House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday criticized Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) for repeatedly interrupting President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.
“I agree with what Sen. Lindsey Graham said: ‘Shut up,’” Pelosi said during her weekly news conference, referring to the Republican senator appearing to say this to Boebert during Biden’s address on Tuesday. “That’s what he said to them. They should just shut up.”
“Thank you all,” she added with a smile, ending her news conference.
Greene was heard making comments throughout the portion of Biden’s speech about his COVID policies, and shouted something about women’s sports when the president talked about new laws targeting transgender people. She and Boebert also unsuccessfully tried to start a “build the wall” chant as Biden talked about his efforts to secure the border.
But the most offensive moment came when Boebert began yelling as Biden spoke about veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and the effects of “burn pits” that “incinerated wastes of war — medical and hazard material, jet fuel, and more,” saying some veterans battle “a cancer that would put them in a flag-draped coffin. I know.”
Boebert interrupted: “You put them in, 13 of them,” referencing 13 service members who died last year in a bomb attack in Kabul. Democrats booed Boebert in response moments later.
The president ignored her outburst and continued: “One of those soldiers was my son, Maj. Beau Biden.” Beau Biden served in Iraq and died of brain cancer in 2015.
“I don’t know for sure if the burn pit that he lived near ... in Iraq, and earlier than that, in Kosovo, was the cause of his brain cancer, or the disease of so many of our troops,” Biden said. “But I am committed to finding out everything we can.”
It’s not clear if there will be any repercussions for Boebert and Greene’s behavior.
Their heckling came on the same day that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) dodged questions about whether Greene and another member of his conference, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), would face any punishment for participating in a white nationalist event over the weekend.
