Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert’s desperate race up the U.S. Capitol steps to try to cast her vote on the debt bill, caught in a CNN video over the weekend, has prompted an activist group to call on her to apologize for “failing to do her job by missing the vote on the debt ceiling bill and then lying about her reason for missing the vote.”
In a statement that is now part of the Congressional Record, Boebert initially explained that she missed the voted because she was “unavoidably detained.” Later, she claimed she was engaging in a “no show protest.”
ProgressNow Colorado — a multi-issue state advocacy organization — launched a petition yesterday urging people to “join our call for Rep. Boebert to apologize for her dishonesty and failure to accomplish the one job voters sent her to Washington to do.”
Where Was Boebert?
Boebert’s Democratic opponent, Adam Frisch, issued a news release last week calling on the congresswoman to divulge why she missed the vote on the debt ceiling measure, saying voters in her district “deserve an answer” to the question of why she missed the vote.
“When critical issues are being decided impacting our district’s economy, CO-03 needs a leader and a representative who will actually show up for them and vote in the district’s best interest,” Frisch said in the news release. “What exactly was more important to Boebert than showing up and doing her job? The people of our district deserve an answer. In Colorado, we have veterans, seniors, and children in CO-03 who rely on critical programs such as Social Security, VA benefits, and more, which are affected by this legislation. She plays to the most radical elements of politics versus what’s best for the country and CO-03.
“The people of our district deserve a representative working in a bipartisan way, not one who is focusing more on herself than the people, who can’t even be bothered to show up to vote. When elected, I will support similar bipartisan efforts because I believe we need to stop the circus and elect responsible representation for rural Colorado.”
Boebert’s congressional office didn’t respond to an email this morning asking if the congresswoman plans to apologize, whether her absence for the vote was, in fact, unavoidable or a no-show protest, and if it was unavoidable, where she was prior to the vote.
This isn’t the first time Boebert has offered conflicting explanations for what appear to be personal lapses.
In her 2022 autobiography, for example, she downplays and misrepresents her multiple arrests, even dedicating a short chapter to an 2015 incident at the Country Jam music festival in Grand Junction where, according to a police report, she encouraged underage drinkers, detained by police, to flee custody.
In her book, she describes herself at the Country Jam festival as coming to the rescue of one young woman who was, as Boebert alleges, “aggressively grabbed” by police.
This is completely at odds with police reports, which describe her this way: “Lauren continued yelling and causing the underage drinkers to become unruly.”
