DC – This is one of four profiles the Tribune is writing about the Republican candidates for attorney general. Read our coverage of the candidates Aaron Reitz, Sen. Joan Huffman and Sen. Mayes Middleton. For more information on the primaries and the voting process, check out our guides and news coverage here.
In mid-December, U.S. Rep. Chip Roy found himself in a familiar pickle.
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Republicans in Congress were pushing to make it a crime to provide hormone therapy to transgender minors. Roy, an Austin Republican, supported the goal but felt it was an unacceptable expansion of federal power over the states.
“Now, I’ve got this paradox,” Roy said at a House committee hearing. “I don’t support this kind of behavior and I think it should be criminalized. I also don’t believe we should make a mockery of a limited Constitution.”
Roy floated an amendment to address the perceived overreach, but eventually dropped it and voted for the bill amid frustration from his Republican colleagues.
For Congress’ chief obstructionist, this was nothing new. Roy is a limited government absolutist, whose zealous pursuit of conservative culture war priorities comes second only to his refusal to give the government an ounce more authority or a dime more money. He breaks often with his own party and speaks out frequently against leadership, pledging loyalty only to the Constitution and his own principles.
It’s a massive headache for Republicans in Congress, and, Roy believes, the perfect mentality for Texas’ next attorney general.
Roy, previously a top deputy to Attorney General Ken Paxton, is the frontrunner to replace his former boss. He’s touting his rock-solid conservative credentials and extensive government experience, running on a Texas-first platform for an agency that’s become increasingly central to the national GOP.
“People look to [the Texas Attorney General’s Office] to lead, to hold the line against an overbearing federal government if they’re getting out of their lanes,” he told The Texas Tribune. “You have to do that no matter who’s in the White House. We gotta defend Texas. That’s our job.”
But Roy’s history as a party antagonizer has given his opponents plenty of ammunition. Roy was the first Republican to call for Paxton to resign after his aides reported him to the FBI. He voted to certify the 2020 election and said President Donald Trump engaged in “clearly impeachable conduct” on Jan. 6. He’s delayed major Republican priorities over spending and constitutional concerns, often for limited gains.
“Chip Roy betrayed and abandoned the president and the attorney general over and over and over and over again,” Aaron Reitz, a former Paxton deputy who is running against Roy, said in an interview.
For Roy, these are battle scars from fights rooted in the same strict adherence to the Constitution that he thinks GOP primary voters should expect from an attorney general. Roy likes to remind people that Trump once described him as “not easy, but he’s good.”
That’s as good as an endorsement for Roy, who believes the relationship between a state official and the president — any president — should be based on co-equal respect, not blind fealty.
“You need somebody who’s demonstrated strength and independence,” Roy said. “We’ve got to defend the state of Texas, defend our borders, defend our streets, keep it safe and defend ourselves against the federal government interfering with us, no matter who’s there.”
Climbing through a party on the rise
Roy was born and raised in the D.C. suburbs — and here is where he’d interrupt to note that his family ties run deep in Texas. His great-great-grandfather was a Texas ranger, his grandfather a small-town police chief. His grandmother was the first female county clerk in Nolan County, west of Abilene.
After graduating from the University of Virginia, and a stint in investment banking, Roy returned to his ancestral lands for law school. He arrived in Texas in 2000, just as the GOP was on the rise in the state. His first government job was clerking at the agency he now seeks to lead, under then Attorney General-John Cornyn. When Cornyn became a U.S. senator, Roy followed him to Washington to work as a staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
After a stint as a federal prosecutor, Roy joined forces with then-Gov. Rick Perry right as the tea party movement was bursting onto the scene. He ghostwrote Perry’s book, “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington,” and helped shape Perry’s state’s rights-focused presidential campaign.
“This is 2010, we’re saying, ‘Guys, we’re Texas. We’re doing great, and we don’t want the long arm of the federal government interfering with us,’” Roy recalled on a podcast from the conservative outlet Texas Scorecard. “That was what was dripping throughout that book, [we’re] just fed up with a Supreme Court, a Congress, a presidency that was telling Texas what to do.”
