Another ad campaign featuring a Pueblo veteran attacks Lauren Boebert for voting record

Coloradans can expect to see more ads targeting Rep. Lauren Boebert in the next few months.

It's been just over a year since President Joe Biden signed the PACT Act into law, which compensates veterans experiencing adverse health effects from burn pits.

Boebert, as well as many other Republicans in Congress, voted against that bill.

On the first anniversary of the signing of the PACT Act, political group Rocky Mountain Values launched a new ad campaign targeting Boebert and hosted a roundtable with six Pueblo veterans.

What is Rocky Mountain Values?

Rocky Mountain Values is a liberal-leaning dark money group registered as a nonprofit. They are not required to disclose their donors but reported receiving over $2.8 million in 2020.

The organization previously targeted former Colorado Republican Sen. Corey Gardner in 2020. Rocky Mountain Values announced earlier this year it would be working in Colorado's 3rd Congressional District and launched its first ad campaign in June in Pueblo.

They just released a new campaign featuring another Pueblo veteran attacking Boebert's voting record.

Political nonprofits are forbidden from explicitly advocating on behalf of or against candidates but are allowed to direct voters to contact their representatives and talk about policy.

Boebert’s Democratic challenger in November 2022, Adam Frisch, narrowly lost his race for Congress after many pundits thought Boebert would sail to a decisive victory in the district that leans Republican.

What the PACT Act did

The PACT Act funds benefits for millions of veterans exposed to toxic substances from burning waste in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as exposure to other harmful chemicals during other wars. It also funds research into how they were affected.

Veterans will have an easier time collecting benefits from exposure to burn pits. The Associated Press reported that before the bill’s passage, over 70% of disability benefits for burn pit exposure were denied because of insufficient evidence.

Democratic politicians from Biden to U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet tweeted statements about the anniversary of the bill’s signage Thursday.

Why Lauren Boebert voted against the PACT Act

Boebert joined 173 other Republicans in voting against the PACT Act in March 2022.

She told Grand Junction TV station KKCO in a statement that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was “politicizing” the bill by bringing forward another bill instead of similar one that had unanimously passed the Senate on a voice vote.

The PACT Act was passed with a final vote of 86-11 in the U.S. Senate, with all 11 dissenting votes coming from Republicans.

Boebert’s campaign manager, Drew Sexton, told the Chieftain in an email that the PACT Act was not well-written and that Boebert had concerns that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) was not ready for the new claims. He added that the rollout has been “disastrous” because the website has crashed, the deadline needed to be extended and the claims backlog has grown.

Veterans are able to file with the VA to receive backdated benefits to when the bill was signed. The VA announced an extension from the deadline of Aug. 9 to Aug. 14 because some people received a website error message from the high volume of claims, Military Times reported.

The people who received error messages still have their claims logged in the system, though. Veterans can apply for payouts from the PACT Act at any time, but will only be eligible for benefits after their future date of filing.

What’s in the ads from the group

The latest round of ads features George Autobee, a Pueblo-area veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, discussing Boebert’s voting record on veterans' health care issues.

“We have a responsibility to make sure these veterans are taken care of when they return from war,” Autobee says in the ad. “Lauren Boebert has voted against veterans’ health care many times and she’s left them behind.”

Autobee helped launch an anti-Boebert PAC, Rural Colorado United, in 2020. He has contributed to mostly Democratic candidates in recent years, state campaign finance records show, but also gave $250 to Republican state Senate candidate Stephen Varela in 2022. (Autobee and Varela worked together on Rural Colorado United. Varela was registered as a Democrat at the time.)

Sexton targeted Autobee’s previous political work and referred to him as a “longtime liberal extremist” in a statement about the new ad he shared with the Chieftain.

“George and progressive, dark-money groups can keep shoveling money into attacking Congresswoman Boebert, but 3rd District voters know better when it comes to her strong record of supporting our veterans,” Sexton said. He added that Boebert has recently voted for four bills for veterans that were signed into law and sponsored six amendments that amount to $13 million in support for veterans.

“Rep. Boebert is continuing to fight to ensure our veterans receive the care they earned,” Sexton said.

This newest campaign featuring Autobee is costing $350,000, Rocky Mountain Values spokesperson Amber Miller told the Chieftain. The campaign includes TV ads in the Grand Junction, Colorado Springs and Denver markets.

The first ad blitz that launched in June featured Pueblo veteran Jerry Solano. The themes of those ads focused on Boebert’s positions on Social Security and Medicare.

Solano, who was also present at the Thursday roundtable, told the Chieftain that people in Pueblo have been recognizing him from the ad and he’s heard “not one negative thing” about them.

What the veterans said about Boebert

At the roundtable moderated by Sol Sandoval, a current member of the Pueblo District 60 school board who ran in the Democratic primary for the 3rd District in 2022, six Pueblo veterans talked about their time in the military and their grievances with Boebert.

Most of the participants were from the Vietnam era. They said that Boebert uses veterans as political props and does not do enough legislating for them.

One of Boebert’s amendments to the latest National Defense Authorization Act bans book purchases in military schools that include “pornographic materials” and are “espousing gender ideology.”

“I enlisted and volunteered to defend democracy, not fascism,” said Chris Sutton, an Afghanistan-era Air Force veteran. “Book banning and book burning and all that — those are steps towards fascism. I'm not okay with it.”

The NDAA often passes with bipartisan support but was opposed by most Democrats because of the added stipulations from Republican representatives.

Boebert also included the “Pueblo Jobs Act” as an amendment in the NDAA, which passed the House with a unanimous voice vote. That bill seeks to keep approximately 1,000 jobs in the Pueblo area as the Pueblo Chemical Depot shuts down.

Anna Lynn Winfrey covers politics for the Pueblo Chieftain. She can be reached at awinfrey@gannett.com or on Twitter, @annalynnfrey. Please support local news at subscribe.chieftain.com.

This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: Liberal PAC launches new ads targeting Lauren Boebert over voting record