| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Well, I mean, I've said before in Quip that the only crocket we should be caring about in Texas is Davey Crockett. | ||
| And I mean, look, Jasmine Crockett is not going to be able to mobilize the people of Texas to back her for United States Senate. | ||
| That's just not a thing. | ||
| She's trying to grab a star and try to build up her brand and her ID. | ||
| We'll have a serious race, obviously, in the Senate and the primary and the Attorney General's race. | ||
| I'm running for Attorney General. | ||
| And we'll go through that this spring and then we'll get busy. | ||
| We'll go beat Democrats and we'll be fine. | ||
| But people should be alert in Texas that if we don't deal with the issues that are plaguing us, Democrats will take power. | ||
| All right, Texas Congressman Chip Roy, what do you say on this chilly D.C. day before you get out of town? | ||
| I don't know, it's just the season, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's no, it's good to be here, good to be with you, and I'm glad to have you in D.C. How you feeling about these last few days as you guys tie everything together? | |
| Are you going to get some things done? | ||
| Are you going to punt them to the new year? | ||
| I'm getting all kinds of answers. | ||
| I'm about 10 interviews in. | ||
| Yeah, look, we'll pass a few things this week, but at the end of the day, we've got to have a plan when we come back in January, in my opinion. | ||
| It's the message I'm sharing with the White House, the message I'm sharing with leadership that did a lot of good things, the big beautiful bill. | ||
| I think we held our own in pushing back on the Dems on their shutdown strategy, which is entirely political. | ||
| You know, we've done some other good things, the Lake and Riley Act and stuff, but we need to come back and deal with the issues the American people care about. | ||
| And which, by the way, I mean, affordability is a real thing. | ||
| Healthcare costs, a real thing. | ||
| Housing costs, a real thing. | ||
| And we need to address it for the people in addition to all the good stuff on the border. | ||
| But we just got to keep doing what we're doing on the border and lean into the affordability issue. | ||
| And if so, we'll have a good year, but we got to lead. | ||
| What do you make of the state of liberty in America right now? | ||
| You're always on the more libertarian-minded side of things. | ||
| I definitely find myself there for the most part. | ||
| There seems to be a cry from younger people, even on the right, that government should be doing more. | ||
| And I can tell even when just looking at your Twitter, you have a sort of internal struggle with that. | ||
| Like, how do you decide? | ||
| How do you respect liberty, also do kind of things that people want to be done? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, I'm always going to decide on liberty because the temporary gain of some policy choice that's going to constrain liberty will end up killing us in the end. | ||
| But you do have to kind of figure out how to navigate this environment where you're trying to undo the damage of decades of tyrannical growth of government, whether it's in D.C. or in the states. | ||
| And so that takes some action to be able to undo that quickly. | ||
| So take, for example, the filibuster, right? | ||
| You kind of debate those issues or other things to try to see what we can do to solve the problem. | ||
| But let me give you an example of freedom. | ||
| So you always hear people talk about the right to health care. | ||
| Well, that's usually a leftist, a Marxist who wants to say that your right to health care is to take people's money and to force a doctor to provide care in whatever way that they decide in their infinite wisdom. | ||
| I say that the right to health care is I have a right to go to the doctor of my choice. | ||
| I have a right to be able to use cash to do that at the same tax advantage as anybody else. | ||
| I have the right to save money for that. | ||
| I have the right to go to direct primary care. | ||
| I have the right to go to health sharing ministries. | ||
| I have the right to be able to start an insurance company and sell that product to somebody based on a risk assessment for health insurance. | ||
| I'm being denied those rights by government. | ||
| I think we need to talk in those terms rather than getting wrapped around the axle on what government's doing for you on healthcare. | ||
| Let's talk about the right to health care. | ||
| That right to health care is something that you have in this country through freedom. | ||
| And I think we can win that argument if we'll actually take it on. | ||
| But Republicans are always scared of their shadow and they listen to the lobbyists and who are the, you know, go out and fight for the people. | ||
| The president's instincts were right on this when he said, stop giving money to insurance companies and give subsidies to people. | ||