In 2011, when Roy was 39, he was diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. But battling cancer didn’t dampen his furor for conservative battles. When Roy returned to the political arena as Sen. Ted Cruz’s first chief of staff in 2013, he was in remission — and more aflame than ever.
Almost immediately after arriving back in D.C., he worked behind the scenes as Cruz shut down the government over the Affordable Care Act, coordinating media hits, calming anxious allies and facing relentless pressure for his boss to cave. The effort failed after 16 days, sparking outrage and inflighting among Republicans, with much of the ire directed at Cruz.
“Was I intimately involved with it? Yes. Unapologetically. I think it was the right strategy,” Roy told The Texas Tribune in 2019.
A focus on stability
After two years with Cruz, Roy returned to the Texas Attorney General’s Office as Paxton’s inaugural first assistant.
“We had to start an office from scratch, ground zero, because then-Attorney General [Greg] Abbott took all of his key leaders over to the governor’s office,” Roy said. “We built a great team.”
Roy helped recruit some big names within conservative circles, many of whom are now big names outside of them. To fill out the executive office, they hired Jim Davis, now the president of the University of Texas, Brantley Starr, now a federal judge, and Bernard McNamee, who later became commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Roy and Paxton set an aggressive pace right out of the gate, challenging some of Obama’s biggest environmental and immigration policies. Solicitor General Scott Keller argued before the Supreme Court 11 times, a record for the time.
“Chip knew it was important to focus on making sure the office worked well,” McNamee said. “There was a real focus on the big, headline issues, and they were important, but Chip made sure we never forgot to get the day job done.”
Roy and Paxton were ideologically aligned, but the men reportedly clashed over how large of a role Roy took in running the agency. Roy left in 2016 amid an exodus of senior staff, the first of several such turnovers during Paxton’s decade at the helm. In a recent interview, Roy said he and Paxton had “differences of opinion” on running the office, but declined to comment further.
If elected, Roy said he would start the same way he did back then, by hiring the best attorneys and generating headline-grabbing cases to keep them busy.
Like his opponents, he has said he would work to overturn Plyler v. Doe, a Supreme Court decision that requires public schools to educate undocumented immigrants, as well as Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage. He is leading Congress’ push against Sharia law and the “Islamification” of the country, a fight he promises to bring back to Texas as attorney general. He has vowed to “roll over” left-leaning district attorneys, aggressively push voter fraud investigations and prosecutions and defeat the “woke agenda.”
Roy has also said the state needs to be preemptively pursuing litigation to ensure Texas can enforce immigration law after Trump has left office, rather than waiting to see what the next administration does on border policy. Immigration enforcement has historically been under federal jurisdiction.
“I believe Texas has a right to defend its 1,100-mile border and not just be beholden to whatever Washington does,” he said. “We need to look at the invasion arguments. I believe that there was an invasion.”
Roy has also said he would focus on stability and retention, noting that most of his staff has been with him his whole time in Congress. He said he would reinvigorate the agency’s bureaucratic functions, like child support and consumer protection, and do more public engagement, which he said has lapsed under the current administration.
“I don’t mean that as a criticism, I just think that’s the time we’re in,” he said in an interview with the True Texas Project. “Things have evolved and changed. We’re at an aggressive time where we need to use that bully pulpit almost daily to highlight this stuff.
Roy’s conservative message has attracted some deep-pocketed donors, including Amarillo billionaire Alex Fairly, and major endorsements, including Cruz. He came into the race with a large lead, which has diminished slightly as Galveston state Sen. Mayes Middleton has invested millions into self-funded ad buys.
Middleton, as well as Reitz and Houston Sen. Joan Huffman, are all hoping to elbow their way into a runoff with Roy. To do so, they’re targeting his relationship with two of the party’s most prominent leaders.
“Chip is one of the most belligerently anti-Trump, anti-Paxton elected officials in America,” Reitz said at a campaign forum in East Texas.
At odds with his former boss
In October 2020, when Roy was a freshman in Congress, news broke that top deputies at the attorney general’s office had reported Paxton to the FBI, accusing him of bribery and abuse of office to help Nate Paul, a real estate developer and political donor.
