As U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert embarked on a fresh chapter in her political career Friday — representing a new Colorado district in Congress — she left a few legislative accomplishments to the district she led for four years, but where her prospects for reelection grew dim.
Last month, the bipartisan Upper Colorado and San Juan River Basins Endangered Fish Recovery Programs Reauthorization Act became law, extending protection for four threatened and endangered native fish species on the Western Slope. President Joe Biden signed it as part of the larger National Defense Authorization Act.
And in the coming days, the Democratic president is expected to sign the CONVEY Act, a Boebert-led bill that directs the Bureau of Land Management to sell to Mesa County a 31-acre parcel in Clifton for economic development.
“These were all bipartisan efforts that may not have grabbed the national spotlight, but they will make a major impact on the health of our state and that’s what is most important to me as a legislator,” Boebert, a Republican, wrote in a statement to The Denver Post.
The two-term congresswoman was sworn in Friday to represent Colorado’s eastern 4th Congressional District in the 119th Congress. That happened just over a year after she announced she wouldn’t stand for reelection in the 3rd District, which covers a huge swath of mountainous western Colorado, stretching from Craig to Cortez to Pueblo on the Front Range.
Boebert, 38, lost her luster in the district she had represented since 2021, making the wrong kinds of headlines for controversial statements and questionable behavior. She nearly lost her first reelection bid in 2022, despite the 3rd District being heavily Republican.
More unwanted coverage exploded nearly a year later, when Boebert was removed from a musical at Denver’s Buell Theatre after engaging in inappropriate behavior, including vaping and groping her date. Several prominent Republicans in the state went on the record withdrawing their support for her.
Boebert switched to the reddest district in the state — the 4th — at the end of 2023. She won a June primary and then the November election.
It took Boebert until nearly three years into her congressional tenure to see her first bill pass — the Pueblo Jobs Act — in December 2023. The law aims to create 1,000 jobs in Pueblo following the closure of the Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot. Another bill to assign unique zip codes to communities in the country without one — including the 4th District communities of Lone Tree, Castle Pines and Severance — passed the House last month but did not get through the Senate.
But Boebert’s fish recovery bill — designed to protect the beleaguered humpback chub, bonytail, Colorado pikeminnow and razorback sucker — made it into law. For Melvin Baker, chairman of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, the legislation was important.
“As stewards of the earth, the tribe supports the recovery of the endangered fish populations and the protection of the waterways to support the endangered fish,” he said.
With both chambers of Congress now controlled by Republicans, Boebert is sanguine about her ability to push through more legislation than she could under a politically divided Congress. But she said she’d look back wistfully at the part of Colorado that made her a household name in the first place.
“More than any one place, I will deeply miss representing the people of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District as they supported me as a business owner and an activist before I’d ever run for office,” she said in the statement. “And while it may seem like a small thing, I will miss the gorgeous sunsets in Rifle.”
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