The American Dream Revisited: Challenges and Opportunities

Today's guest is Rep. Chip Roy (R–Texas), a fiscal hawk whose commitment to balancing the budget has led President Donald Trump to call for primary challenges against him.

Nick Gillespie sits down with Roy to talk about why he ultimately voted for the president's budget-busting One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), whether the controversial redistricting plan going on in Texas is legit, the expansion of the federal government under both major parties, and where libertarians and conservatives can work together to reduce the size, scope, and spending of the state.

 

0:00—Intro

0:41—Why we must control government spending

4:20—The OBBBA and the national debt

6:30—Facing off with Trump

9:25—The Federal Reserve's existence and independence

11:00—Reforming the health care system

14:21—Victories from the OBBBA

19:16—The influence of Ron Paul

24:51—Immigration, labor, and assimilation

35:17—Is there a new GOP consensus on foreign policy?

41:50—Texas redistricting

44:28—Cultural identity of Texas

 

Upcoming events:

The Soho Forum Debate: Melanie Thompson vs. Kaytlin Bailey, September 15

 

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Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

 

Nick Gillespie: Chip Roy, thanks for talking to Reason.

Chip Roy: Happy to do it, Nick. Appreciate you guys.

You are a rare voice of fiscal shrinking in Hollywood.

Hollywood for ugly people.

In Hollywood, yeah. In Washington, D.C. That has put you in the crosshairs with [President] Donald Trump in particular. You don't want to raise the debt ceiling unless there's a reduction in spending. You pushed back against the Big Beautiful Bill, although you did cave and supported it.

We'll come back to the word cave, but OK.

Well, you voted for it.

Sure.

Talk a little bit about your general philosophy. Why is it so important that government spending be either held constant or reduced?

First of all, my view is that the power of the purse is the central power of Congress, and we've abdicated it for as long as I can remember. If you don't constrain that power of the purse, then you're funding the very bureaucracy that was predicted by the founders and has proven to be true to be at odds with our liberty. You fund the bureaucrats that are then turned on us.

Why has Congress…to say they're asleep at the switch is an understatement. What's going on? You came into office in 2019, but this has been going on for at least 20 years before.

Or more, yeah.

My observation over time is that we're actually at a moment where more members of Congress get it than I've ever seen in the past, that's the good news. But the bad news is, it's still a woefully inadequate group of people to change it.

I think, really, at the end of the day, members of Congress believe that they get more popularity in votes by spending money. I actually just disagree with that. I'm a cancer survivor. I have cancer groups who come in and they ask me for money. I say, "God bless you. I know what you're trying to do. Research is great. But do you have a pay for that?" No. Well, then I can't support it. Farm Bureau comes in. I love the farmers. I want to protect small farmers against corporate [agriculture] and all those things, and we try to do that. But they come in and they want their money on the Farm Bill. I'm like, "Well, are we fixing the food stamps?" Well, no. Well, then I can't support it. They get that. And you know what, at the end of the day, they end up appreciating it. They appreciate that you're coming in and doing that. Look, I think to answer your question, the reason it's important is to not fund the tyranny that's turned on us.

I think more people are seeing that now in ways that they didn't in the past. Whether you're the bureaucrats that have been unloaded on the people, through education and DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and all these things, or whether it's just the weaponization of the Department of Justice [DOJ] against people. Targeting of parents back when parents were trying to do things in the DOJ under [President Joe] Biden and those guys were targeting people, etc., etc. WOTUS [Waters of the United States] has turned on people and farms. Our mutual friend [Rep.] Thomas Massie [R–Ky.] talks about that a lot. I think people are just understanding, "Well, crap, you're building up and funding all this stuff." Now, we just got to get a Congress that will understand that and peel it back.

