On the day Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) lost his gavel, former Congressman Bob Beauprez expressed his frustration with House Republicans, including Rep. Ken Buck who was one of eight GOP members who voted for the unprecedented removal, in no uncertain terms, calling it political suicide.
Appearing on the Steffan Tubbs Show on Tuesday, Beauprez lamented his party’s infighting and characterized the decision of Buck and other Republicans to boot their own leader as a self-inflicted wound.
Beauprez: The American people are concerned about the border. We’re concerned about the economy. We’re concerned about what our kids are getting taught in the classrooms — I could go on and on and on. And here we’ve got a family food fight being played out. We’ve got 40 what, two or three days?
Tubbs: That’s the thing. Yeah, we got, this was not, this was not kicked down the road the next year.
Beauprez: No! Why don’t they just pass out cyanide pills and let them all commit suicide? Because that’s kind of what they did today, was inflict an enormous wound on themselves.
Bob Beauprez on the Steffan Tubbs Show, Oct. 3, 2023
Beauprez went on to note the damage he believes his party’s infighting will do to its political chances with unaffiliated voters here in Colorado.
“As a very partisan Republican…you win elections by addition,” said Beauprez. “In Colorado especially. plus or minus fifty percent of our electorate is independent…if we’re going to win an election, you’ve got to attract a majority of those independent voters. Who was impressed by the spectacle we saw today…to say, we want to be in that club?”
One of those Republicans Beauprez says committed this self-harm is his longtime Colorado GOP colleague Ken Buck (R-CO), who was the only Republican in the state delegation to vote for removing McCarthy. He and Beauprez never served together in Congress, but the two were often in the conversations for statewide office campaigns and previously shared a stage at the Conservative Political Action Committee. Buck did not reply to a text asking him if he wanted to respond to Beauprez’s statement. This article will be updated with any response received.
As he acknowledged later in the interview, Beauprez has plenty of experience with success and failure in tight political battles. The staunch conservative served as Colorado Congressman for the Seventh District from 2003 – 2007. He won his first race by just 121 votes, the closest election in the nation. He went on to run for governor in 2006 against Democrat Bill Ritter, losing a race the Denver Post called “a perfect storm of goofs,” writing that “most of Beauprez’s wounds were self-inflicted.”