| I don't like subsidies. | ||
| I'd rather have no subsidies. | ||
| But if you're choosing, figure out how to empower people, not insurance companies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Everything being equal, if you were in charge, you would just basically lower taxes for everybody. | ||
| So none of this would be in play, right? | ||
| But what you're saying within the system as it is, giving it back to the people if you got to do something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, within the system we have, for example, I would have massively expanded health savings accounts and all dollars would flow through those, whether they're from your employer or yourself in the healthcare space in an obviously much lower overall tax burden in the first place. | ||
| But in the current environment, we have a highly regulated, insurance-run, government-regulated health system that isn't providing care for people, and it's consuming people's pocketbooks and freedom. | ||
| And I think we got to deal with it. | ||
| Housing is another one. | ||
| Why do we let foreigners own the American housing supply? | ||
| Why do we let massive corporations come up and buy housing supply and do that for profiteering? | ||
| I think if you're a single, you know, American citizens should own single-family residents. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And there are other things we can do. | ||
| And by the way, if you're enforcing the border, then you're going to help on the housing supply as well. | ||
| What do you think besides closing the border, we can do on the housing side? | ||
| Because I always view that one. | ||
| Like, to me, a young person with a low interest rate who can put a little money down to get in, to me, that is the key to the whole, the economic issue. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| I mean, so you can't gloss over the border situation. | ||
| Right now, we're saying. | ||
| That's under control, at least at the moment. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's under control, but you got to remove people. | ||
| You got to remove a lot of people who are coming here. | ||
| And that's partially under control, but we need to keep doing it. | ||
| When you're removing people, then you're getting the supply back in whack and back in the place it should be. | ||
| And then secondly, as I said, we should not have foreigners owning our real estate. | ||
| I'm just being honest. | ||
| And people say, well, it's a free flow of money. | ||
| It's like, I don't know, but why are like a bunch of folks in the Middle East buying up condos in downtown Austin? | ||
| Why are, and then why are major corporations and why can you have the profiteering on single-family residences? | ||
| I just disagree with that. | ||
| I think those are some things you can do. | ||
| And the other thing we should do is, frankly, is open up some of the federal lands. | ||
| I'm not talking about our beautiful mountains and national parks that we want to preserve, but there's, I mean, Utah is what, 80% federally owned? | ||
| Arizona is something like 78% federally owned. | ||
| Why don't we find some parcels of land and be able to say, look, we're going to allow some communities to go out here and get, you know, stake a claim like the mid-1800s. | ||
| Like, look, let's go out and use some of this stuff. | ||
| Again, I'm not talking about our national parks, but we can do a lot to free things up and provide more supply, get rid of some of the demand when you secure the border and stop the kind of constraint on the availability of single-family residences by targeting these corporations and foreigners. | ||
| I know we can probably talk about the wackiness of D.C. all day long. | ||
| So let's shift to Texas because there is something wacky happening in Texas. | ||
| Can you guess where I'm going with this? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| There is a lady named Jasmine Crockett who apparently thinks that she can be a senator from Texas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| This is shocking and appalling and also obvious to me. | ||
| What is like Texas? | ||
| What? | ||
| Well, I mean, I've said before in Quipped that the only crocket we should be caring about in Texas is Davey Crockett. | ||
| And I mean, look, Jasmine Crockett is not going to be able to mobilize the people of Texas to back her for United States Senate. | ||
| That's just not a thing. | ||
| She's trying to grab a star and try to build up her brand and her ID. | ||
| We'll have a serious race, obviously, in the Senate and the primary and the Attorney General's race. | ||
| I'm running for Attorney General. | ||
| And we'll go through that this spring and then we'll get busy. | ||
| We'll go beat Democrats and we'll be fine. | ||
| But people should be alert in Texas that if we don't deal with the issues that are plaguing us, Democrats will take power. | ||
