WASHINGTON— Lauren Boebert, a gun-rights advocate and arduous supporter of President Donald Trump, first decided to run for Congress in response to her own misunderstanding of how congressional committees work.
In December, she said she first decided to “mount up” and run for Congress because U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton (R-CO) wasn’t leading a U.S. House committee chaired by U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA).
“What made me decide to run for Congress or decide, Lauren, it is time to mount up, was when I heard my congressman say he was on a committee with Maxine Waters as the chair and [U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York] is on that committee, and Rashida Talib is on that committee, and this is the new world that we live in, and they direct the ship.
And I said, why aren’t you directing the ship?” Boebert told 9News anchor Kyle Clark in December, referring to Tipton. “Why aren’t you the captain? You have been there for four terms now, and you want us to re-hire you for a fifth? I think it is time someone else steps up, and I didn’t see anyone else step up. So I put my life and family on the line to answer the call.”
Clark told Boebert that Tipton doesn’t lead the committee because Democrats control the U.S. House, and therefore Democrats are the chairs of all U.S. House committees.
Boebert replied that Tipton should “give us a battle plan and get behind people with conservative values.”
Boebert’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment to clarify why she decided to run for office.
However, she has generally offered two reasons since announcing her candidacy: her disdain for Ocasio-Cortez and the inspiration she gained from her confrontation with former Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke about his position on gun rights.
Boebert rarely mentioned Tipton’s name during the primary race. In one of
her first interviews as a candidate, Boebert explained that her opponent was Ocasio-Cortez rather than her actual opponent, Tipton.
“I’m absolutely running against her,” Boebert told 9News in a December interview.
Now, as she runs against Democrat Diane Mitsch-Bush, Boebert continues to say she’s running to stop “left-wing lunatics.”
When explaining why she decided to run for Congress, Boebert also points to the moment that she publicly chastised former Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke about his position on gun rights as a contributing factor to why she decided to run.
“This wasn’t just a political statement for me, this was a way of life that he was threatening,” Boebert said during her May interview with NOQReport. “I see a whole lot of our elected officials giving our freedoms away and appeasing the Democrats every time that they try to inch away and take something else from us.”
In that same interview, Boebert provided more specific examples of why she decided to challenge Tipton.
She claimed that he has “spent far too much time voting alongside Nancy Pelosi to give millions of illegal immigrants amnesty, rubber stamping trillion-dollar spending bills, and even killing our energy industry in the western slope of Colorado.”
Boebert also told Breitbart in July that the second amendment “defends all of our other rights.” Without that, she added, “we have no way to defend our freedom of speech, our freedom of religion.”
“I love to have the freedom to proclaim that Jesus is my lord,” Boebert said. “But without the second amendment, [the] government can come in at any time and say you’re not allowed to say that anymore, you’re not allowed to go to church.”
Boebert identifies herself as an advocate for “freedom,” vowing to “annihilate socialism, deregulate America, and secure the Constitution.” Displayed on her campaign website is a “Contract with Colorado,” which she promises to “never vote to give away our personal freedoms to socialists” and grant the president more authority to “take on the deep state.”
And she is keen on joining the Freedom Caucus on “day one.”
“One of the things that I love about these guys is that they’re the only members of Congress that actually get together and debate the constitutionality of a bill before they vote on that,” Boebert told NOQ Report, a conservative news outlet that endorsed her, in a May interview. “That’s why I so desperately want to be a member of the Freedom Caucus, that is day one for me.”