Going to the heart of the Big Beautiful Bill debate. Setting up last year, I was trying to work with the OMB [Office of Management and Budget], with [OMB Director] Russell Vought, and others inside the administration and the incoming administration, a framework to hold everything back. We were told in January, "You're not going to touch anything in Medicaid or any kind of healthcare." Well, we got a trillion dollars of Medicaid. We were told we weren't going to be able to do much on the green new scam subsidies, and all this stuff going out. We were able to get three, or four, or $500 billion worth of cutbacks to those. Did we get everything we need? No. We can debate.

There's no question that the Big Beautiful Bill is going to increase the debt. There's no realistic scenario where it doesn't, if spending doesn't ramp up, we're digging a deeper hole for ourselves.

I think that is likely the case based on the following facts. Medicare was not touched. Social Security was not touched. Interest payments are going up.

But understand that part of the agreement, and we got to deliver the agreement, was holding discretionary flat or lower. That was a part of the deal, which by the way, will pay dividends if we do it—yet to be determined.

That's a part of the "deal," which I'm going to hold to fight for. And also, remember that tax cuts, look, we can debate them. But I had libertarian friends who were like, "Hey, I love the no tax on tips." Well, OK, but what about no tax on the guys in the back of the restaurant? These are debatable policies that we all want lower taxes. You, I, every person who wants a limited government.

I want lower spending.

But you want lower spending to go along with that. What I would argue is we fought to get lower spending at levels on things that people never thought we could get.

Medicaid being huge among those. Parity on Medicaid and Medicare rates, a lot of pieces in this that people don't even understand that we were able to achieve. Is it enough? No.

No.

Is it likely going to create front-loaded deficits? Yes. I showed those curves and worked with people, and I put those charts out.

The problem is it's always going to cause short-term deficits, but then in a year…

Long-term savings.

5,000…it comes pretty close to balanced.

I put all those charts out there in good faith. Why? Nick, to push the narrative over. Then figure out what we could get.

First, I want to ask you a little bit about total spending levels, since they're bonkers.

Yeah, they're bonkers.

I'm not saying you're responsible, but since you showed up, spending has gone up a lot.

I agree.

On the debt ceiling bill, you took a lot of heat from Trump. He was calling you out by name. And then in the Big Beautiful Bill, also you got leaned on.

What is it like when you have Donald Trump, the President of the United States, a guy who, whatever else you can say about him, has the power to destroy the political careers of politicians who are very popular in their districts when he says, "What the hell are you doing? You better get on the line?"

I view it this way: I view it slightly differently because I don't actually worry about whether I'm in office or not, so I don't actually care. Come after me, it's fine.

What I do care about is what can we do in this window of time when we have some people in the administration willing, clunkily, not always what you and I and others who are fiscal stewards, Thomas Massie, what we would do.

What are you going to do when you've got that opportunity? I view it that way. "All right, Mr. President, you're saying you're going to do X, Y, Z." Well, actually he's doing X. Whatever he's doing, he's taking on this, or scaling back some of the spending at the Pentagon, or taking on some cuts and getting the $9 billion of the rescissions package. There are things that are in process. Are they peanuts and crumbs? Kind of. But are they trending in the right direction? So far. Did we get material changes on the spending? Yes. The political influence, it is what it is. Look, you sit at the table in the White House, let's say you have some rather robust conversations.

The night of the Big Beautiful Bill, I was with Thomas, I was with other mutual friends. The president's calling and we're talking. The political pressures don't matter much to me. What matters to me is how can you assemble people to build a coalition to deliver. I'm proud of what we delivered on Medicaid reforms. I'm proud of what we delivered on the subsidies, which are horrid. I'm proud of what we delivered on a bunch of other spending levels that we won't go through the details in. But is it enough? No. We're just nibbling around the edges, it's crumbs.

Yeah. In 2019, the Fed spent about $4.8 trillion.

Now we're at $7.5 or whatever.

$7.2 in 2024.

Right.

What's amazing is it went from $4.8 trillion in 2019 to $6.8 trillion in 2020, to $7.5 trillion in 2021. It's now settling in around $7.2.

