WASHINGTON – As lawmakers entered the Capitol on Wednesday for one of the US government’s most solemn ventures, the impeachment of a president, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert was causing a spectacle before she even entered the House. She made her way through newly installed metal detectors and ignored the police who asked her to stop so they could check her with a hand wand.
This echoed a standoff the night before, when Boebert, a freshman Republican from Colorado, refused to show guards what was in her bag when she entered the building. In both cases, she ended up getting access, but not before creating a moment made for Twitter that charmed the far right.
After joining her colleagues on Wednesday, Ms. Boebert went to the House floor to denounce the impeachment vote that passed just hours later.
“Where is the responsibility for the left after encouraging and normalizing violence?” Boebert asked out loud, arguing that Democrats had tolerated excessive violence last summer during racial justice riots. “I call it bullshit when I hear Democrats demanding unity.”
The stalemate in the metal detectors was a characteristic move by Mrs. Boebert. She is only ten days old, but she has already arranged several episodes that show her kind of far-right challenge as a conspiracy theorist who is proud to take her Glock gun to Washington. She is just one of 435 members of the House, but Boebert, 34, represents a new party faction for which breaking the rules – and gaining notoriety for doing so – is exactly the point.
In the same way that Republican leaders had to adapt to the Tea Party more than a decade ago, House leaders must now face a strait, but more and more clamorous element of the party that not only carries Trump’s anti-establishment message, but connects with voters who are so loyal to him – and so crucial to future elections.
In the process, Ms. Boebert and her group angered other lawmakers and Republicans.
“There is a tendency, in both parties, for members who seem more interested in diving into people on social media and appearing on cable friendly networks than doing the job of legislating,” said Michael Steel, Republican strategist and former press secretary to former mayor John Boehner. “They seem to see public service as more of a performance art than a battle of political ideas.”
In the past few days, Ms. Boebert and a group of other freshman Republicans, including the QAnon devotee, Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, and North Carolina’s Madison Cawthorn, a 25-year-old freshman who said she was armed during the Capitol disturbances, questioned or totally disrespected guidelines designed to protect lawmakers from violence, intruders or the spread of the coronavirus.
Their fluency on social media, access to conservative television and radio platforms and combativeness with reporters on live television allow them to gain notoriety in non-traditional ways.
“There used to be a certain level of control over how members developed a profile when they arrived in Washington,” said Kevin Madden, a strategist who served as senior adviser to Mitt Romney during his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. “Usually you had to work to that and gain that notoriety. It is now given to you with a YouTube video. “
In a kind of introductory video that she released last week, Boebert was shown walking against a Washington scene with a gun holstered at her waist. “I refuse to give up my rights, especially my Second Amendment rights,” she said to the camera.
In his short term in office, Boebert already fought with a Republican colleague over security breaches on Capitol Hill last week and expressed interest in bringing his gun to work. Her Twitter account was temporarily suspended after she spread the falsehood that the presidential election was rigged.
She also faced criticism, and some dismissal demands, for tweeting information about the locations of some lawmakers during the Capitol siege by a violent crowd last week.
The behavior displayed by Boebert and some of his first-year Republican colleagues prompted Timothy Blodgett, the House’s arms sergeant, to send a memo to lawmakers on Tuesday notifying them that security checks would be needed for members seeking access to the chamber and that legislators who refused to wear masks would be removed from the plenary of the Chamber. Several Republicans responded by shouting that their rights were being violated by passing metal detectors, a behavior that exasperated Democrats.
“I don’t know what the consequences will be for people who hold power and don’t want to be held accountable,” Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat from Ohio, told NPR on Wednesday about lawmakers who circumvented security measures in the capital. He added that the lawmakers’ challenge was “a sign of how bad things have become for some of these people who supported Donald Trump. The rules do not apply to them. “
Boebert unofficially started his campaign for Congress in September 2019 in Denver, announcing to Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke that he would not carry one of the most powerful symbols of rural autonomy: his weapons.
“I was one of the gun owners who heard him talk about ‘Hell, yes, I’m taking your AR-15s and AK-47s,'” Boebert told O’Rourke at the time. “Well, I’m here to say no, you’re not.”
She expressed support for the conspiracy group QAnon, although she tried to moderate this by saying she is not a follower.
Boebert ran a restaurant in rural Colorado – where he encouraged servants to openly carry weapons – when he stunned the state’s Republican establishment by defeating a five-term primary and then winning the general election.
“She was so inexperienced,” said Dick Wadhams, the former head of the Colorado Republican Party. “I think she didn’t even know she didn’t have a chance, which turned out to be a good thing for her. She took everyone by surprise. “
So far, it has had the same effect in Washington. On Wednesday, the Capitol Police and Ms. Boebert’s office refused to respond to requests about whether she was actually carrying a gun at any time when she had trouble entering the chamber. Mrs. Boebert has said that she has a concealed license, issued through the District of Columbia, for her weapon and has claimed on Twitter that she has the right to freely charge inside the Capitol complex, which is not true.
On Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department did not respond when asked whether Washington’s chief of police, Robert J. Contee III, had met with Boebert to explain her district gun laws. , as he said he would do last week.
Ms. Boebert often defended her behavior as one of the reasons why she was elected. Just as Mr. Trump did with his base, she tells her followers that she is fighting for them. As for her right to carry a gun, she wrote on Twitter that “self-defense is the most basic human right”.
In Colorado, the Boebert district covers much of western Colorado, a wide and politically diverse landscape of plateaus and jagged mountains that includes liberal enclaves like Aspen and Telluride, as well as often neglected cities where livestock, mining and natural gas drilling pay the bills. For generations, the district has chosen deeply rooted local men who, Democrats or Republicans, tended to be moderated wearing cowboy boots focused on the local economy and natural resources.
Once a trusted red state, Colorado has taken a turn with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, and Republicans have been struggling to regain a position. Democrats now occupy both seats in the Senate, the state chamber and the governor’s office.
Republicans looking to maintain viability in the state take Boebert’s behavior with caution.
“I think most Republicans here are still after her,” said Wadhams. “But she can’t just pick a fight in Washington. She also needs to pay attention to her district’s issues: water, natural resources, mining. If she doesn’t, she is in serious trouble. “