| If we don't deal with the Islamification of Texas, if we don't deal with continued abuse of open borders, because just because President Trump has secured the border for now doesn't mean that a future Biden-Majorkis won't go right back to where they were. | ||
| Remember, we had Trump, then we had Biden-Majorkis, and we had hell for four years, and Americans died, and we had a glut of people in the state. | ||
| So we've got to get busy doing those things to fight and preserve Texas and make sure that we can keep a strong majority there of conservatives. | ||
| What is going on with the Islamification of Texas? | ||
| You know, you're seeing all of these videos come out. | ||
| From what I can see, it seems to be in the Dallas suburbs right around there that there are just all of these cities, Sharia law. | ||
| There's all these strange zoning things happening. | ||
| I mean, people see it and say, Dearborn, that's one thing. | ||
| But Texas, I mean, something just doesn't add up here. | ||
| Yeah, obviously, you've got Minneapolis, you've got Dearborn, you've got now Mamdani in New York. | ||
| You've got it all across the country, but Texas is frankly ground zero. | ||
| If you talk to people who have intelligence on this stuff and what the Muslim Brotherhood's view is, they view Dallas-Fort Worth as where the epicenter is for them to be able to grow Islam in the West. | ||
| And they've been there for a while. | ||
| Remember the Holy Land Foundation? | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| That was 25 years ago, 20, yeah, three years ago. | ||
| And they've got an unindicted co-conspirator from that who's affiliated with CARE, which is why I introduced legislation to take the tax status away from CARE. | ||
| We've got a massive influx of people because we've allowed Republicans have been guilty of this, allowed the pro-business world to say, well, we need all of our H-1Bs and we need to be able to have chain migration diversity visas so people can come here and bring their families from all over the world. | ||
| And then we had the SIVs from Afghanistan. | ||
| And so we had this massive glut of people coming in that are from cultures that don't want to assimilate. | ||
| Remember that, you know, we're at 51.5 million foreign-born people in our country. | ||
| That's about 16%. | ||
| That's the highest rate we've ever had. | ||
| That's bigger than it was in 1900, 1920 when we had the massive inflow. | ||
| And then those were people who were largely sharing our values, who were going to schools that were teaching America is great and trying to get people to understand Western civilization. | ||
| And we didn't have a welfare state. | ||
| Now we have a welfare state. | ||
| We're giving stuff for free. | ||
| We have schools that are teaching them that Palestine's awesome, not Israel, that we're guilty of sin for slavery, not the Ottoman Empire. | ||
| We're not teaching our kids any of that. | ||
| And then we're just allowing more people to come in with their broken visa system. | ||
| So that's why I introduced legislation to pause all immigration. | ||
| Let's reset the whole structure and let's reclaim our sovereignty as a nation. | ||
| If we don't, we're going to lose the country. | ||
| So is that part of the reason that you want to be attorney general? | ||
| Do you feel that you can be more effective in that way rather than trying to push through some of that at the federal level? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I mean, you know, when I look at it, my son is 16. | ||
| My daughter's 14. | ||
| If we lose Texas, we lose the country. | ||
| And, you know, God's given me this moment in time. | ||
| I'm a former federal prosecutor, former first assistant attorney general. | ||
| I was a lawyer to Governor Perry. | ||
| I understand the state, but I've obviously been up here in the fight. | ||
| I see the nexus of these major issues, and I want to bring that fight as attorney general because we have got to. | ||
| We have got to get in there and fight these out. | ||
| Let me give you an example. | ||
| The Islamification issue, we've got to take that on and be able to manage intelligently the defense of the First Amendment, which we all share as conservatives and limited government believers in the Constitution, that we want to preserve and protect the First Amendment. | ||
| But you've got to be able to recognize that Sharia law is inconsistent with the First Amendment of the Constitution and Western values. | ||
| You've also got to recognize that we can make a strong argument that Islam is political, not religious. | ||
| And we've got to have smart people willing to make those arguments, be strong enough to stand up and say them, but also have the legal backing to be able to defend them in court. | ||
| And then there's other issues like Plyler V. Doe. | ||
| That was the Supreme Court opinion in the early 80s that said that we had to educate illegal alien children. | ||
| It was a Texas case. | ||
| We need to challenge that. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Like birthright citizenship is in front of the courts now. | ||
