The House-rules chair blocked Lauren Boebert's measure under a 'new rule' against 'lunatics,' a new book says
- Lauren Boebert put forth an amendment, but the House Rules Committee chair blocked it, a book says.
- Jim McGovern, the chair, said a "new rule" was "crazy" people couldn't get an amendment, it adds.
House Rules Committee Chair Jim McGovern created a "new rule" on his committee for people like Rep. Lauren Boebert, the gun-toting far-right firebrand from Colorado, a new book says.
When one of her "flurry of nonsensical amendments turned out to be reasonable," McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, blocked it from going to the House floor, and a Republican committee member wanted to know why, the journalist Robert Draper writes in his new book, "Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind."
"As McGovern would recall it, his response was, 'We have a new rule in the Rules Committee. If you're batshit crazy, you're not getting an amendment,'" Draper writes. "'I'm sorry. We're not doing this. We're not doing this. I'm not going down that road. I'm not going to be part of any effort to legitimize people who are fucking lunatics.'"
The book does not describe the amendment. McGovern's and Boebert's offices didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Boebert was among the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential-election results after a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the aftermath, some Democrats, including McGovern, weren't inclined to work with election-denying Republicans.
Draper describes McGovern as someone who'd always thought the minority party in Congress "deserved an airing of its views" but who "modified" his position after the riot.
McGovern was among "the vast majority" of Democrats who initially believed what House members had been through on January 6 would bring them together, Draper writes, just as members came together after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
One Republican Congress member told McGovern that because of the riot, he would vote to uphold the election results, the book says. But it adds that the Republican changed his mind by the time the vote came, telling McGovern, "I won't come back otherwise" to Congress.