Colorado Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert got very upset when her Democratic colleague on the House Oversight Committee, Cori Bush of Missouri, dared to utter the words “white supremacist” and immediately demanded that they be taken down and removed from the record on Wednesday.
The hearing was to discuss the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and Bush noted that one of the witnesses invited by committee Republicans was Alex Epstein, President of the Center for Industrial Progress, even though he had “espoused white supremacist views.”
Boebert immediately told chair Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX), “Mr. Chairman, I demand the gentlelady’s words be taken down. She just called the witness a white supremacist.”
Bush rightly noted that she had actually “referred to the words, not to the person, not to him, the words.”
Fallon informed Boebert that “The chair cannot take down words that are directed toward a witness only to other members.”
That allowed Bush to fully quote Epstein:
“Rather than disavow them, he doubled down on this narrative saying, ‘It has nothing to do with skin color. I was arguing that those cultures overall are inferior to Western culture.'”
The Missouri Democrat noted, “We are not inferior to any culture, speaking as a descendant of one of those cultures.”
While she was at it, Congresswoman Bush also noted that Boebert and many of her GOP colleagues had refused to sign a letter condemning white supremacy.
Indeed, as Forbes reports, House Oversight member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) urged Republicans to condemn white supremacy in all forms.
The ranking member attached a resolution that’s already been signed by all of the committee’s Democratic members, which Raskin asked GOP committee members to now sign as well.
Raskin cited “dangerous and conspiratorial rhetoric that Republican committee members have made that “[borrow] from” the “Great Replacement” theory as making it more necessary to emphasize that the Republican lawmakers denounce those ideologies, such as describing migrants arriving at the Southern border as an “invasion” and claiming the Biden Administration was “implementing a plan ‘to deliberately open our border’ for purposes of ‘changing our culture.’”
Despite that plea, 26 Republicans refused to sign the resolution. One of those was none other than Lauren Boebert.
To borrow a line from the late author Maya Angelou, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.