Chip Roy Is Making Congress Better

I got this email last night. The subject line is “Now a former listener.”

Ted, the listener, writes:

Mr. Erickson,

I am a lifelong conservative Republican and I have enjoyed listening to your show via podcast most days for the last several years.  I found your commentary to be consistently insightful and interesting.   However, your recent commentary supporting the 20 +/- crazy, mostly creepy buffoons and hostage takers in the House is beyond the pale for me.  These people are a disgrace and doing more serious damage to the conservative and Republican brand.  Say what you will about Kevin McCarthy.  At least he is not a carnival barking, nutty embarrassment like many of the members of this group.  Unfortunately, Chip Roy, whom I previously respected, is my Congressman.

I wish you well, but I will never again listen to your show.

First, I have an opening for a new listener. One of you can go here now.

Second, when I hear someone say they are conservative but then attack the conservatives holding out, I’m reminded of all the “conservatives” who attacked the House conservatives in the past for being willing to shut down the government to force fundamental fiscal reforms.¹

Third, Kevin McCarthy is not a conservative. He came up with the Boehner/Cantor wing of the party embracing the ‘young guns’ label whose claim to fame was not that he had principles but that it was his time. In leadership, he relied on Democrats to get his spending bills passed. To say McCarthy is a conservative is to say you don’t know what the hell you are talking about.

Fourth, Ted will reap what Chip Roy is sowing.

Full disclosure: Chip is a very good friend. I have known him for years. I have not talked to him or any member of his staff in several weeks because I do not want anything I say to be attributed to or blamed on him. I want you to know that out of the gate.

I suspect Congressman Chip Roy would prefer someone other than Kevin McCarthy. Punchbowl DC notes that McCarthy’s team considers Chip the only objector to McCarthy they can trust because they, like the conservatives, view Chip as an honest broker. He is not going to lie or play the DC games.

What Chip Roy has, if press reports are to be believed, accomplished is the ultimate concession from leadership — budget votes.

Right now, House and Senate leaders wait until a crisis is upon us. Then, they draft a multi-thousand-page bill and rush it through on the spur of the moment. Congressmen are supposed to be given seventy-two hours to read the legislation. That does not happen. Leadership waives that rule and rams it through.

When doing so, they threaten the members of Congress that if they do not comply, they will either cause a default and damage American credit or they will cause a government shutdown.

The pressure is extraordinary. In the legislation leadership drafts, they add in all sorts of extraneous and unrelated spending and know that most of it will get ignored. Roy blasted this process on the floor the other day.

Chip Roy has, it seems, extracted from House Republican leaders a binding commitment that, instead of legislating by crisis, the House will pass the twelve appropriations bills and conservatives will be able to extract from those bills any earmarks. This is how Politico reports the concession:

Fears of another trillion-plus-dollar omnibus spending bill have been a major driver of the conservative backlash to McCarthy. The brewing deal includes a promise for standalone votes on each of the 12 yearly appropriations bills, which would be considered under what is known as an “open rule,” allowing floor amendments to be offered by any lawmaker. Conservatives also won a concession to carve out any earmarks included in those packages for separate votes, though it’s unclear if they’d be voted on as one package or separately.

On top of that, it seems Roy has also secured fiscal conservatives seats on the House Rules Committee. This has not been done before. Nominal, mainstream conservatives might get seats on the Rules Committee, but they do not put the firebrand conservatives on who might force rules to open the amendment process.

Ted should thank Chip Roy for that. These things have not been done before. They will, if the press reports are correct and the deal goes through, profoundly change the game in Congress and force the House actually to legislate responsibly instead of by crisis.

It would be fantastic to toss McCarthy. He has shown himself to be weak and willing to give away the kitchen sink for the title of a neutered position. That is clearly not the guy you should want. But perhaps he gets to be Speaker. If so, to get there, he had to go through Chip Roy and nineteen other members of Congress to whom he has made incredible concessions.

Ted might not ever listen to me again. He might never support Chip Roy again. But he and his descendants will all benefit from what his Congressman has managed to get done.

1. I recognize people like Matt Gaetz are discrediting to the whole enterprise, but there are serious people with serious things they are fighting for in that group of twenty.