Colorado far-right Representative Lauren Boebert has been caught on video sprinting to a vote that she later claimed to have missed on purpose.
She argued at the time that she missed the Thursday House vote on the raising of the debt ceiling as a “no-show protest”.
But footage shared on Sunday by Morgan Rimmer of CNN shows Ms Boebert running up the stairs of the Capitol on the night of the vote.
As she runs up the steps in the footage, Ms Rimmer tells Ms Boebert, “they just closed it”.
“They closed it?” Ms Boebert asks before continuing up the steps.
She seemingly missed the vote and then tried to claim that the mishap was intentional.
“Deals cut in the dark are why we’re headed to 36 trillion in debt, and I refuse to be a part of it,” Ms Boebert said.
Ms Rimmer tweeted: “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.”
Ms Rimmer tweeted the footage in response to the video shared by Ms Boebert on the platform.
“Call it a protest — there’s absolutely no way to ever justify adding another $4-6 trillion in debt. This is more DC self-created garbage that I will always fight against,” Ms Boebert tweeted.
According to Ms Rimmer, Ms Boebert entered a statement into the congressional record following the closing of the vote that she was “unavoidably detained” at the time and that she “would have voted no”.
President Joe Biden signed the debt ceiling legislation on Saturday following its passing in both chambers of Congress to avoid a default on the US’s sovereign debt which is likely to have prompted a global economic crisis.
On Friday night, Mr Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office, telling Americans not to abandon the idea of bipartisanship.
He said the aim of the debt deal was to “keeping the full, faith, and credit of the United States” and putting in place “a budget that continues to grow our economy and reflects our values as a nation”.
“Passing this budget agreement was critical. The stakes could not have been higher,” he added.
“Our economy would have been thrown in recession. Retirement accounts for millions of Americans would have been decimated, eight million Americans would have lost their jobs,” Mr Biden said. “Default would have destroyed our nation’s credit rating, which would have made everything from mortgages to car loans to funding for the government much more expensive and it would have taken years to climb out of that hole — and America standing as the most trusted, reliable financial partner in the world would have been shattered.”
“No one got everything they wanted but the American people got what they needed. We averted an economic crisis and an economic collapse,” he added. “We’re cutting spending and bringing deficits down. And, we protected important priorities from Social Security to Medicare to Medicaid to veterans to our transformational investments in infrastructure and clean energy.”
The bill passed the Senate by a margin of 63-36 and the House by 314-117.
