. A straight-up, dead-to-rights lie.

How do we know? Boebert told us. She submitted to the House clerk a statement in which she explained her absence by saying she was “unavoidably detained.”

She told her constituents one thing and the House another thing, and the two can’t both be true.

We further know she intended to vote, because on Sunday an embarrassing video from CNN emerged that showed Boebert sprinting up the steps of the Capitol just as the vote was closing. A CNN associate producer tells her in the video that the vote was closed, and Boebert pauses briefly to ask, “They closed it?”

It sure didn’t look like a no-show protest, and Boebert has not denied the video shows exactly what anyone watching it knows it shows.

Members of Congress go on TV, introduce bills, post messages, fundraise, and take part in all kinds of other activities. But essentially they have one job: vote. Boebert, one of the most visible members of the sedition caucus, habitually humiliates Colorado and residents of her district. This time she also failed to perform the most basic part of her job — then tried to cover it up.

The episode came at an inopportune time for her reelection chances.

On the day after the “they closed it?” video made the rounds, Colorado Democrats announced an aggressive initiative to unseat Boebert next year. The so-called 546 Project “organizes the Democratic Party earlier than ever” in the 3rd Congressional District and enlists almost 500 neighborhood leaders to get out the vote for her opponent.

The name of the project alludes to Boebert’s vulnerability — she won reelection in November by only 546 votes in a district that typically favors Republicans by 9 points. It would be difficult to measure how much the missed debt-limit vote — and, worse, her flagrant lies about it — has damaged Boebert’s electoral prospects. Her recent misbehavior has been the subject of plenty of statewide attention, and it’s hard to see that it’s helped her.

But if voters deny Boebert a third term in Congress, at least she has an explanation handy. She can tell her former colleagues in Washington that she was “unavoidably detained.”

Editor’s note: This opinion piece first appeared on Colorado Newsline, which is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and Twitter.