We were left scratching our heads this week after learning that U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert has flipped her stance on congressional earmarks. She had been vocally opposed to the practice as recently as a few months ago. So what changed?

According to reporting by The Daily Sentinel’s Charles Ashby, Boebert has come around to the practice of members of Congress submitting funding requests for their districts. This comes after years of our congresswoman calling earmarks “corrupt” and “a waste of taxpayer money,” and something only “swamp creature” career politicians would request.

The stated reason for her change of heart is that the new Republican House majority changed the rules around how it would handle earmarks.

“Because of new changes to the House rules, Congresswoman Boebert will now be accepting Community Project Funding submissions,” Raven Finegan, the West Slope field representative to Boebert, wrote in a March 6 email to the Mesa County commissioners.

Boebert said the new House rules have more constraints on what monies are approved, which includes having House members vote on them individually.

“When it comes to earmarks, there is a new process put in place that lets us bring those to the floor and vote on them,” she told the Colorado Springs Gazette Editorial Board in January. “There were 7,500 earmarks in the $1.7 billion omnibus bill. My constituents are responsible for paying for those 7,500 earmarks. I was fighting to save my district tax money.”

We’re confused by this argument. Boebert’s previous position was that these earmarks were part of the problem in Washington that needed to be torn down. Congress didn’t need to just tweak some rules here and there. This was a corrupt practice and it needed to go.

“The American people are tired of the D.C. way. At a time when our projected deficit for 2021 is $2.3 trillion, it is wrong that career politicians want to line their own pockets by using earmarks to pay off campaign donors and special-interest groups. Tax dollars are not politicians’ personal wallets, and they should stop treating them as such,” Boebert stated in 2021 when earmarks were reintroduced by House Democrats.

We’re somewhat agnostic about earmarks. We can see the arguments for and against them. However, we’d note that the projects our County Commissioners submitted to Boebert, like the 29 Road interchange, are worthy of federal funding.

Boebert on the other hand has never been wishy-washy on this subject, which is why this turn is so odd. In the previous Congress she went so far as to vote against bills she agreed with because they contained earmarks. These were bills that she later touted as achievements, but her stance on earmarks meant she could not vote for them.

We said that we’d be watching how Boebert behaves while in the majority. When her party was in the minority she spoke about the corrupt practices of Democrats and railed against congressional procedures she deemed unethical. We didn’t always agree with her opinion, but she had an ethos.

We wondered whether her principled stands while in the minority would soften and change when her party gained power. Just a few months in, that’s what seems to be happening.

This has left us wondering what she stands for in this new Congress. Is all her railing and grandstanding just a means to get some face-saving rule tweaks?

Grand Junction Daily Sentinel Editorial Board

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