| We've been living under this sort of false set of rules that have been forcing us to lose our country. | ||
| We should do the opposite. | ||
| We live under rules to protect our country. | ||
| So it seems to me that the easy version of this is, okay, you can close the border, which we've largely done. | ||
| You can stem further immigration, at least temporarily. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| Most people can get on board that. | ||
| The more complex issue is now what Europe is having to deal with, which is they're going to have to kick out people who were born in their country, who are legal citizens. | ||
| And it seems to me America is going to have to confront that too. | ||
| We have a much better position because we're kind of 20 years behind them in all of this. | ||
| Are you ready to confront that sort of issue? | ||
| Yeah, we should absolutely be removing people who are adherent to Sharia law. | ||
| We should be removing people who are here who are certainly not citizens. | ||
| Frankly, I think we should be reviewing some of the false notion of birthright citizenship, all of these corporate centers where people are bringing people over from China, from all over the world, having babies here. | ||
| But we can review all of that and we can preserve and protect our country. | ||
| People are here and they're citizens and they believe in this country and they want to assimilate. | ||
| Then, you know, we're all about people being able to do that. | ||
| But you've got to believe in America and want to assimilate. | ||
| And we've got to go through, figure that out, and remove people who don't fall into that class or you'll lose your country. | ||
| This is just basic self-preservation stuff. | ||
| And I'm fully capable, willing, and planning to engage in that as Attorney General. | ||
| So assuming you become Attorney General of Texas, are you worried at all what might happen to your seat? | ||
| Because again, you are one of the prime, I'd say, defenders of freedom and liberty in Congress. | ||
| Well, look, we've got a lot of good people that we've been bringing into the fold and folks that are now kind of moving up, you know, guys like Keith Self, who's from Plano, actually, and Josh Brukeen from Oklahoma. | ||
| And, you know, we got Roxan Eric Burleson from Missouri. | ||
| He's a great guy on healthcare freedom. | ||
| Got a lot of guys who are picking up the mantle and running. | ||
| And look, I think it's a team effort nationwide. | ||
| And we've got to have strong people in governor's mansions. | ||
| We've got to have strong people in attorneys general's offices. | ||
| We've got a strong people here in the House of Representatives and the Senate. | ||
| And then we've got to obviously have strong people in the administration. | ||
| Right now, we've got a good team. | ||
| We've got to build it out. | ||
| We've got to win in 26. | ||
| We got to win in 28. | ||
| We've got to be prepared for when we do lose to not lose too much ground and to be able to keep moving in the right direction. | ||
| So we'll be fine. | ||
| The American people are wise enough to send good people here. | ||
| But, you know, I've got another year left. | ||
| I've still got 12.5% of my tenure in Congress left. | ||
| And I'll go back and be attorney general. | ||
| And then who knows what holds in the future? | ||
| What do you make of the general voting demographics of Texas? | ||
| I think in most people's minds, Texas is this hardcore red state. | ||
| That's the thing we associate with it. | ||
| And then you look at, I mean, I saw something. | ||
| You can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but there are actually more registered Democrats than Republicans in Texas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know that that's accurate, but let's give some, you know, there's a large swath of independents also there. | |
| There's a good number of independents. | ||
| But also remember what's been happening over the last two decades, where we've gotten a movement in the Hispanic population towards the Republican Party, but particularly because President Trump, you know, we were winning counties in South Texas that we hadn't won in over a century. | ||
| We've been moving the needle with populations, people switching parties. | ||
| We've got, you know, young Hispanics who are sick and tired of the open borders and the dangers and the cartels that are with us. | ||
| And when you start talking about us versus them, meaning Western civilization versus Sharia law, I promise you, the Hispanic population in Texas, they want to promote their Catholic faith and their Christian values, and they don't want to see the advancement of Sharia law. | ||
| So I think we've got the makings of a strong and powerful coalition in Texas, not unlike 1836. | ||
| A lot of the people who have moved to Texas have done so seeking refuge from leftist hellholes throughout the rest of the country, and they've moved to Texas. | ||
