Just three months into his second term, Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy finds himself with a White House and Congress both under Democratic control, and with a divided Republican Party. Yet he hopes to bridge the gaps between differing factions and is willing to use all tools available to him to slow down the Democrats’ agenda.
Roy is a former federal prosecutor who worked his way up through the Texas Republican congressional staffer ranks. He served as chief of staff to Sen. Ted Cruz, staff director to Sen. John Cornyn’s leadership office, and senior counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Cruz, who won his Senate seat in 2012 as a Tea Party favorite, praised his former staffer, telling the Washington Examiner in a statement, “Chip is a friend and a conservative in his bones and we have fought together side by side. He’s also a fierce patriot who defends the Constitution and fights for Texans each and every day.”
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Roy talked about his roots in the Tea Party movement of the 2010s and how its goals and experiences still inform him today. He credits his political experience in Washington, and in Texas under Attorney General Ken Paxton and then-Gov. Rick Perry, with providing him insight into why the Republican Party base has become disenchanted with the GOP establishment over the last decade.
“When I was in Washington 12, 13 years ago, I was Sen. Cruz’s chief of staff,” he said. “You come in and you try to rock the boat, and the establishment pushes back. Whether that’s on immigration, Obamacare repeal, spending earmarks.” Yet Republican voters continued to elect candidates they saw as going against that centrist party faction.
“Going all the way back to 2010,” he continued, “we chose Mike Lee over Bob Bennett. We chose Rand Paul over Trey Grayson. We chose Marco Rubio over Charlie Crist. Two years later, we chose Ted Cruz over David Dewhurst in the primary. The Freedom Caucus was established in 2014, and then in ‘16, President Trump is elected.”
He added, “The decade has been a rising battle against sort of the old guard in the mainline establishment, and that’s taking root [now]. You have a bigger, broader House Freedom Caucus. You have a handful of senators that are not of the establishment.”
There are similarities between the situation congressional Republicans find themselves in now and the 2010 environment. As in 2010, House Republicans are in the minority and hungry to take it back, while Rep. Nancy Pelosi once again holds the speaker’s gavel. But important differences, too: In 2010, Tea Party rallies were held on the lawn of the Capitol to protest Obamacare; now, the GOP is grappling with its post-Trump identity and a Democratic Party even further to the Left.
In lieu of championing the large, public Tea Party rallies of old, which could not be held on Capitol Hill now anyway given the miles of fencing erected following the Jan. 6 attack on the complex, Roy has opted for a more methodological approach to oppose the Democrats’ sweeping agenda. So far this term, House Democrats have moved key legislation, such as a voting reform and campaign finance bill, through the lower chamber without committee markups or a full amendment process. In response, Roy and other Republicans have begun to support guerrilla political tactics on the House floor.
The Texas Republican frustrated Democrats recently by threatening to slow the immediate passage of 13 pieces of largely uncontroversial legislation, also known as suspension bills, by calling for a lengthy roll-call vote of at least one of the bills. These bills, which often come in a series of about 10 or more, are often fast-tracked by voice vote and require a two-thirds majority to pass the House. Roy says his threat to gum up the movement of these bills was necessitated by the partisan actions of the Democrats.
“Democrats are literally shutting down our ability to amend and debate the vote,” Roy explained. “We never have any say. Zero say. I was on the floor yesterday, and I was talking about the absurdity of what’s going on with the process. And I pointed out that [Republicans] never get to amend. We never get to debate,” he said.
“Well, Speaker Pelosi comes down to the floor, and then she starts ranting about that all being false, saying, ‘Well, we have 56 amendments in this bill.’ I think it was the H.R. 1. And I said, ‘Forty-nine of those amendments are Democrat amendments.’ It’s all a shell game, which is a joke,” he argued. “The seven amendments that weren’t Democrats’ were preselected in a rules committee by a handful of people in a committee that’s run by nine Democrats over four Republicans. They just pick these amendments to give us scraps, to give us crumbs.”
Roy’s slowdown tactic was soon adopted by controversial Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene, who was stripped of her committee assignments last month for previous inflammatory and conspiratorial social media posts, now routinely calls for motions to adjourn on the House floor as a means to bring members to the chamber to vote and slow down the legislative process. While several Republicans have grown publicly annoyed with Greene’s ploy, Roy defended it. As he sees it, Democrats left her without any committee work and now have to reap what they’ve sown.
“The idea that we have debate is a complete joke,” Roy lamented. “‘The People’s House.’ That term is a joke. This place is being run by autocrats who are just making decisions at the top. We have no real voice. When we think about things like rules, well, cry me a river.”
Roy’s tactics, at least, have the support of House Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney. It is a “legitimate approach for members of the minority to take,” she told reporters recently. “The majority needs to understand we are not interested in a situation where they have taken away so many rights of the minority and they expect things are going to operate smoothly.”
Cheney, whom Roy considers a friend, was blasted by members of the House Republican Conference for voting to impeach Donald Trump and publicly blaming him for inciting the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Her declaration caused members of the Freedom Caucus to mount a campaign to force her out of leadership, which was roundly defeated in a conferencewide vote.
Roy, who voted against impeachment, publicly rejected calls for Cheney to step down from leadership. However, he spoke out against subsequent negative statements the Wyoming Republican made before conference members about the former president. “I don’t believe that, in my view, leadership necessarily has to have the same position on every vote,” Roy told the Washington Examiner. “They can go vote as a member representing their constituents and then go answer to those constituents, and Liz will do that,” he said.
“So, I talked to Liz, and I did publicly say that I strongly disagreed with her comments, when she spoke. Whenever that happened … she did so after a conference meeting as the conference chair, she spoke out in a negative way about the former president in a way that is, I think, out of step with the conference she is leading and the vast majority of the American people who supported Republicans, who supported the president in November.”
Roy, however, criticized his own party when it came to the final certification of the Electoral College in Congress. Three days before his fellow Republicans contested the states of Arizona and Pennsylvania, Roy and six other Republicans released a joint statement calling the move “unconstitutional.” Nevertheless, Roy says that despite disagreements his party members might have with one another, he fails to see any permanent rifts.
“I don’t think there’s some massive divide in the conference. I think the conference, by and large, is in roughly the same place of strongly agreeing with and believing in the unbelievably positive strides that we made as a country from January of 2017 through about a year ago,” he said. “I believe our conference is highly united around the strength of the agenda of the four years under President Trump. … I don’t know what I’m going to do, in two, four, six, 10 years, but right now, I’m fighting for freedom.”
Kerry Picket is a senior campaign reporter for the Washington Examiner and a fill-in radio host at SiriusXM Patriot 125.
