Republican representative Lauren Boebert has fired back at Donald Trump for vetoing a bill that would have funded a drinking water project in her Colorado district, implying the president was playing at political retaliation.
The bill was aimed at funding a decades-long project to bring safe drinking water to 39 communities in Colorado’s eastern plains, where the groundwater is high in salt and wells sometimes unleash radioactivity into the water supply.
Trump vetoed the bill on Tuesday, writing in his veto letter to Congress that his administration is “committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding expensive and unreliable policies” and that “ending the massive cost of taxpayer handouts and restoring fiscal sanity is vital to economic growth and the fiscal health of the Nation”.
Boebert criticized the move, calling the bill “completely non-controversial” and pointed out that it passed the House and Senate unanimously earlier this year.
Trump’s veto comes after Boebert had pushed the administration to release the government’s files on the late convicted sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein. Boebert, a longtime Maga ally and supporter of the president, said in a statement to a local news station: “I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption and demanding accountability.”
Trump also vetoed a second bill on Tuesday for a project in Florida. The measure aimed to spend $14m to protect an area known as Osceola Camp within Everglades national park that is inhabited by members of the Miccosukee Tribe of Native Americans. The tribe has fought Trump’s makeshift immigrant detention center “Alligator Alcatraz”. A federal judge has now ordered the detention center to be shut down.
Trump said the tribe was never authorized to inhabit the Osceola Camp area, and that his administration would not support projects for special interests, especially those “unaligned” with his immigration policies.
Trump’s vetoes were the first two of his second term.
The veto of the Colorado bill came after Trump’s vow to retaliate against Colorado for keeping his ally Tina Peters in prison, despite his attempt to pardon her earlier in the month.
Peters, a former Colorado county clerk, is serving a nine-year prison term after being convicted on state charges for illegally tampering with voting machines in the 2020 presidential election. The charges against Peters were brought under Colorado state law, and so are exempt from a Trump pardon, which can only cover federal charges.
It was not immediately clear whether the Republican leaders in Congress would allow a vote to override Trump’s veto in Colorado. Boebert was one of four Republican lawmakers, along with Marjorie Taylor Greene, who played a key role in forcing the release of justice department files on Epstein. Trump fought the release of the files for months before ending his opposition.
In her statement to Colorado’s 9News, Boebert said: “Nothing says ‘America First’ like denying clean drinking water to 50,000 people in Southeast Colorado many of whom enthusiastically voted for him all three elections … But hey, if this administration wants to make its legacy blocking projects that deliver water to rural Americans; that’s on them.”
Boebert did not immediately return the Guardian’s request for comment.
