The GOP's Newest Nutjobs: Part 5

Rounding out the top 5 of the GOP's newest nutjobs is Colorado's Lauren Opal Boebert.  That's right-- the 34-year-old firearms enthusiast, covid-restrictions refusenik, QAnon sympathizer, and electoral-vote rejecter, who tweeted on the day of the Capitol Insurrection: "Today is 1776!"  During the lockdown of the Capitol, Boebert infamously revealed (via a Tweet) the moment when Speaker Pelosi had been removed from the House Chambers.  Investigations are underway into whether Boebert aided and abetted the insurrectionists by giving them reconnaissance tours of the Capitol in the days prior.  by the time of the attack, Boebert had already drawn notice for having filmed herself walking around DC with a concealed pistol in violation of the law-- but that weapon didn't come in handy during the Capitol siege now, did it?

Pistol-packing Lauren then unwittingly admitted to being involved in the Capitol attack after calling out New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney in a public statement.  Referring to his allusion that some Congress members gave tours to the Capitol rioters, Boebert described Maloney’s appearance on MSNBC as “lies,” adding that “all of your implications are categorically false.”   The problem is, Maloney never named any members of Congress. By issuing this statement and writing that Maloney’s “comments [about her] are extremely offensive, shameful and dangerous,” Boebert implied that the member of Congress Maloney was referring to was, in fact, her.  Ooops!

Before her election, Boebert made headlines for being open to the QAnon conspiracy theory. In a May interview, she said that "everything that I’ve heard of Q, I hope that this is real, because it only means America is getting stronger and better and people are returning to conservative values, and that’s what I am for." Most recently she was called out when she refused to open her bag for the Capitol police after it set off metal detectors.

In the days after the Capitol Insurrection, Boebert also dug her herself into another hole by tweeting "Protecting and defending the Constitution doesn’t mean trying to rewrite the parts you don’t like."  She was immediately roasted by more informed users (which is most of Twitter, to be honest): 

Boebert recently put her ignorance back on full display when she said falsely claimed that the Equality Act would put straight people at a disadvantage as gay people would be considered superior under the law over their heterosexual counterparts-- saying, "There is nothing about equality in that act! If anything, it's, the, uh, it's supremacy of gays, lesbians, and transvestites. This is what this is about, it's about putting them higher than anyone else!"

And if all this wasn't enough, it's now possible that her intellectual shortcomings may have led her astray into criminality.  The Denver Post reported a month ago that Rep. Lauren Boebert wrote herself two checks from her campaign account, totaling $22,259 for “mileage,” between January and mid-November of 2020. Using the IRS’s mileage rate of “57.5 cents per mile for 2020,” that would mean that the congresswoman drove about 38,712 miles in that time. But, as the Post points out, Boebert’s campaign had “no publicly advertised campaign events in March, April or July, and only one in May.” To put this into perspective, Boebert’s predecessor Rep. Scott Tipton reimbursed himself $9,575 from his business account for mileage … over 10 years in office.  Boebert’s mileage reimbursement is now the subject of a federal ethics complaint.