To give you an example, I don't think, and correct me, you'll have to go look at my voting record, I don't think I voted for any of that. I'm pretty sure I voted against every one of those appropriations packages when they were passed. But where does that get you? We have to figure out how to turn the Titanic.

Or we have to figure out how to sink the Titanic faster and build a new boat.

I am open to those ways of thinking. I think the issue here is what do we do right now with what we have to give us a fighting chance?

Do we need to end the Fed? Yes. Do we need to totally reform our entire healthcare system, Medicaid, Medicare, all of it? Yes. Do we need to be serious about cutting back half or more of the bureaucracy? Yes.

Start with how would ending the Fed reduce the federal budget?

In terms of the budget itself, I think two things would happen. One, I think it would have a direct impact on what happens with our overspend and interest.

Because I think the backstop of the Fed…that Congress feels unfettered, they feel like they can do whatever they want.

Secondly, I think that what's happening with respect to the Fed's action, which is driving up inflation and has been, that you now have to have all of the forces at play that we see unfolding right now where Trump's rattling about the Federal Reserve Chairman.

Is that troubling though? Because we can talk about whether the Fed should exist, but the Fed should be independent, right?

I don't think the Fed should exist, so independence I think is a question constitutionally with respect to executive branch, legislative branch, judicial branch. The founders didn't create, "Oh, there's this stuff over here"—NASA or whatever. Independent agencies are a whole other thing. I just personally think we need to get back to, whether it's gold standard, or whatever we want to do. Now, we've obviously got a crypto variable to figure out and how we want to manage it. Those things are all important. But what we need is something that is tangible, that we know we can rely upon, and that you can't politicize and then just print money or borrow money recklessly.

Trump is not leaning on the Fed in order to de-politicize it. He wants to…

He just wants interest rates lowered.

Yeah, he wants more money. He wants an inflationary Fed policy, so we're kind of in trouble there.

Let me ask you about…you mentioned Medicare and Social Security.

Medicaid, yeah.

Medicare and Social Security are things that Trump has taken off the table for as long as he's president, which could be another two-and-a-half years or it could be another 10 years. You have interest on the debt, you have Medicare and Social Security. That's the biggest chunk of the federal budget. Is there a way to cut spending? How do you get to a smaller budget without addressing those?

Number one, there's a technical matter: reconciliation. We're legally prohibited from touching Social Security. You got to come up with some sort of bipartisan way to address Social Security, or you can't really get to it.

Secondly, with respect to Medicare, I fundamentally believe for Medicare and Medicaid, and frankly [Veterans Health Administration] and other pieces of the puzzle, [Children's Health Insurance Program] and these other health programs, you have to have fundamental healthcare reforms from top to bottom that starts with the individuals, doctors, and liberty. I'm not saying liberty because I'm talking to you, I'm saying that's what I mean.

Literally, my ability to go to the doctor of my choice with the money that I have, the only way to get prices down for that entire system if we don't do that. One of the first bills I introduced was the Healthcare Freedom Act, which would do that. By the way, we did force into the Big Beautiful Bill DPC, direct primary care, being able to be used within your health savings accounts.

Look, fighting the swamp, fighting the healthcare swamp, is brutal because the insurance companies, pharma, big hospitals, they're all colluding to make it to where you and I can't go to the doctors of our choice.

I'm a member of Congress and I'm on Obamacare. If my cancer comes back, which I had 13 years ago, I can't go to MD Anderson [Cancer Center], which is an hour up the road right here in Texas, where we are, because Obamacare won't let me go to MD Anderson. That's asinine. And yet, millions of Americans are on that system. We've got to blow that up to get people control.

Why didn't the Republicans, and this is before your time, when you were working with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the whole first Trump administration was like, "When we take over, we're going to repeal and replace Obamacare." Then they were like, "Yeah, we didn't really mean that."

Republicans in Congress in particular suck on this and are running afraid to touch and deal with healthcare. I will say this: To the credit of the administration, we were told that we weren't going to touch healthcare at all and we did touch Medicaid in a very big way. Those reforms and people that I trust on this issue, Brian Blase at Paragon [Health Institute] and other good, solid conservatives on healthcare, are looking at this going, "Man, we got a lot of reforms that will impact Obamacare in what we fought for in that bill."

