These are some of Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert's most memorable controversies, including her feud with Marjorie Taylor Greene.
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00:00 Lauren Boebert first made headlines when she confronted Beto O'Rourke in 2019
00:05 at an event where he was talking about banning assault weapons.
00:09 She took the mic and said, "You have said, 'Hell yes, we're going to ban assault weapons.'
00:13 I'm here to tell you, 'Hell no, you're not.'"
00:15 And that video went viral and just sparked a lot of public interest in her.
00:20 And then when she ran for Congress in 2020, in the Republican primary,
00:25 she defeated a five-term incumbent.
00:27 My name is Talia Lakritz, and I'm a lifestyle correspondent at Insider.
00:31 I'm Congresswoman Lauren Boebert.
00:33 She is a far-right MAGA Republican elected in 2020
00:37 and re-elected by a pretty narrow margin in 2022.
00:41 There are a few reasons why Boebert's name has been in headlines lately,
00:45 one of which is sort of an ongoing feud with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene
00:49 that reached a boiling point.
00:51 Both Boebert and Greene were elected at the same time,
00:54 both vocal Trump supporters who have sort of represented
00:57 this right-wing faction of the Republican Party.
01:00 And they used to be a lot more in step.
01:02 They were allies and friends.
01:04 At the 2022 State of the Union address,
01:06 they both heckled President Joe Biden together.
01:09 But in recent months, their relationship has had these tensions.
01:14 Boebert has criticized Greene over her promotion of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
01:19 Greene hit back on Twitter, talking about Boebert's narrow re-election margin.
01:24 And things sort of came to a head when they argued in the women's bathroom
01:28 around the time where Republicans were trying to elect a Speaker of the House,
01:32 where Greene accused Boebert of accepting Kevin McCarthy's money for her re-election bid,
01:37 but then not actually backing him for the House Speaker race.
01:41 So all of this was sort of coming to a head.
01:44 And then it all blew up on the House floor over this argument
01:48 about the dueling Biden impeachment resolutions.
01:52 Boebert introduced her own resolution to impeach President Biden.
01:56 And stay tuned as I prepare to take steps available to me
02:00 as a United States Congresswoman to bring real leadership back to America.
02:05 And this upset Greene because she had introduced her own resolution to impeach Biden in 2021,
02:11 and she had asked Boebert to co-sponsor hers.
02:13 Boebert denies this and says that she never even saw Greene's resolution.
02:18 So they got into a heated argument on the House floor,
02:22 and that resulted in Greene calling Boebert an expletive.
02:26 They then sort of went on cable news shows and talked about the argument that they'd had.
02:33 Greene confirmed that she had called Boebert an expletive
02:35 and said that she would not be reconciling with Boebert.
02:39 Boebert said that Marjorie Taylor Greene is not my enemy,
02:42 Joe Biden and the Republicans are my enemies, I didn't come here to get into spats.
02:47 Part of why Lauren Boebert has become such a well-known name in the Republican Party
02:52 is because of this firebrand MAGA Republican persona that she has.
02:58 President Donald Trump has a servant's heart, and he puts the American people first.
03:06 And there have been a litany of controversial stances and statements from her years in Congress.
03:12 One that stands out is that in 2021, she called Representative Ilhan Omar
03:16 a member of the Jihad squad. Omar is a Muslim American.
03:20 And Boebert also said that she felt safe around Omar
03:24 as long as she wasn't wearing a backpack around her, so implying that she was a terrorist.
03:29 Boebert later apologized to the Muslim community for her comments,
03:32 but there definitely remains some bad blood between the two of them.
03:36 And then in June 2022, just days after Roe v. Wade was overturned,
03:41 Boebert told a crowd at a Christian community center that she's, quote,
03:44 "tired of this separation of church and state junk" and said that churches should direct the government.
03:50 Lauren Boebert believes that life begins at conception and supports criminalizing abortion.
03:55 And she also does not believe in allowing exceptions for rape,
03:59 incest, or the health of the person giving birth.
04:04 She is strongly pro-gun. Her campaign has been endorsed by the NRA.
04:09 She's the co-chair of the Second Amendment Caucus.
04:11 And after school shootings, she has said things like,
04:14 "After 9/11, we didn't ban planes" when people have called for stricter gun laws.
04:19 And she's also called gun-free zones the most dangerous places in the country.
04:23 Lauren Boebert has four children.
04:25 Her oldest, Tyler, is 18 years old, and he just fathered a baby with his girlfriend,
04:31 which makes Boebert a 36-year-old grandmother.
04:34 And Boebert was actually a teen mom herself.
04:36 When she was 18, she gave birth to Tyler and dropped out of high school,
04:40 began working at fast food restaurants.
04:42 And then she eventually opened her own restaurant, Shooter's Grill,
04:45 where the waitstaff carried firearms openly.
04:49 Lauren Boebert has been married to Jason Boebert for a little under 20 years
04:53 and recently announced that she is filing for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences.
04:58 And from very early on in their relationship, there were indicators that there were issues.
05:02 For example, in 2004, even before they were married,
05:05 Jason Boebert was arrested and charged with public indecency and lewd exposure.
05:09 After he exposed himself in a bowling alley.
05:12 Boebert in her memoir writes about the incident, saying that it was a misunderstanding,
05:16 that Jason just pretended to unzip his pants, but Jason did end up serving jail time for this incident.
05:22 And then more recently, in December 2021,
05:25 one of the Boebert's teenage sons called 911 to report that his father was throwing him around the house.
05:31 And then Boebert said that nothing physical happened, denied these allegations.
05:36 So there have been several incidents that indicated maybe things weren't going so well at home.
05:41 And then in May, Boebert confirmed that she had in fact filed for divorce.
05:45 What we're seeing in the Republican Party right now is this power struggle between MAGA,
05:50 Trump loyalist Republicans and Republicans who are maybe looking for some new leadership.
05:56 And in this power struggle, people like Lauren Boebert are seizing the moment to push their own agendas.
06:02 For example, the resolution that she pushed to impeach President Biden,
06:07 even though it largely did not have support from the rest of the Republican Party,
06:11 it was something that she pushed ahead and it ended up being called to a vote.
06:16 Lauren Boebert is a pretty well-known conservative politician at this point,
06:21 but her seat is considered relatively vulnerable.
06:24 She won her re-election campaign in the midterms by a very small margin.
06:29 And a lot of other Trump-endorsed candidates did not win their midterm elections.
06:33 So I think it's important to watch Lauren Boebert and people like her in Congress
06:37 to see how this will ultimately shake out.
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