July 16, 2024 11:00 AM UTC

Boebert Wants to Fix Secret Service by...Not Paying Them?

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• by: Colorado Pols

To say that Congressperson Lauren Boebert is a “one-trick pony” wouldn’t be entirely accurate — unless you’re talking about her ideas for legislation related to federal agencies.

Boebert is a big fan of using her interpretation of the so-called “Holman Rule” to attempt to essentially eliminate salaries of top officials in government agencies by reducing them to $1 per year. Among others, Boebert has made this proposal for various officials at the Department of Defense (including Assistant Secretary of Defense Shawn Skelly); for President Biden’s Ambassador to the United Nations; and for “Deputary Secumatary” Stacy Dean (actually the Deputy Under Secretary of the Food and Nutrition Service of the Department of Agriculture). In Dean’s case, Boebert’s $1 salary proposal was in response to something that she couldn’t really remember.

Whenever there is a manufactured controversy related to a government agency, Boebert rushes to roll out her “$1 salary” proposal. None of these efforts have actually gone anywhere in Congress — nor do they make a lot of sense from a policy perspective — but because this is an easy idea for Boebert to understand, she likes to keep throwing it out there.

Boebert did it again on Monday. After teasing on social media that she was going to hold Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle “responsible” for Saturday’s attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump (and suggesting that the Secret Service was complicit in the shooting), Boebert proudly rolled out the same dumb idea:

According to Boebert logic, the best way to make sure that the Secret Service improves its protection measures is to eliminate the salary of WHOMEVER serves as the Director of the United States Secret Service. Think about that for a moment: Boebert is saying that you fix management issues by eliminating managers entirely. Why would that work?

Boebert’s resolution (H.R. 9034) has five cosponsors, which speaks more to the general intelligence of Republicans in the House of Representatives than it does to the validity of Boebert’s idea.

We’ve said it before: This is a serious job, but these are not serious people.