I think that's a baseline to now give us some offense to go onto. By the way, I got a lot of assurances in the administration, I got a couple I can't talk about yet regarding Obamacare expansion and continuation of the Biden credits under COVID-19 that we'll say that we would oppose, so we can minimize the footprint. Then importantly, in the second two-year stint of the term, provided that we have the House and Senate, that we'd be able to address healthcare. Because I said, "Guys, if you don't address healthcare, then there is no legacy." Because you can't stop the bleeding on the spending if you don't deal with Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans now is a huge chunk of it.

You mentioned Social Security is obviously, to say it's going bankrupt is not quite right. 

We're going to hit a ceiling.

It's about to hit a rocky ground or something.

Yeah.

What are the ways? Is there any reason to believe anybody in Congress is doing anything about that? Or do they say, "Ah, we're just going to wait, and then we're going to say just blow out the cap on earnings that are taxed to pay for Social Security?"

I think something's going to have to be dealt with on that front. Where I've come to a conclusion, especially now having lived through this reconciliation process and fought, I can't tell you how hard to get what we got while then sucking up things I didn't like, is…I think [Sen.] Rand [Paul (R–Ky.)] has been right for a long time, and others. I've been there too, but you got to get there, about you're going to have to have across the board, this penny plan, which now probably has to be the nickel plan for all I know. I don't know where we are mathematically. You have to have something where across the board, you're shrinking everything, and then force everybody to deliver.

This is actually really important. For what everyone thinks about the Big Beautiful Bill, one of the things we did that we broke the orthodoxy in Washington, that we can just have all the tax cuts we want without spending restraint. We forced that in the budget committee. Myself, [Reps.] Ralph Norman [R–S.C.], Josh Brecheen [R–Okla.], Andrew Clyde [R–Ga.]. The four of us took down the bill in the budget committee; we killed it. That brought everybody back in. I can tell you, those were some intense meetings where we said, "Guys, we're not doing this if we don't get this level of spending restraint at least as a model to guide what we do on the floor." That was before we sent it to the Senate.

That's actually a big shift. The fights we've had to have inside the Republican Party to say, "Guys, I know we're products of the '80s, and we believe in the Laffer curve, and we believe in lower taxes, of course we do." I do. But you also have to do math. You can't just keep cutting taxes and then not do the spending side because the inflation/turning over of all our freedom to government is eating up any of the value you get.

Who are the people? You've mentioned a couple times, Thomas Massie, people like Rand Paul, people like yourself, who are very insistent even in a MAGA era of spending matters.

Where's your bench? Who are you grooming to become low-spending Republicans?

There are some guys, I just mentioned one of them, Josh Brecheen from Oklahoma. He worked for [former Sen.] Tom Coburn [R–Okla.] back in the day.

We've got others that are my Freedom Caucus allies, as you talked about, Thomas. Over in the Senate, we worked very closely with [Sen.] Ron Johnson [R–Wis.], and with [Sens.] Rick Scott [R–Fla.] and Mike Lee [R–Utah].

We were trying to hold all that together towards the end. There are others, I'm going to leave people off. But there are people who are up-and-coming who get it and who understand, "Look, we've got to do something on the spending."

I will say more than I've ever seen, there was a willingness and a belief that we must do something. But when push comes to shove, they get afraid. Like, "Oh, well, we can't touch Medicaid there" or "Oh, we can't do this policy." We were having to fight that off as it went to the Senate and came back to the House.

Are there any Democrats that are interested in right-sizing government spending? Milton Friedman used to say that the ultimate measure of the size of government is its spending, because you got to pay for it ultimately one way or the other. Is there anybody on the Democratic side that is like, "Yeah, this is a little bit out of control? We're spending 50 percent more than we were just a few years ago. What do we got for it?"

