Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck was once the archetypal too-conservative-to-get-elected tea party candidate. Now, he has become one of a small handful of moderate holdouts complicating his party’s efforts to elect a new speaker, a telling indication of how much both Buck and his party have changed in the past decade.
Buck was one of 20 GOP dissenters who voted against Jordan on the first ballot. And he has said he cannot vote for a speaker who refuses to acknowledge that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. He's also been pushing to protect Ukraine aid.
“If we don’t have the moral clarity to decide whether President Biden won or not, we don’t have the moral clarity to rule in this country, period,” Buck told reporters last week. Later, on MSNBC, he said his fellow Republicans were afraid of the “political penalty” they would pay for acknowledging Biden won.
It’s a striking turn of events from when Buck first emerged in national politics in 2010 as the “mascot for anti-establishment conservatives,” as Politico dubbed him at the time.
Then, Buck was a little-known tea party candidate who defeated the establishment-backed former lieutenant governor in a GOP Senate primary. But he went on to lose the general election to Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, despite a very favorable national climate for Republicans, which turned him into a cautionary tale of conservative overreach costing the GOP race. "Senate seats ... essentially given away,” as then-Rep. Steve LaTourette, R-Ohio, wrote for Politico of Buck and others in his cohort.
In 2014, Buck ran again, this time for a House seat, though still as a conservative. He won, but as the GOP shifted to the right and as Trump forced the GOP into increasingly high-stakes loyalty tests, Buck grew uncomfortable and emerged as a critic of Trump and his party’s right flank. Last month, he even wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post decrying his party’s rush to impeach Biden.
"I wish we could take whatever it was that happened to Ken Buck and replicate it 217ish times," Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist turned anti-Trump activist said on the social media platform X.
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