On Saturday, Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado posted a video on Twitter in which she claimed that she had intentionally skipped Wednesday's key House vote on a bill to suspend the nation's debt ceiling.
"No excuses: I was ticked off they wouldn't let me do my job, so I didn't take the vote," Boebert said, going on to allege that the voices of individual House members had been stifled during the legislative process. "Call it a no-show protest, but I certainly let every one of my colleagues and the country know I was against this garbage of a bill."
But Boebert's claim of a deliberate "protest" absence is contradicted by her own words in the congressional record. After the vote ended on Wednesday, Boebert submitted an official statement in which she said she had been "unavoidably detained" for the vote and would have voted against the bill had she been present.
And Boebert's claim is further called into question by CNN footage from the House steps in the moments after the vote concluded.
Less than a minute after the vote was finalized, CNN photojournalist Jake Scheuer captured video of Boebert running up the steps as a CNN associate producer mentioned that the vote had just been closed. Boebert stopped running for a moment to turn back and ask, "They closed it?" After the associate producer confirmed, Boebert continued her dash toward the building entrance.
Boebert never said why she was in such a hurry. However, there were no significant House votes left that night after the debt ceiling vote.
CNN asked Boebert's office on Monday to explain how her Twitter claim that the missed vote was a "protest" is compatible with her official statement in the congressional record or with her sprint up the stairs. A spokesperson responded by providing a link to Boebert's Thursday statement, which outlined her opposition to the bill but did not substantiate her subsequent assertion in the social media video that she had missed the vote on purpose.
"I certainly wasn't afraid to vote against the bill, as I have been advocating against it all week," Boebert said in the statement.
