Rep. Roy emerges as rookie contrarian of year
Chip Roy’s best quality might also be his biggest political liability.
The freshman Republican congressman — and former aide to Texas GOP heavyweights Ted Cruz, John Cornyn, Rick Perry and Ken Paxton — has a stubborn contrarian streak. So contrarian, in fact, that sometimes it feels like Roy is trying to do his potential adversaries a favor by writing their campaign-ad copy for them.
Take the May hearing of the House Oversight Committee on the issue of the high price of the HIV prevention drug, Truvada, and the amount of profit made by its manufacturer, Gilead.
If anything stirs up a sense of bipartisan populism on Capitol Hill, it’s a chance to knock Big Pharma — either for misleading the public on the dangers of opioids or for gouging people with exorbitant drug prices.
At the May hearing, however, Roy nearly was stirred to tears by what he viewed as an unfair attack on pharmaceuticals. Recalling his own battle, nearly a decade ago, with stage 3 Hodgkins Lymphoma, he cast drug companies as heroic.
The criticism of Gilead, Roy said, was an “attack on the capitalistic system.”
This was Roy in undiluted form. After hearing prominent Democrats disparage Big Pharma as a monster obsessed with profit, he turned the argument around and made the case that drug companies are supposed to be interested in profit, because that’s what businesses are all about. He resented the idea of free enterprise being demonized and he didn’t care who he offended.
If Gordon Gekko had served in Congress, this is the kind speech he would have given.
A week later, Roy temporarily blocked $19.1 billion in disaster aid, partly because he objected to its lack of border-security funding but largely because he resented the thought of the House passing it by unanimous consent, without a real vote. Three weeks later, he was at it again, forcing an interminable roll-call vote on a massive spending bill.
“My job is to go challenge the status quo in Washington and to do it on behalf of the residents of this district,” Roy said Tuesday during a visit with the San Antonio Express-News editorial board.
A few hours later, he hosted the third San Antonio town hall of his short congressional tenure at Compassion Church. The event quickly turned contentious, with Roy and several audience members involved in loud, heated exchanges on numerous topics.
Roy’s District 21 — which stretches from Terrell Hills up to South Austin and takes in much of the Hill Country — is a gerrymandered chunk of Republican real estate that’s going through a bit of an identity crisis. Roy’s Republican predecessor, Lamar Smith, held the seat for 32 years and never faced a serious Democratic challenge.
In 2018, however, Roy barely outlasted his Democratic opponent, Austin tech entrepreneur Joseph Kopser, by a margin of 2.6 percentage points.
The possibility of a big turnout for next year’s presidential election has Democrats cautiously optimistic that they can flip this once-unflippable seat. Roy’s most likely Democratic opponent, former state Sen. Wendy Davis, will bring name recognition and fundraising acumen but also the baggage of her lackluster 2014 gubernatorial campaign.
With Roy, you always sense that he’s running against Congress at the same time he’s serving there.
On Tuesday, he suggested that his colleagues are more consumed with getting out of town on weekends than doing their jobs.
“Nothing puts more pain on these clowns than the jet-fume fear,” he said.
Roy supports President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall but speaks with compassion about Central American families seeking asylum. While arguing that Democrats have been soft on border security, he also acknowledges that members of his own party have been hypocritical on immigration.
Republicans, he said, “stand right by the Rio Grande, with a No Trespassing sign, with a Help Wanted sign on the other side, while winking. We all know that and they do it. And it’s ridiculous.” Roy is a deficit hawk who nonetheless supports a 2017 GOP tax cut which the Congressional Budget Office projected will add $1.9 trillion to the federal debt over 10 years. He is an avowed free trader who nonetheless refrains from criticizing Trump’s trade war with China.
He exudes a rare confidence, almost welcoming criticism because he gets so much enjoyment out of defending himself.
Last month, his fellow Texas freshman, El Paso Democrat Veronica Escobar, told the Texas Tribune that Roy’s legislative antics “undermined his own district by blowing up relationships on both sides of the aisle.”
On Tuesday, Roy had a quick answer ready.
“Congress’s approval rating is 17 percent, $1.3 trillion dollars of deficit spending, we don’t have a secure border, our health care costs are skyrocketing, we’ve been in a 17-year war,” he said.
Having sufficiently ripped the legislative body in which he serves, Roy punctuated the thought with a mocking paraphrase of an expression used during Hurricane Katrina by Republican President George W. Bush — a phrase which came to symbolize Bush’s cluelessness.
“Great job, Brownie.”