Colorado Congressman Ken Buck first became involved in national politics during a constitutional crisis, and although he didn’t directly call it one, he is exiting during what could be another.
Buck, a five-term Republican from Windsor representing Colorado’s 4th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, announced Nov. 1 that he will not run for reelection next fall, citing concerns over the direction his own political party has gone in its efforts to deny the results of the 2020 presidential election and downplay the subsequent storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump.
He first went to Washington, D.C., he said, in the mid-1980s to work in the Justice Department on the Iran-Contra investigation.
“It was a constitutional crisis, and I was a staffer for that,” Buck said Friday while speaking at a Thematic Year of Democracy event at Colorado State University. “… The constitutional crisis was about (then-President Ronald) Reagan and about his actions and about him trying to subvert — he thought legally, and other people thought illegally — the will of Congress.”