Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), one of the final holdouts in Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) bid for House speaker, received a spot on the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday.
The Republican, who narrowly won her seat in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District in November, will sit on a panel already gearing up for investigations into the Biden administration. The committee, chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-KY), is probing President Joe Biden‘s handling of classified documents.
Boebert is one of several firebrand Republicans to be appointed to the committee. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who were stripped of their committee assignments in the last Congress, received spots on the panel as well.
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The House GOP Steering Committee, made up of about 30 members of House leadership, determined the Colorado Republican will also return to the House Natural Resources Committee. After holding out against McCarthy’s bid for four days, Boebert finally acquiesced and voted “present,” saying the concessions the hard-liners got from the GOP leader were a “massive victory” for the public.
“We changed the way bills will be passed,” Boebert wrote in a press release last week. “We changed the way the government will be funded. We changed the ways committees will be formed.”
The new roles for Boebert and other McCarthy detractors come after committee assignments became a major issue during the speaker battle. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) at one point reportedly floated denying committee assignments to those who refused to vote for McCarthy.
House GOP leadership eventually negotiated a deal with the McCarthy holdouts that led to his election but maintain that no one was promised specific committee assignments in exchange for their vote for the California Republican’s bid. Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Chip Roy (R-TX) said they asked the House speaker for more conservative representation on top committees.
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Last week, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) said the deal involved “making sure that our committees are represented by a whole swath of our membership” during a press conference.
Boebert appears likely to face little backlash from GOP leadership as a result of her opposition to McCarthy due to Republicans’ slim majority in the House. The Colorado congresswoman was elected to the House for the first time in 2020 and won reelection in 2022.
The ardent Trump loyalist has emerged as one of the most high-profile members of the House Freedom Caucus and is known for her incendiary right-wing rhetoric. A regular on conservative cable news shows and podcasts, Boebert routinely picks fights with Democrats and, most recently, with members of her own party.
She notably interrupted Biden’s State of the Union address last year when he was speaking about veterans and his oldest son, Beau, a former National Guard member who died of brain cancer in 2015. Boebert was heard yelling “13 of them,” a reference to the service members killed in the final days of the U.S. exit from Afghanistan.
