Well, well, well, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert is a liar, and a CNN producer has the video to prove it. Is anyone surprised? No. Is it still hilarious but also despicable at the same time? Yes. After a controversial negotiation between President Biden and Republican Speaker McCarthy, the House voted late last Wednesday night to suspend the national debt ceiling. Out of the 435 members of Congress, only four did not vote, and one of them, suspiciously, was Colorado’s own walking red flag, Lauren Boebert.
After the vote, the widely-mocked freshman Representative tweeted that she skipped the vote as an intentional protest over the weekend.
On Saturday, the ultra-conservative congresswoman tweeted a video of herself standing in front of a country landscape wearing a backward cap (because she’s a real casual average Joe just like us, I guess) calling her absence an intentional “protest” against “DC self-created garbage.”
“I am back in Colorado, but let’s talk about DC. No excuses. I was ticked off they wouldn’t let me do my job, so I didn’t take the vote,” she said to the camera. “Call it a no-show protest, but I certainly let every one of my colleagues and the country know I was against this garbage of a bill.”
Even if that were true, the decision to abstain from voting rather than voicing her opposition with a “no” vote doesn’t make a ton of sense.
But by Monday, CNN producer, Morgan Rimmer, had tweeted video footage appearing to expose Boebert’s excuse as a full-on lie. The clip shows Boebert in what appeared to be a desperate sprint up the House steps to make it inside for the debt ceiling vote. You can hear a voice Rimmer identifies as herself saying, “They closed it.” To which Boebert briefly turns and asks, “They closed it?” Then continues to hurry up the stairs.
According to Rimmer, the video is from that night just minutes after the vote closed. (There were also reportedly no other significant votes that night that Boebert might have been rushing for.) Still, some might doubt the video’s timeline. But here’s the thing: In addition to the video, which Boebert had little reason to suspect would come out, there’s another giant piece of hard evidence showing that she very much tried to make it to the House floor to vote—unlike what she claimed to the public—but missed it by minutes for an unknown reason. Boebert herself submitted an official statement to the congressional record stating that she missed the vote because she was “unavoidably detained” and would have voted no if she could have been there. So, yeah.
You probably already know that our national debt ceiling is a perpetually contentious issue within Congress. The House votes to suspend or raise the thing fairly frequently, often multiple times per administration. This suspension also passed by a wide margin. It’s not currently clear why Boebert was so bent on lying about why she missed it.
(via CNN, featured image: )
