a congresswoman answered a sex-scandal complaint by announcing she isn't a lesbian. we're not claiming her either.

via the Daily Beast and Sources Say News, with reporting from the Colorado Times Recorder, the roll call from the Office of the Clerk of the House, and the Committee on Ethics Rules for the 119th Congress.

Of all the sentences available to a member of Congress accused of sleeping with her own staff, Lauren Boebert reached for this one first: "Well, I'm not a lesbian or bisexual."

Note the order. The first thing she wanted on the record was not that it did not happen. It was that she is not one of us.

The rest of the quote does get around to the denial. "Well, I'm not a lesbian or bisexual, and I have never, ever been in any inappropriate relationship, nor have I ever been sexually involved with any staff," she told the Capitol Hill reporter Juliegrace Brufke on Saturday. By Sunday she had escalated to video, where the register was less lawyerly: "You all ran a smear and called it news." The coverage was "filthy garbage." And, for the road, "I hate to spoil the fan fiction, but y'all needed to do better."

where this actually came from

Here is the sentence we did not expect to type today. On the mechanics of it, she is largely right.

The complaint was filed on September 17 with the House Committee on Ethics by one man, David Wheeler of American Muckrakers. He signed it under penalty of perjury, which is not nothing. It alleges that Boebert had sexual relationships with three House employees she supervised, which House rules forbid outright, and that she arranged a $200,000 payment to one of them to head off an ethics complaint.

The Daily Beast reports the filing claims to rest on text messages, bank records, recorded conversations, court documents and payroll records. None of that is public. The Colorado Times Recorder, which has covered Boebert at close range for years and is not in the business of protecting her, notes that the complaint leans on two of the Recorder's own old stories, from 2022 and 2024, plus photographs from a Mar-a-Lago trip. Wheeler's 2022 reporting on Boebert contained errors he has himself described as sloppy.

what the ethics rules say

So we went and read them, because it turns out almost nobody covering this did.

The Committee on Ethics publishes its rules for the 119th Congress as a public document. Rule 15(d) is unambiguous about who gets to file: "Information offered as a complaint by an individual not a Member of the House may be transmitted to the Committee, provided that a Member of the House certifies in writing that such Member believes the information is submitted in good faith and warrants the review and consideration of the Committee."

Wheeler is not a Member of the House. No Member has been reported to have certified anything.

Then there is Rule 15(h), which is shorter and even harder to get around: "The Committee shall not accept, and shall return to the complainant, any complaint submitted within the 60 days before a Federal, State, or local election in which the subject of the complaint is a candidate."

Boebert is seeking a fourth term in Colorado's 4th district this November. A complaint filed on September 17 lands comfortably inside sixty days of that election. Under the Committee's own rules, the correct and required action is not an investigation. It is to hand the thing back.

Which means the Ethics Committee has announced nothing, and on this timeline probably never will. What has been circulating for four days as an "ethics complaint against Lauren Boebert" is a document that the body it was addressed to is obligated to refuse.

why we aren't printing the names

Three staff members are named in that document, and their names are in essentially everybody else's version of this story. They will not be in ours.

They are not public figures. They are accused of nothing illegal. And the accusation exists nowhere on earth except in a filing one man wrote citing anonymous sources. The one who has answered it publicly answered it about as flatly as language allows: "entirely false, defamatory, and beyond ridiculous. There is absolutely no truth to any part of this claim." Printing their names does nothing for you and quite a lot to them.

the part that is ours

So set the whole thing aside. Unproven, procedurally dead, and quite possibly never going anywhere. Something is still sitting there, and it does not depend on any of that.

Boebert has a voting record, and unlike the complaint it is a public document that anyone can read. On December 8, 2022, the House passed the Respect for Marriage Act by 258 to 169. That bill's entire job was to make sure that if the Supreme Court ever came back for Obergefell, the federal government and the states would still have to recognize the marriages that had already happened. It is the lowest bar in American law on this subject. It is barely a bar. Boebert voted no, and her name is right there in the nay column of roll call 513.

She represents the state where a Denver judge had to close a courtroom so that doctors could describe their own medical practice without their names going into the record.

So yes, there is a hypocrisy story available here, and gay Twitter found it inside of four hours. We would just like to be precise about what the hypocrisy is, because the internet keeps getting it slightly wrong. It is not that she might secretly be gay. It is that she votes to make other people's lives smaller, and then the instant a rumor lands on her own doorstep, the word she scrambles to get out in front of is "lesbian." Nobody has to be closeted for that to be damning. Nobody has to be gay for it to be true.

And for the record: if it turned out to be true, she still would not be ours. You do not get to vote against other people's marriages and then join the family because somebody filed a complaint about you.