While many elected Republicans stayed quiet, Roy swiftly called on Paxton to resign.
“The Attorney General deserves his days in court, but the people of Texas deserve a fully functioning AG’s office,” he said in a statement at the time, adding that the agency was “too critical to the state and her people to leave in chaos.”
Paxton did not resign. He was reelected two years later, and his legal troubles have largely evaporated as he withstood indictment, impeachment and federal investigations. He’s now running to unseat Roy’s other former boss, Cornyn, to take the longtime incumbent’s seat in the Senate.
Paxton endorsed Reitz, his former deputy attorney general for legal strategy, to replace him. Reitz has hammered Roy for his disloyalty to their shared former boss, saying he was part of a plot to take down the attorney general.
“Congressman Roy was the very first elected official in America to call for Ken Paxton’s removal from office,” Reitz said at a campaign forum, to applause. “If you want somebody who stands with Paxton, has been endorsed by him, is loyal and not a traitor, I’m your only option.”
Roy said he and Paxton are on good terms now, but despite the continued attacks from Reitz, he hasn’t walked back his stance on his former boss. He says he was standing up for his former colleagues that reported Paxton to the FBI.
“When they were being thrown under the bus, I felt like I owed it to them to defend them,” he said to Texas Scorecard. “I stick with my friends and defend them when I feel like they’re being attacked.”
Paxton declined to comment.
While that agency scandal was unfolding, Roy was in the midst of a tough reelection campaign against former state Sen. Wendy Davis. Davis, a Democrat darling after her 2013 abortion filibuster, brought name recognition and major money into the race, which ended up being the third most expensive in the country that cycle.
“I’m the only one of us [in the AG primary] that’s had to run a really tough, brutal, high-profile race,” Roy said. “You don’t have to be a political genius to know that, as a conservative running with Austin as a big part of your district, the ability to win that … shows an ability to win in the general.”
Roy beat Davis by seven points in 2020, sealing his return to Congress right as another party scandal was about to bubble up.
Trump criticisms
When Trump lost in 2020 to Joe Biden, many Republicans quickly joined him in claiming that the election was stolen. Roy agreed that there was reason for concern — but was frustrated that no one seemed to be able to produce any evidence, text messages obtained by CNN show.
Roy told Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff, in a text that they needed to “approach the legal challenge firmly, intelligently and effectively,” without resorting to a “conspiracy frenzy.” And if it turned out that Trump had lost, there needed to be “an orderly transfer of power.”
Paxton and Reitz took a different approach, asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election results in four states. While many Republicans signed on, Roy called it a “dangerous violation of federalism” that would “almost certainly fail.”
He was correct; the Supreme Court threw out the lawsuit immediately. But that did little to quell claims of a stolen election, which erupted on Jan. 6 when protesters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Roy later said that Trump engaged in “clearly impeachable conduct” by pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to not certify the election results that day, although he voted against impeachment charges brought by Democrats. In 2024, he campaigned for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, rather than Trump, exacerbating tensions between the two men.
This is a potential anchor around Roy’s neck as he seeks the approval of Texas’ very Trump-friendly GOP base, one his opponents never miss an opportunity to call out. In ads, Middleton has detailed Roy’s tumultuous relationship with Trump, declaring the president “doesn’t trust” Roy.
Roy points out that he has voted with Trump’s agenda more than almost any House member, and said he and the president talk frequently about their shared policy goals, like Roy’s bill that just passed the House, which would require voters to provide photo ID at the polls. In a recent campaign ad, Cruz says “no one, and I mean no one, has fought harder to help President Trump make America great again” than Roy.
But even as he works to sew up the nomination, Roy has stood by his previous comments about the president, saying on WFAA that he “always stands for what I believe in, defending the Constitution and defending the rule of law.”
He said he’s confident his record on the issues that matter to GOP voters will ultimately win him the party nomination.
“Honestly, the only way that I’ll lose this election, after all that I’ve done to defend the state of Texas, all that I’ve done to fight for conservatism, all that I’ve done in a courtroom, my legal bona fides, my background, is if somebody else is trying to buy Texas,” he said. “Just do your damn job. Go deliver. And I feel very, very good about my track record.”