Hours after issuing an apology Friday for her conduct during a performance of ‘Beetlejuice’ in Denver, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) joked about the incident during the Las Animas County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner in Trinidad.
“I want to stand here tonight and tell you that you deserve my most humble apology,” said Boebert, before downplaying the incident, which saw her escorted out of the Buell Theater for vaping, taking photos, and engaging in intimate touching with her male companion. “I went out in my personal capacity for the first time in four years and I learned not to do that. But truly, I love you. There are two things in life: there are gravity and levity. No matter how much levity you have, there’s going to be some gravity that brings you back down and humbles you. My job is not to incur gravity on anything that you are doing. You were to not carry any weight or burden on my behalf. I’m here to lift that burden off of you, to represent you, and to avoid infrared cameras.”
Before leaving the stage, Boebert quipped, “It is an honor to serve you, and if any of you go and see ‘Beetlejuice,’ please let me know how it ends.”
Listen to Boebert joke about the theater incident — after she apologized for it — here.
Boebert’s conduct, and her narrow victory over Democrat Adam Frisch in the 2022 election, is concerning for some Republicans.
“I’m terrified we’re going to lose this seat,” said Russ Andrews, a former conservative radio commentator from Carbondale who is challenging Boebert for the Republican CD3 nomination in 2024. “If we lose this seat, we’re one seat closer to losing the house. If we lose the house, and we don’t have the senate or the White House, we’re going to lose our nation.”
In addition to Andrews, Grand Junction lawyer Jeff Hurd is also hoping to unseat Boebert. Boebert, who refused to sign the Libertarian Party’s pledge that would keep possible “spoiler” candidates off the ballot, will also have competition from the Libertarian party in 2024.
“The Libertarian Party of Colorado entered a Pact with the Colorado Republicans to not challenge their candidates so long as they would pledge to abide by Libertarian Principles,” wrote Libertarian candidate James Wiley in his campaign announcement. “Since then, Lauren Boebert, aka Beetlejuice, has publicly denounced our pledge and defamed the principles we cherish as unworthy. This insult to who I am as a Libertarian compels me to eagerly fulfill the duties invoked by the Libertarian Pact and challenge her in her district which she so nearly lost by only 542 votes. 542 votes are not enough to stop me from being the cause of her defeat.”
Recent polling shows Frisch with a slight lead among voters.
In addition to joking about her off-duty conduct, Boebert also discussed the looming budget fight in the House of Representatives. “There’s a big fight coming up,” she said. “First of all, the federal government runs out of money September 30. Part of our agreement during the speaker’s race was that we would have these 12 individual funding bills by September 30, and no one was going to jam us, come Christmas Eve, with an omnibus bill.”
U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo (D-CO) discussed the budget negotiations with Colorado Morning News during a Sept. 14 appearance. “I’m seeing chaos on the other side of the aisle,” she said. “Yesterday we were supposed to be voting on a rule to move on to votes on one of the appropriations bills. They couldn’t even bring their own party together because of the very extreme members that Speaker [Kevin] McCarthy [R-CA] is beholden to. That’s really clogging up the works on all of the work that we’re trying to do, not just these appropriations bills that are very important to funding the government further and ensuring that we don’t go into a wasteful government shutdown, but real work that has to happen, for example, around the farm bill. This is something that is only passed every five years. As a member of the Agriculture committee, I have been waiting anxiously to be able to mark this bill up and get some real work done for not just farmers in Colorado, but all of the people who depend on nutrition programs like SNAP. And this dysfunction that we’re seeing on the other side is really holding up very important work for the people of Colorado.”
Boebert told the dinner crowd that her priorities with the budget were addressing “wokeism” in the military. “We’re going to be there for four weeks working out an agreement to actually cut federal spending,” she said. “We want our federal spending to be to pre-COVID levels. We want to reduce your taxes and actually manage your tax dollars. What a concept! We want to defund woke agencies — both personnel, departments, and one of the ways that we’re going to do that is by using the Holman rule that we fought for at the beginning of the year. I have many amendments ready. One of them being to reduce Secretary [of Defense Lloyd] Austin’s woke salary down to $1. You can’t infiltrate our military with wokeism and not be impacted by that. Recruitment is down. We have servicemen and women who are suffering because of all of this DEI that they are putting in.”
Caraveo said that House Republicans are going back on previous deals made with Democrats. “If the House Republicans were to stick to their deal that they made with the president when we avoided the debt ceiling crisis and we made real compromises on government spending, we are happy to pass those bills,” she said. “They’re not sticking to their end of the bargain. They’re going back to the funding levels from 2007 and 2009 on some of these bills, cutting government spending on defense, cutting very important resources for rural areas, which they constantly say that they are working for. Democrats have compromised in the House, the Senate Democrats and Republicans have both compromised. It’s really just the House Republicans who are refusing to stick to deals that they have made. They are refusing to compromise. I am here and ready to work in a bipartisan manner. They are not.”
