The stupidest thing about this (beyond the blatant hypocrisy) is that in 2021 Rep. Lauren Boebert penned an op-ed (or her staff did) for Fox News, on the evils of earmarks, saying at the time, "Democrats are serving up pork, and it tastes like corruption." Cue ahead to 2023 though and Colorado’s Rep. Lauren Boebert, a leader among the House Freedom Caucus members, just submitted 10 requests totalling $34.3 million.
Source: The Messenger
When House Democrats resurrected the previously scandal-plagued Congressional earmarks system in 2021, a group of more than 30 Republican lawmakers signed their name to a terse one-sentence statement vowing not to participate.
“We, the undersigned, pledge that we will not request earmarks, or the preferred euphemism of the day, ‘Community Project Funding,’” the GOP lawmakers pledged. The group of fiscally conservative lawmakers who signed the letter represented a range of primarily rural districts from Colorado to Virginia.
Just two years later, the pledge appears to have been forgotten by some of its most ardent supporters.
Five high-profile House Republicans who signed onto the no-earmarks pledge in 2021 have requested a combined 45 projects totaling $175.9 million in federal spending in the 2024 fiscal year, a review by The Messenger has found. They include Reps. Lauren Boebert, Byron Donalds, Lance Gooden, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Andy Harris.
And what did Boebert write in 2021?
“Earmarks are counterproductive tools for entrenched politicians to shut down debate and buy votes,” Boebert wrote in a 2021 Fox News op-ed. “Now more than ever, politicians need to remember that for all their talk of accountability, they are accountable to American voters who are not going to stand for the charade.”
“Tax dollars are not politicians’ personal wallets, and they should stop treating them as such,” Boebert said in a March 2021 press release highlighting her fight against earmarks.
Among the earmarks Boebert has requested is a $1.4 million bridge project in Glenwood Springs, Colorado — a well-off community near the Aspen ski resort that Bloomberg Business ranked seventh in a list of “the 20 richest small towns in America” published in 2015. Boebert did not respond to a request for comment.
