Later this week, Republicans in Colorado will convene to nominate their choice to replace Congressman Ken Buck in the upcoming special election in Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District, giving the party a chance to box out Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who moved to the district to escape a competitive general election in her current district, Colorado’s Third.

In announcing his early retirement last week, Mr. Buck not only whittled down the House Republicans’ shrinking majority, but also threw Ms. Boebert under the bus electorally.

Though Mr. Buck had already announced he didn’t plan on running for office again, leaving early means that there will be a special election to replace him.

Mr. Buck’s decision incited retaliation from fellow Republicans and members of the Freedom Caucus, who kicked him out of the caucus last week. It also, however, gave the Colorado GOP a chance to give one candidate a leg up in the general election.

That’s because whoever the GOP chooses as its nominee in the special election will likely defeat the Democratic nominee in the safe Republican district and be able to use incumbency to their advantage in the November election in the district.

This puts Ms. Boebert in a tricky situation because she abandoned her current district, in which she was nearly defeated in 2022, to run in the GOP primary for the Fourth District.

While Ms. Boebert called Mr. Buck’s early retirement a “gift to the uniparty” in a tweet, saying that the “establishment concocted a swampy backroom deal to try to rig an election I’m winning,” Mr. Buck has made it clear that he doesn’t care.

In conversation with The Colorado Sun, Mr. Buck called Ms. Boebert’s allegations “ridiculous” saying that “I have done my very best to stay out of this primary election.

“I’m not giving anybody an advantage or disadvantage,” he said. He elaborated on his position to CNN, saying that the “bickering and nonsense” has made this year the “worst year in 40, 50 years to be in Congress.”

The core of the problem for Ms. Boebert is that she is ineligible to be nominated for the special election because she is currently serving in Congress, albeit for another district.

One of Ms. Boebert’s harshest critics in Colorado, Sara Loflin, who directs the Progress Now Colorado group which has sought to remove Ms. Boebert from office for years, tells the Sun that whatever maneuvering the Colorado GOP does to block Ms. Boebert is indicative of a larger problem in the party.

“Whatever the GOP establishment hoped to achieve by throwing up procedural roadblocks is dwarfed by their failure to stand up to the extremism of their own base,” Ms. Loflin says. “If Lauren Boebert succeeds in a primary for another district after abandoning her constituents, it’s because the GOP voters like what she’s selling them.”