What Are Chip’s Values?

He owns stock in a company that’s taking land from his constituents to build an oil pipeline.

Kinder Morgan is using eminent domain to take land from Hill Country property owners for a natural gas pipeline. The pipeline poses risks to residents’ drinking water and safety. These rural land owners, many of whom are constituents of Chip Roy, have had to sue Kinder Morgan to procure fair market value for their land.

Chip’s 2019 financial disclosure shows he owns up to $15,000 in Kinder Morgan stock. To date, he has made no effort to explain this apparent conflict of interest.

He made a hush-hush arrangement with Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office to keep his state-provided health insurance while he worked for Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign.

Chip left his position in the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to work on Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign . . . but he somehow managed to stay on the state payroll, thus keeping his state health care benefit. Chip had recently survived a cancer scare (as he never tires of reminding people), and he didn’t want to risk being without medical coverage while he labored for Ted Cruz.

Chip continually invokes his experience as a cancer survivor to explain his faith in “health-care freedom”–by which he means abolishing Medicare, ending all regulation of health insurance, and weeping with rage when anyone criticizes Big Pharma’s price gouging. Chip says he feels “blessed to have had medical care that cured his cancer. But he’ll be damned if he’ll let other Americans share that same blessing.

His impressive-sounding experience as a “Special Assistant US Attorney” was really more like an unpaid internship.

Chip frequently brags about his experience as a Special Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Texas. He never mentions that Special Assistant United States attorneys are unpaid volunteers

He’s a carpetbagger from “the Swamp.”

“Texas” Representative Chip Roy was born in Bethesda, Maryland, grew up in Virginia, graduated from the University of Virginia, and worked as an investment banker before moving to Austin to attend law school at the University of Texas.

Once he arrived in Texas, Chip quickly ingratiated himself with top right-wing lawmakers, working for John Cornyn, Ted Cruz, and Ken Paxton, and ghostwriting a book for Rick Perry. Before becoming the U.S. Representative for Texas’s 21st Congressional District, Chip had never held elected office.

He now represents one of the most egregiously gerrymandered districts in the country, drawn by Republicans to neutralize liberal Austin and San Antonio voters by splitting them into five districts, each linked to a large conservative, rural region. A member of the hard-right “Freedom Caucus,” Roy has spent most of his first term in office avoiding his constituents in Austin and San Antonio.

Screenshot of a tweet from Chip Roy, warning that Democrats will take away Texans' brisket, guns, and pickups.
Roy works hard to come across like a true Texan on social media.