Politics

/

ArcaMax

Rep. Chip Roy eyes 'steamroller' agenda if Republicans sweep in November

Paul M. Krawzak, CQ-Roll Call on

Published in Political News

WASHINGTON — Rep. Chip Roy laid out a game plan Tuesday for conservatives to go to war against “the radical left” if the GOP gains control of the White House and both chambers of Congress in the November elections.

The Texas Republican and House Freedom Caucus policy director said hard-liners will have to roll over fellow Republicans who want to scale back their agenda because of the 60-vote requirement for most legislation in the Senate.

“You’re going to have to get over the excuse that will be dropped on day 1, which is, Chip, we don’t have 60 in the Senate,” Roy said at a Heritage Foundation event Tuesday. “We got to plan now driving a steamroller over the weak-kneed individuals in the Congress that will use 60 as the excuse not to fight for you.”

Heritage billed the event Roy spoke at as “Defunding the Left: The Strategy to Save America.”

Roy said his priorities in the next Congress are to cut spending to stop funding left-wing policies such as tighter emissions requirements for cars, securing the border and restoring a “peace through strength model” for the military. He said he wants a “strong, focused military, sparingly used.”

Calling it a “third way,’ Roy said: “It’s not isolationist and it’s not endless wars.”

 

Roy said funding national defense has wrongly been used as an excuse to go along with Democratic spending priorities that conservatives oppose.

“We just default to fear and we use the national security and defense complex to run over everything else,” he said. “We just did it last week with the foreign aid bill,” the $95.3 billion emergency supplemental providing aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan and requiring TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell the app or face a U.S. ban.

“Getting the defense increase was the leverage and excuse for funding the entire omnibus in the first place without getting the reforms we wanted on any of these other issues,” he said. According to Roy, Republicans tell him when appropriations are being negotiated, “We just can’t risk defense.”

“Well if that’s what you do, you’re never going to change the town,” he said.

...continued

swipe to next page

©2024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus