Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) was Sen. Ted Cruz’s chief of staff before winning a House seat in 2018. This week, he has emerged as a leader of the conservatives who are fighting back against an effort to block the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory – spearheaded in the Senate by his former boss – that they see as a radical, cynical and myopic.
Roy, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, persuaded six of the most committed conservatives in the House to sign onto a statement he drafted Sunday that makes a blunt case for counting all the electors submitted by the states. The centerpiece of his argument is that failing to do so will create dangerous precedents and open a Pandora’s box that would eventually doom the electoral college.
“From a purely partisan perspective, Republican presidential candidates have won the national popular vote only once in the last 32 years,” Roy wrote in his statement. “They have therefore depended on the electoral college for nearly all presidential victories in the last generation. If we perpetuate the notion that Congress may disregard certified electoral votes — based solely on its own assessment that one or more states mishandled the presidential election — we will be delegitimizing the very system that led Donald Trump to victory in 2016, and that could provide the only path to victory in 2024.” Continue reading.