Greg Lopez, Colorado’s six-month congressman, steps aside for Lauren Boebert after role in GOP power play

On Friday, U.S. Rep. Greg Lopez will make Colorado congressional history — well, almost.

After less than half a year representing the 4th Congressional District, Lopez will step aside as the second-shortest-serving member of Congress in state history — behind only William E. Burney, who filled a vacancy in Colorado’s then-3rd District from Nov. 5, 1940, to Jan. 3, 1941.

Lopez, a Republican who was sworn into Congress on July 8, said his congressional stint was an “honor and a pleasure,” if a bit discombobulated. The former mayor of Parker and a two-time Colorado gubernatorial hopeful rented 14 places on short-term leases to serve as home during his six months of service in Washington, D.C.

“I was like that foreign exchange student — I showed up in the middle of the year and missed the yearbook picture, but everybody liked me because they didn’t know that much about me,” he told The Denver Post last week, as he picked up pozole in Aurora for Christmas dinner with his wife of 37 years, Lisa.

Despite the truncated term, Lopez played a small but notable role in what became a convoluted electoral chess game centered on the political survival of U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, boosted GOP billing among Colorado’s congressional delegation and, ultimately, solidified Republican control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the upcoming Congress.

“The amount of coordination and the little bit of luck to get this to come together is something I will be teaching in class for a while,” Colorado State University political science professor Kyle Saunders said. “It’s a political story, it’s a campaign story and it’s a candidate story.”

Lopez, 60, won a special election in late June to fill out the term of Ken Buck, the longtime representative of the Eastern Plains district. Buck had abandoned his seat in March — nine months before his term was up. His retirement, announced in late 2023, set in motion a switch by Boebert, who was facing tough reelection prospects in her Western Slope district, to politically friendlier territory on the other side of the state.

The plan worked: Boebert won a hard-fought 4th Congressional District primary in a crowded Republican field and went on to win election easily in November. On the same night, Republican Jeff Hurd defeated his well-funded Democratic opponent, Adam Frisch, in the district Boebert had departed less than a year prior, and two years after Frisch nearly toppled her in the midterm election.

“It led to the Republicans holding both of these seats,” Saunders said of Boebert’s move.

Lopez, chosen by the 4th District’s central committee in late March to run in the special election, made it clear from the outset that he wouldn’t run in the June 25 primary against Boebert and nine other GOP hopefuls.

Boebert, in a statement, praised Lopez as having represented Colorado “in a principled manner” as she scrapped her way to becoming his successor. The 4th District seat represents agricultural communities across a large expanse of land but also well-populated suburban Douglas County in south metro Denver.

“While his time in Congress may have been quick, Congressman Lopez absolutely made the most of it and gave a voice to Colorado’s 4th District that his constituents had been without for too long,” she said. “He consistently went above and beyond his duties, from speaking up for his district in internal meetings and on the House floor to being an eager collaborator on the issues we agreed on, like cutting wasteful government spending.”

The nation’s mounting debt was a chief concern for Lopez while he was in Congress. In his final vote as a congressman, he opposed a continuing resolution to fund the government, saying on Dec. 20 that he could not “accept a bill that does nothing to address our $36 trillion debt.”

In September, he introduced a bill requiring a tally of the national debt to be listed on ballots in elections for federal office.

The next month, he introduced a bill touting a “Red Card” system to allow private businesses to hire immigrant workers who enter and live in the U.S. to work “under strict government oversight.” The arrangement, which would be critical to the 4th District’s labor-hungry agricultural sector, would not provide those workers a path to citizenship.

At the time that concern about Venuezelan gang activity and arrests in Aurora was making national headlines in September, Lopez introduced a measure that called on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to detain and deport people in the country illegally with known gang affiliations.