Chip Roy, conservative, runs in shadow of Cruz

State senators were still shuffling into a sleepy Texas Senate Nominations Committee hearing on an April morning in 2011 when Chip Roy, Gov. Rick Perry’s pick to lead the state Office of State-Federal Relations, jolted the proceedings with an unexpected message.

The office, which traditionally lobbied for federal money for state institutions, such as grants to universities, ought to be shut down completely, Roy argued, or at least “stand for something.”

“Our interest is liberty, state sovereignty, and an end to the crippling pile of debt and regulation coming from Washington,” Roy told the senators.

This was an office specifically designed to grease the skids for federal money flowing to Texas. Roy, who is now running for the Republican nomination in a congressional district that includes swaths of Central and South Austin, was suggesting turning it into something more antagonistic.

Everything had been weaponized — this was in the wake of the 2010 tea party wave and ahead of Perry’s 2012 presidential run — and Roy, in a sense, was the tip of the spear.

His nomination was approved 6-1 by the committee, with Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, voting “no.”

The Senate later confirmed his nomination.

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The episode was emblematic of how Roy, 45, who lives in northern Hays County with his wife and two children, has tried to press against the federal government in however obscure a role he has held.

For years, Roy has operated behind the scenes on behalf of top Texas GOP officeholders. Now he’s trying to make a name for himself as a politician in his own right.

He’s sounding the same kinds of themes he touched on in that 2011 hearing, positioning himself both as an insider who worked the back rooms in Washington as an aide to John Cornyn and, later, Cruz, and as an outsider who was disgusted by what he has described as the “top-down” impulse of Capitol Hill.

Usually he left the policy pronouncement to his bosses, but on the campaign trail and recently as head of a states rights center at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, he’s been giving voice to his own opinions.

Ahead of the Women’s March in January 2017, he wrote in the National Review: “In their zeal to shock and to trumpet a convoluted notion of freedom to have their bodies ‘left alone,’ these marchers exclude the bodies of the unborn. What about the rights of an unborn child? What about the safety of an unborn child?”

He has also said that “for every dollar of taxes cut, Congress should cut a dollar in government spending.”

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On May 22, he faces Matt McCall, a tea party-aligned business owner, in the runoff for the GOP nomination. With the backing of incumbent Rep. Lamar Smith, who is not running after more than 30 years holding the seat, and Cruz, who is especially popular among the party faithful in these parts, the race stands to be Roy’s to lose.

“It’s tough to beat the Cruz machine,” said state Rep. Jason Isaac, R-Dripping Springs, who was one of 18 Republicans in the March primary.

Roy also has a money advantage: He has raised more than $540,000, according to an April campaign finance filing. McCall had raised nearly $200,000.

Roy’s campaign received hundreds of thousands of dollars from political action committees dedicated to promoting the GOP’s most conservative principles: more than $145,000 from the Club for Growth political action committee and nearly $65,000 from the House Freedom Fund. He also has received roughly at least $10,000 from Tim Dunn, a Midland oilman who supports Empower Texans, the group that has long attacked moderate Republican politicians. The Jobs, Freedom and Security campaign committee, affiliated with Cruz, contributed $5,000 to Roy’s campaign.

Career in politics

Born in Bethesda, Md., to Texas transplants, Roy says his political philosophy was the consequence of growing up in a Baptist, Reagan-era conservative household in a rural corner of northern Virginia. Class field trips were to Washington or Civil War battlefields.

“Fairly early on I had a belief in limited government being good for freedom,” he told the American-Statesman. An only child, he liked to watch John Wayne and World War II movies with his parents. “I was raised on the idea of rugged individualism.”

At the time of his appearance before the Senate Nominations Committee, he had already ghost-written Rick Perry’s “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington,” a book that, among other things, likens Social Security to a Ponzi scheme. The Office of State-Federal Relations post didn’t last long. A few months later he was diagnosed with stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma (the cancer was treated and is in remission, he said). In November 2011, he was named a senior adviser to Perry’s ill-fated first presidential campaign.

He then became Cruz’s chief of staff, advising the newly elected senator on messaging and policy. The senator was involved with the October 2013 government shutdown, giving a 21-hour Senate speech to hold up a budget bill in an effort to defund the Affordable Care Act.

He took to Twitter to criticize GOP senators who turned their back on Cruz, including U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.: “Shocking for someone talking to (Sen. Chuck) Schumer 5x a day and the White House daily”; and U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.: “The worst thing is giving up & leaving your base believing there is no need to be a Republican any longer.”

Roy believed “we’re doing this for the right reasons,” said Boyd Matheson, who was chief of staff for Cruz ally U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.

In September 2014, Cruz announced that Roy was leaving his Capitol office to join his political team.

But Roy soon left Cruz’s orbit to return to Texas to serve as first assistant attorney general under newly elected Ken Paxton. During his tenure, the office filed suit against the federal government to prevent same-sex marriage; to quash proposed environmental air and water regulations; to chip away at Obamacare; and to halt the relocation of Syrian refugees in Texas.

“Chip is a great strategic thinker, a principled conservative, sets clear goals and has a clear vision of what public policy should be in order to fulfill the vision of the Constitution and its framers,” said Bernie McNamee, who was Paxton’s chief of staff.

Attorney general’s office

In March 2016, Roy left Paxton’s office to be executive director of Trusted Leadership PAC, a political group that backed Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign.

But a month later, Roy remained on the state payroll, according to a Dallas Morning News story at the time.

On April 1, 2016, the newspaper reported, Roy received a full month’s paycheck, $16,220.62.

Roy was severed from the payroll the day after the newspaper report. He said he had set up an arrangement with Paxton to be paid through June 10 and maintain access to state health care benefits in case his health took a turn for the worse.

Roy told the Statesman that state lawyers had approved the arrangement.

“I didn’t take any pay, not $1, from the PAC while I was still on the state payroll,” he said.

Early voting runs from May 14 to 18.

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