A CNN associate producer covering the debt-ceiling vote in Washington, D.C., tweeted a video he captured of Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert racing up the steps of the U.S. Capitol, apparently running too late to make a vote she later said she’d skipped as a “no-show protest.”
Boebert did not participate last week when the House of Representatives successfully voted through a bipartisan bill to raise the debt limit. Some Republicans, including Boebert, had wanted significantly deeper spending cuts; she later tweeted a video saying her absence was a “no-show protest.”
But an associate producer for CNN purportedly caught Boebert running up the Capitol steps the night of the vote, telling her “They closed it,” which the congresswoman acknowledges by repeating before continuing to run. The producer, Morgan Rimmer, shared the video, which already has more than 14 million views, on Sunday.
Rimmer wrote: “Here is a clip from that night outside the Capitol, showing Rep. Boebert running up the stairs as though she was trying to make the vote, and me telling her that it had closed already. *running up steps* Me: They closed it. Boebert: They closed it? *keeps running*”
Boebert’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
The bill passed in both the House and Senate, and was signed by President Joe Biden on Saturday. Boebert had been vociferously opposed to the deal, saying she planned to vote against it in a tweet from last week: “You can count me as a NO on this deal,” she wrote at the time.
After her no-show, Boebert tweeted a video suggesting she was somehow prevented from “doing her job” by “Washington’s power machine,” which she said “refused to allow debate or amendments, disregarded everything we fought for in January to actually allow representatives to do their jobs.”
Twitter’s context annotation later added: “Rep Boebert’s ‘did not vote’ wasn’t a protest; she was late and missed the vote.”