I will tell you that I privately had a number of conversations with some of my Democratic colleagues who got it and appreciated those of us who were holding over, pushing wherever we landed in the end, but holding as far as we could. Look, I was taking a lot of heat because I was putting out all the charts, and I was putting out all this stuff saying, "Guys, here's the real math." They were like, "Yeah, go." I was like, "When will you meet me here? Come work with me on the spending side." But they never will on the spending side. They only want to attack the tax side. They want to say, "No, no, no, don't do those tax cuts. Or definitely go tax more and tax the rich."

I was willing to put everything on the table. I was willing to put, as much as I don't really love it, a higher top marginal rate for the top X earners if I could get more spending restraint. If that would be a deal that we could cut, I'll listen. It's politics. But I couldn't get Democrats to agree with us on anything on the spending restraint side. We have work to do there. I hope there's a little religion that's being found by some of my Democrat colleagues on that because there used to be guys that you could go sit down, back in the years past, and do that. But I don't know, it's hard to find. I've got a lot of agreement on things like stock trading among members of Congress, other issues where I can work on a bipartisan basis, but this one's tougher.

We're talking in Lake Jackson, Texas.

Yeah.

The event that we're both here at is the 90th birthday party/barbecue of the Young Americans for Liberty and the Ron Paul Institute. We're doing it for Ron Paul. Can you talk a little bit about Ron Paul's influence? Both as a member of the Texas Congressional delegation, but Ron Paul as a figure of limited government. How has he influenced your thinking about government?

Obviously, I work closely with Rand. Rand is obviously his son, and I have good friends that I've known for 25 years who worked with Rand. I did overlap with Ron, but man, what a legacy. People go automatically to the Fed because it's the thing that he's known for. And that's important because how many times do you want to say Ron Paul was right?

But the notion of limited government is something that has been lost on an entire generation of Republicans. I think that at some point here, people are now to some degree, nostalgically looking back and saying, "Ron Paul was right." This is all coming back, and the roosters are coming home to roost. I think that his legacy is going to build and grow over time.

I think you and I were talking about it before, a slightly different tangent of the point about limited government. We're devastated with the floods in Texas and I represent Kerrville. We lost 120 people. Obviously well known, those 27 little girls from a camp. We rallied around, and people of faith, and all coming together to help. But I've been really impressed with how much has been happening through philanthropy, and local action, and state action, less federal. Yeah, FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency], there are things in place and there's a lot of those battles to still ensue. But the extent to which the focus has been rightly on the people locally taking care of people locally.

If we don't get back to that, if we don't get back to that notion of limited government, then we're lost. Ron represents a philosophical bent that I think, I'm hoping, that there's a new generation of Americans that will grasp because they'll realize the futility of pursuing this path of unfettered spending which is driving up inflation, making housing completely impossible to afford. Making healthcare completely impossible to afford, so you don't ever control your life. People ask me, "Why do you do what you do?" I'm trying to fight to defend the ability of the American to go achieve the American dream, which they can't do right now. We're killing it by government action.

How do you define the American dream there?

The ability to live free, and to be able to go out and make your life…

Do whatever you want. There's not an American dream, the American dream is to make your own life.

Yes. Importantly, and this gets into libertarian, conservatarian, whatever you want to say. Do whatever you want. Well, there's limits to doing whatever you want.

Well, obviously.

In that sphere. But there's the right to go produce, live your life, work, produce for your family, own a home, get a doctor. Right now, all of those things, if I look at my staff and they're in their 20s or 30s, can they buy a house? They don't know. Can they go get a doctor and get healthcare? Increasingly limitedly. Can they buy a car? Can they afford one? Can they send their kids to a school of their choice? Those things are at the center of existence.

I think we've got to reclaim that ground. I think we're too corporatist. We're too….Free trade, I believe in. But you've got to be smart about what we're doing here in this country, in making sure that we've got workers here who have jobs in the United States. All of these things have got to come together so that you can go, you can go put a farm together. You don't have corporatists that are buying up every farm in the state of Texas, and I'm unable to actually go have the small farm that my parents passed down to me.