| Now, yes, some people have moved there because their businesses move them there and they suck and they need to go back to California. | ||
| But most people that I talk to and I run into, I got a lot of people in my district that I represent outside of Austin who moved there and they're rabid conservatives because they were in Washington State or Chicago or someplace where they were suffering and they wanted to live free. | ||
| We've just got to make Texas stronger. | ||
| Get rid of the property tax so you can own your home again. | ||
| Make sure George Soros DAs aren't putting criminals on the streets. | ||
| Secure the border of Texas, even if Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas don't or the future version of those because they were leaving our state exposed. | ||
| Texas should just say no. | ||
| And I think we did an okay job, but we could do a better job holding the line and saying, look, it's our border. | ||
| You don't get to come in. | ||
| Where are you guys on the property tax stuff? | ||
| As you know, I'm in Florida where DeSantis is fight. | ||
| I feel like this is going to be his final gift to us. | ||
| We'll see what happens. | ||
| Well, obviously, I think the world of Governor DeSantis, I think he's right to pick that fight. | ||
| We need to pick that fight in Texas. | ||
| Look, we keep chipping away at it, but it's all like stemming the tire, you know, trying to stop the bleeding by just minimally impacting the valuations. | ||
| We need to slash or eliminate the property tax because you just never own your home. | ||
| And that's, it's absurd. | ||
| And you can first shrink government. | ||
| Rule one. | ||
| Our government in Texas is too big. | ||
| Two is modify the tax structure in terms of sales taxes or other ways that we can make sure we've got the income. | ||
| But we also have a $28 billion surplus. | ||
| So let's get people to where they can own their homes. | ||
| Let's fix that for the average Texan. | ||
| I hope Governor DeSantis is successful in leading on that effort this cycle. | ||
| What else do you want to see Trump do from now to the midterms or the Republicans in general to make sure that it isn't what most people that have sat in that chair today are predicting? | ||
| Well, look, a lot of people are saying we're going to lose the midterms. | ||
| I think those become self-fulfilling prophecies. | ||
| Let's go lead, right? | ||
| Let's do what we said we would do. | ||
| We came in and for six months, we fought, we pulled with a three-seat margin. | ||
| We delivered tax cuts. | ||
| We delivered Medicaid reforms. | ||
| We put work requirements in place. | ||
| We cut back half of the green new scam subsidies. | ||
| We've got gas going in the right direction. | ||
| We've got a border that's getting secured. | ||
| We put funding in place for defense and for the border that enabled us to be able to navigate through a shutdown the Democrats put in place to try to pick apart one winning issue on health care. | ||
| I would stick it right back in their face. | ||
| I would pass a massive health care freedom bill with a second reconciliation package right out of the gate in January, February. | ||
| And I would make it where we're empowering doctors and patients and people, not insurance companies and bureaucrats. | ||
| Let them go own it. | ||
| You like your Obamacare? | ||
| You can keep it. | ||
| We're going to give you a freedom option. | ||
| Seriously, let's just do it. | ||
| Why do I care? | ||
| You want to go into that system? | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| But we're going to give you a freedom option. | ||
| Massively expanded health savings accounts, direct primary care, health sharing ministries, all the ways that we can allow people to defray costs and get prices down. | ||
| Let's get to the affordability issue. | ||
| Let's address the housing stuff we talked about before. | ||
| Let's ban congressional stock trading. | ||
| Let's make sure that we codify some of the border security issues. | ||
| Send it over to the Senate. | ||
| And if the Senate wants to block it, let them run on those things. | ||
| But let's go on offense instead of sitting around going, what do we need to do to just try to navigate through them and win them? | ||
| You'll lose. | ||
| It's like playing prevent defense. | ||
| People always blame defenses in a football game and they collapse and let them score, but they forget that the offense went three and out four straight times. | ||
| Do you think the defense is exhausted after the offense went three and out? | ||
| Let's get back on offense. | ||
| Stop going three and out because that's all we've been doing. | ||
| What has changed for you in your years from when you walked into Congress to now? | ||
| Well, my kids are older. | ||
| I'm older. | ||
| Besides age. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Look, I think what I came in in 2018. | ||
| I think what has changed is I think the battle landscape has become clearer. | ||
