Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) expressed his frustration with keyboard warriors who have slammed conservative Republicans legislators like him from a distance and called them RINOs, saying, “You want to come at me and call me a RINO, you can kiss my a**.”
Roy spoke with radio host Steve Deace during the challenge that ultimately ousted Rep. Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker. Deace, pointing out that some social media users had called Roy a “RINO” for not endorsing the move to oust McCarthy, declared he was fed-up with the internecine warfare in the GOP, saying, “I’m about to just ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ and just go full-on Billy Graham and you all, I don’t care. … This is a joke. It’s rudderless and it seems as if we want to sell each other talking points rather than actually produce some form of substantive whatsoever. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“Some of our brothers and sisters – particularly in the, you know, MAGA camp, I think – particularly enjoy the circular firing squad,” Roy asserted. “You wanna come out me and call me a RINO? You can kiss my a**. Look, I’ve spent a lifetime fighting for limited government conservatism. I have laid it all on the line. I have not seen my family for two days in the last 30 days. You go around talking your big game and you thumping your chest on Twitter? Yeah. Come to my office, come have a debate, mother.”
“I’m not gonna go to a nunnery, because godda**it, there were people who are buried over in Normandy who deserve us to stand up for what they fought for!” he continued. “So that’s what I’m gonna do. And all of you f***ers out there who are out there saying what you’re saying out on social media, you stick it! I’m gonna go down to the floor and do my job and I’m gonna stand up for the people who fought for this country.”
“Like, I respect what Gaetz and my four, five, six brothers are doing right now because they want to change things,” he said. “I respect friends of mine who went to the mic, who are your heroes out there, ladies and gentlemen, who are taking a different position because we’re trying to figure out how to navigate through a world in which Democrats control the Senate, the Republican conference in the Senate is garbage, the House Republican Conference has a variety of views from all over the country with 221. But if people wanna play this out in real time and deal with this every single minute and every single day on social media, don’t think that that’s somehow going to change the game, because what we gotta do is we have to actually define the fight.”
Roy followed up with comments when he spoke to The Blaze’s Dana Loesch. “Part of what frustrates me, Dana, is when you get pundits — my reaction there wasn’t really to Matt,” he clarified. “It wasn’t to any of my friends who had a good faith belief that we weren’t getting the job done through the speaker, and they called the question. So, now we gotta go choose another speaker. I didn’t agree with the play call, but I don’t fault them for it.”
Roy then pointed out the realities of trying to get things done in Washington, D.C. “I do fault the pundits who are spinning people up with lies, saying, ‘Chip Roy supports giving all the money in the world to Ukraine; he’s selling out,” he said. “Why? Because I made a statement that said we should consider attaching H.R. 2, border security, to any Ukraine deal. Yeah, I don’t think we ought to be giving a blank check to Ukraine, or frankly, any more money at all to Ukraine, but I am going to try to play the leverage to try to secure the border of the United States. I’m paid to be smart and try to figure out how to get this done. So look, that is what I was frustrated about.”
“Look, I should not have used the language that I used–” he said before Loesch interjected, “Oh, no, no. I’m not gonna have you come and apologize and do all that stuff, Congressman. You know what? You were, you were mad on behalf of the American people. And what you were expressing is what– is the frustration of people all over this country because, you know, at the end of the day, whoever the speaker is, isn’t gonna change inflation. It’s not gonna change what’s happening at the border. We just want to get stuff done. We know who you are; we know that if anyone’s saying that Chip Roy’s a RINO those people have not been paying attention to what you are doing. You’ve fought a lot; you’ve put your reputation on the line.”