Chip Roy Is Leaving Congress Angry. He Says the GOP Lost Because It Shrugged Off Corruption.

Chip Roy has a few weeks left in Congress, and he isn’t spending them being polite.

The Texas Republican stood up Wednesday at The Forum, a conservative conference put on by The Heritage Foundation in Washington, and told a room full of his own side exactly why he thinks they got crushed on Nov. 3.

“I’m p***ed off at a Republican establishment that embraced corrupt people at the top of the ticket too often,” Roy said, according to The Daily Signal. “You can’t win an election and beat corruption when you put at the top of your ticket in Texas someone that we knew to have massive issues.”

He was talking about Ken Paxton, the former Texas attorney general, who lost the Senate race to Democrat James Talarico by 12 points. In Texas. That’s the kind of number that would have sounded like a joke a year ago.

He’s been saying this about Paxton for years

This isn’t a man settling a fresh score. Roy worked as an assistant attorney general under Paxton before he ever ran for Congress. When the FBI opened an investigation into bribery and abuse-of-office claims against his old boss, Roy called on Paxton to resign, as the San Antonio Current noted. Paxton’s baggage over the years included a securities fraud case that was later dismissed and an impeachment by the Republican-run Texas House.

Roy’s point Wednesday was simple. Republicans knew all of that and put him at the top of the ticket anyway. Then they poured money into the race. Roy put the Texas Senate spending at nearly $500 million and said the party was “trying to chase winning that one race at the expense of all the others. That’s about power-seeking. That’s about power-grabbing.”

Every dollar that went to rescuing one Senate race was a dollar that didn’t go to a House seat somewhere else. And Republicans lost a lot of House seats. The Hill reported Democrats are on track for roughly 260 House seats next year and could hold 56 in the Senate.

The bill nobody went home to sell

Roy didn’t only talk about candidates. He talked about the record, and he thinks it was a good one that nobody bothered to sell.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the giant 2025 package of tax cuts, spending changes and border money, was in his words “basically a Congress’s worth of work done in that one bill.”

“But yet we never took the time to go across the country and barnstorm and explain the greatness of what we did, and so we never got any credit for it,” he said, “and instead we let it pivot to the Democrats being able to take the upper hand on corruption and browbeat us and kick our ears in an election.”

That’s the part a lot of conservatives will nod along to. The wins were real. The selling never happened.

He also told the story of his fight to ban members of Congress from trading stocks. Roy said it took him six years and threats to hold up other votes just to get the ban to the House floor. It passed 232-198. But by then, he said, leadership had bolted a voter ID requirement onto it to make it a party-line vote and “jam it on the Democrats in the Senate.” It died there.

Roy supports voter ID. His complaint was about the move, not the policy. He wanted the stock ban to pass on its own, and he thinks turning it into a fight on purpose handed Democrats an easy line about Republicans protecting themselves.

Still pushing before the door closes

For all the anger, Roy wasn’t talking like a man who’s done. Earlier the same day, his press office posted him on the House floor calling out the Senate by name.

“The Senate didn’t get the job done. They didn’t pass the SAVE America Act. They didn’t pass the Congressional stock trading ban. They haven’t done what we need to do on health care,” he said. “Let’s all stay here, bind together, and get the job done between now and January 3.”

That lines up with the House Freedom Caucus push to keep Congress in town and pass as much as it can before Democrats take over, which we covered when the group sent its letter to leadership.

Roy also turned his fire on the other side. “Democrats haven’t even taken power, and they’re already pushing open-border, sanctuary-city policies,” he posted Wednesday night. “We must fight back. But Republicans cannot rely on Democrats’ failures to win back ground. We have to go on offense, stand on conservative principles.”

Later he went after something even touchier in his own party: lawmakers who just won’t leave. He wrote that the GOP would be stronger if it “stopped propping up 80+ year-olds running for their 4x-5x terms,” and that “the protectionist swamp power games, backroom deals, and political self-preservation” have to end.

The guy saying it is on his way out

Roy is leaving because he ran for Paxton’s old job and lost. He came up short in the May Republican primary for Texas attorney general to Mayes Middleton, who then lost the general election to Democrat Nathan Johnson, according to Meridian.

Some people online called the speech sour grapes. Others said it was the most honest thing a Republican has said since the election. Both can be a little true. But the guy who spent six years trying to stop members of Congress from trading stocks while they vote on the economy has earned the right to say corruption cost his party.

Republicans have about seven weeks of power left in Washington. Roy’s pitch for using them is short: pass the things voters actually asked for, quit protecting the people at the top, and go home and tell voters what you did.