# Chip Roy **Charles Eugene "Chip" Roy** (b. 1972) is a Republican U.S. Representative from Texas (TX-21, Austin–San Antonio corridor, since 2019), a [[House Freedom Caucus]] hardliner, and one of the House's most effective procedural antagonists — of Democrats and of his own party's leadership alike. In 2026 he ran for Texas Attorney General and lost the Republican runoff. ## Background Roy's pre-House résumé runs through the Texas conservative legal-political machine: chief of staff to [[Ted Cruz]], First Assistant Attorney General under [[Ken Paxton]], and stints with [[Rick Perry]] and [[John Cornyn]]. A Hodgkin's lymphoma survivor, he won the TX-21 seat in 2018 (succeeding Lamar Smith) and held it through increasingly competitive cycles. ## House Career - **[[SAVE Act]] sponsor.** Roy is the legislative face of the documentary-proof-of-citizenship voter registration push — the federal scaling of the Kansas experiment (31,089 citizens blocked vs. 39 noncitizens caught over 19 years). The bill is the "election integrity" agenda's flagship vehicle - **One of three votes against the [[Emmett Till Antilynching Act]]** (2022, with Clyde and Massie), on federalism/redundancy grounds - **Leadership antagonist.** A central figure in the January 2023 McCarthy speaker-fight holdouts (negotiating the rules concessions that later enabled McCarthy's ouster) and a chronic "no" on debt-ceiling deals and omnibus spending bills; frequent critic-then-collaborator of [[Mike Johnson]] - **Style.** Roy pairs genuine procedural principle (he votes against Republican spending bills, not just Democratic ones) with maximal culture-war positioning — a combination that made him a Freedom Caucus standard-bearer but a difficult statewide primary candidate ## 2026 Texas Attorney General Run With Paxton vacating the office to challenge John Cornyn for Senate, Roy announced for AG in August 2025 and entered as frontrunner on name recognition. State senator [[Mayes Middleton]] — a Galveston oil-and-gas executive and self-funder — closed the gap with a "MAGA Mayes" ad blitz. The March 3, 2026 primary forced a runoff; **Middleton beat Roy in the May 26, 2026 runoff**. Roy, who gave up his House seat to run ("my voice is not going to go anywhere"), exits Congress in January 2027 — a notable data point in the pattern of movement-conservative procedural purists losing statewide primaries to self-funding, Trump-aligned candidates. ## Why He Matters for the KB Roy matters on three tracks: as the [[SAVE Act]]'s author he is a primary node in the voter-suppression-as-election-integrity infrastructure; as a Freedom Caucus tactician he illustrates how a small bloc converts procedural leverage into agenda control in a narrow House; and his 2026 AG defeat is an early midterm-cycle marker of what wins Republican statewide primaries in Texas — money plus Trump-brand alignment beating institutional conservative credentials.