| I think the push by the president, I think where things have gone from a MAGA Point. | ||
| And look, I was open and I supported Governor DeSantis. | ||
| You and I took a lot of hits. | ||
| And look, he's a dear friend, and I don't regret that. | ||
| But what I would say is that Governor DeSantis himself in Florida, President Trump and leading the MAGA effort, has helped draw the bright lines that need to be drawn. | ||
| And I think we now know the landscape of the fight. | ||
| I think what happened to Charlie Kirk demonstrates the landscape of the fight. | ||
| I'm going to go host a hearing in just about an hour on the Southern Poverty Law Center in Antifa in the massive network of radical leftists and Marxists who are well-funded, whether it's Arabella and all the operatives, whether it's George Soros, whether it's Bill Gates, whether it's United Nations, whether it's other NGOs, taxpayer dollars, outside money from foreign governments, all of that's coming into a network to destabilize our country. | ||
| And I think we need to expose that further and demonstrate that there is, in fact, a war against our way of life trying to dismantle America. | ||
| And we need to rally again as Americans to fight back and preserve it for our kids and grandkids. | ||
| I think that's what's changed that landscape. | ||
| The old guard Republicans, you guys are done. | ||
| Like we're not sitting around, you know, talking about the old days, you know, in here in D.C. and what we need to do to preserve and protect institutions here in D.C. for the sake of it, as opposed to preserving and protecting institutions for the sake of freedom and for the sake of the people being able to be sovereign. | ||
| Well, since you're going to that hearing in about an hour from now, do you think what Trump did with the Muslim Brotherhood was enough? | ||
| I know a lot of people thought that there were some things related to Turkey and Qatar maybe that were left off, especially in backdrop of what you just said about what's going on in Texas. | ||
| Sure, I think, look, I mean, first of all, I'm glad he declared cartels as terrorist organizations. | ||
| I'm glad he's leaned into the fight. | ||
| He declared Antifa terrorist organization. | ||
| I think we need to go harder and faster at the Muslim Brotherhood and harder and faster at CARE and other groups. | ||
| Look, I think we need to be careful about playing footsie with the Middle East because of dollars. | ||
| And that's my concern. | ||
| That's not direct to the administration. | ||
| That's a general point. | ||
| Universities. | ||
| My good friend Rick Perry in Texas, right? | ||
| I love him. | ||
| Crawl over broken glass for him. | ||
| But I think we played a little bit too much, played footsie with, you know, oh, we'll have, you know, Texas AM and their relationship with Qatar and so forth. | ||
| Like, guys, we need to preserve and protect this country. | ||
| And we need to understand that there's a lot of people who want to do us harm. | ||
| And the people that are going after Israel, the people that are going after us, it is purposeful and it is something that we've got to address. | ||
| And I think we need to be more aggressive than we have. | ||
| Do you think some of that was just naivete? | ||
| You know, 10 years ago, they're just pouring money into the university. | ||
| Someone like Rick Perry's gone, well, this is nice. | ||
| We're going to build some nice buildings. | ||
| And I think it's about, I think there was a belief and remains a belief that we can win the argument with our Western values and our Judeo-Christian principles and pushing those out. | ||
| And I think that belies history at the moment. | ||
| Yes, I think we're spreading, like, you know, Christianity, as an example, is growing around the globe. | ||
| And that's great. | ||
| And it's growing. | ||
| But there's also persecutions around the globe. | ||
| There's also a massive and rapid expanse of Islam around the globe. | ||
| And that tension has existed for millennia and is at a, you know, boiling point at the moment. | ||
| And I think we need to address it, recognize it, and pick sides. | ||
| Like, you can't win a war that you don't recognize is occurring. | ||
| And you got to recognize that war exists and then pick sides. | ||
| That's why, you know, this whole business about Israel and, you know, it's like, guys, whatever criticisms you want to mount, Israel is standing there as our ally athwart evil. | ||
| That's the reality. | ||
| So stop pretending that's not the case and going and pursuing random conspiracy theories. | ||
| And let's align and do what we need to do to defeat the evil that wants to undermine Western civilization. | ||
| Well, even though we've lost some of the political battles that we've been on the same side of, I enjoy fighting with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks. | |
| If you're craving more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics, check out our politics playlist right here. |