Chip Roy Is ‘Pissed Off’ at the Republican Establishment  

Rep. Chip Roy, who is leaving Congress in December, pointed to corruption as a cause of GOP losses in the 2026 midterm elections.

“I’m pissed off at a Republican establishment that embraced corrupt people at the top of the ticket too often,” the Texas Republican said Wednesday at The Forum, a conference for conservatives hosted by The Heritage Foundation.

“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 said, pointing to former Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who lost the Texas Senate race to Democrat James Talarico by 12 points.  

The conservative congressman lost the Republican primary for attorney general in May to Mayes Middleton, who then went on to lose in the general election to Democrat Nathan Johnson.  

“I’ve been holding back for about five months, trying to be a team player. I went out and campaigned. I did my part, but I’m sick and tired of watching all the powers that be make really bad decisions,” Roy said, referring to GOP leadership.  

Roy mentioned his six-year effort to stop insider stock trading in Congress, which he says became politicized when leadership added a voter ID requirement to the bill. While the legislation passed the House by a vote of 232-198, the voter ID provision rendered it essentially dead in the Senate.  

“It took me six years to get a vote on that on the floor of the House of Representatives, and I had to threaten votes to do it, we got the vote,” Roy said. “But guess what? The powers that be…they had to add voter ID to it to politicize it, to make it a partisan vote in the House, to try to jam it on the Democrats in the Senate, and then barely ran on it,” he continued.

“You know what would have been much more powerful? Pass a clean stock ban, stock trading ban. Send it to the Senate. Tell the Senate to pass it and then run on it,” he said.

He pointed to the nearly $500 million Republicans spent in the Texas Senate race, describing it as Republicans “trying to chase winning that one race at the expense of all the others. That’s about power seeking. That’s about power grabbing.”

Instead, corruption became a top concern for voters, leading to the November blue wave, he said.  

Republicans were unable to meet voters where they were to communicate the achievements of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” Roy added.

“Now we got 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, 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,” Roy said on stage.