Rep. Lauren Boebert represents an increasingly clamorous faction of the party that carries Mr. Trump’s anti-establishment message and is ready to break all norms in doing so.
As lawmakers entered the Capitol on Wednesday for one of the most solemn enterprises in American government, the impeachment of a president, Representative Lauren Boebert was causing a spectacle before even making it into the chamber. She pushed her way through newly installed metal detectors and ignored police officers who asked her to stop so they could check her with a hand-held wand. This reprised a standoff from the evening before, when Ms. Boebert, a freshman Republican from Colorado, refused to show guards what was inside her handbag as she entered the building. In both cases, she was eventually granted access, but not before engineering a made-for-Twitter moment that delighted the far right. After joining her colleagues on Wednesday, Ms. Boebert took to the House floor to denounce the vote on impeachment that passed a few hours later. “Where’s the accountability for the left after encouraging and normalizing violence?” Ms. Boebert asked loudly, arguing that Democrats had tolerated excessive violence last summer during the unrest over racial justice. “I call bullcrap when I hear the Democrats demanding unity.” The standoff at the metal detectors was a characteristic stunt by Ms. Boebert. She is only 10 days into her term but has already arranged several episodes that showcased her brand of far-right defiance as a conspiracy theorist who proudly boasts of carrying her Glock handgun to Washington. She is only one of 435 House members, but Ms. Boebert,34, represents an incoming faction of the party for whom breaking the rules — and gaining notoriety for doing it — is exactly the point. In the same way Republicans leaders had to adapt to the Tea Party over a decade ago, House leaders must now contend with a narrow but increasingly clamorous element of the party that not only carries Mr. Trump’s anti-establishment message but connects with the voters who are so loyal to him — and so crucial to future elections. In the process, Ms. Boebert and her cohort have exasperated other lawmakers and Republicans. “There is a trend, in both parties, of members who seem more interested in dunking on folks on social media and appearing on friendly cable networks than doing the work of legislating,” said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist and a former chairman of the Republican Naitonal Committee. “They seem to see public service as more performance art than a battle of policy ideas.” In recent days, Ms. Boebert and a group of other freshman Republicans, including the QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, a 25-year-old freshman who claimed he was armed during the Capitol riots, have questioned or outright flouted guidelines meant to protect lawmakers from violence, intruders or the spread of the coronavirus.
