More bad news for Lauren Boebert
In a move that probably a few more people should have seen coming, onetime proud tea partier Ken Buck announced his retirement from Congress. Buck appeared on the Washington scene as one of many extremists who successfully bent the GOP to their will back when Donald Trump couldn’t make up his mind about being in politics. In doing so, Buck made it impossible for Lauren Boebert to run for his seat in a special election, giving the advantage to pretty much anyone else polling ahead of her who isn’t currently seated in the U.S. Congress. This means it’s not very likely Boebert is going to be in the next Congress come 2025, since whoever his successor is will have an incumbency advantage going into the 2024 general election.
What’s actually the most surprising of all this news (Republican resignations before their time are not surprising anymore), is that Buck is going down swinging – not trying to make nice with anybody on his way out. In fact, he deliberately torched Mike Johnson on CNN: “This place just keeps going downhill…Mike Johnson’s ability to talk me into staying here, is going to be as successful as his ability of talking to me into unconstitutional impeachments.”
This leaves the GOP with just a two-seat majority as of this week – which makes Johnson’s life even more miserable and also leaves the question of whether this majority will in fact survive until the 2024 election – but this momentum also means we can’t get complacent. Let’s do everything we can to flip the House, keep the Senate and re-elect President Biden on Nov 5.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making