It gets complicated, but what's wrong with corporate farms?

I get that.

Especially, if they can run more acreage cheaper and produce more crops on it.

I get it.

Is that a problem?

At some point here, maybe this is Jeffersonian agrarianism popping its head into my UVA [University of Virginia] background.

I'm all for the freedom to be able to move capital around and make it be efficient. We all are. If you believe in free enterprise that way. But there is still something about your home and your community. There is still something about being able to say, "This farm, I own this dirt, this farm. I'm building and growing for the people here." The over-corporatization, and frankly it's not pure free enterprise corporate. Its corporate crony subsidized corporate. Big ag where the federal government is subsidizing big ag at the expense of local farmers. The big government that's subsidizing massive hospitals at the expense of local doctor-owned facilities, or whatever. We put all these bans in place and we funnel all this money, and now it's no longer the balance of a market where a corporation, it may not be their advantage to buy up a local thing. But now, it is advantaged. I think that's where we've gone awry.

I'm not asking for restrictions, but I'm just believing that community and the American dream are tied together. You want to be able to have an investment in your local area and the free flow of capital is important. But you also have got to have the non-government interfered with free flow of capital.

Just to dial in on this a little bit more. Should those small farmers be able to hire who they want? Or should they need to go through the federal government and say, "Oh, no, this person checks out?" Not to create a straw man here. The free flow of goods is good, the free flow of capital, the free flow of people.

You were very critical of Biden's border policies, and obviously Texas has a huge border with Mexico. But beyond that, what is your view about legal immigration and about letting people who want to come here, who can get jobs and work here, the more, the merrier, or what are the restrictions on that?

On this one, this is where, in a gathering of my libertarian friends, I'm a little more on the protect our sovereignty as our country. It's important that we know who's here and why they're here.

And making sure that Americans have jobs. Again, in a perfect utopian libertarian world, where free flow of capital is unfettered by government regulation, government interference or crony capital, then things would work out I think much better with respect to that flow. But you still have to have borders. You still have to know the bad guys are coming.

Sure. Nobody's questioned that.

Well, some do. I've had some pretty good fiery responses from some of my Cato [Institute] brothers when they've been at hearings. It's fine and I get it. Should you be able to go get labor if you can't get it? Sure. But there still has to be a component that is factoring in things like anchor babies and birthright citizenship. Which again, I understand all the debates. Whether or not they're in schools, if you have public programs. Again, erase all the public programs.

I think it was Milton Friedman who said very famously in the '70s, "I'm all for open borders if you get rid of the social welfare state."

Actually, he basically just said, "I'm all for open borders."

But he had the component in there about the social welfare state.

He'd build the wall around the welfare state, not around the United States.

But the component being though with a welfare state, which we massively have, which then completely alters the culture of our country. We in Texas are the ones that are sitting here with elementary schools where we have to do English as a second language, we have to do all of the things that cost with that, the hospitals, the healthcare locally. It's a real issue. You say, "Well, but you're getting the labor locally and all the tax policy." Well, that's why we have studies.

But at the end of the day, we have a problem right now where there are American workers who are not working because we're subsidizing them not to work, while we're then complaining about needing labor. We've turned it all upside down is my main point.

Is it a question of getting rid of some of those subsidies? When you say we've subsidized people not to work, there's a lot of Social Security benefits, or unemployment benefits, or various kinds of medical conditions to keep people off.

Tons of welfare people.

Yeah, that needs to be addressed.

Yeah. We had to battle to get work requirements involved with Medicaid, for example, and work requirements on SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] and food stamps. And whether or not that applies to parents who have kids or don't have kids.

Having that battle, which was a whole part of this bill which we got, we got a lot of requirements in there. Personally, I'd rather get rid of all that stuff, and then make that be state, local, churches, charities, etc.

It has a Ron Paul sensibility. Ron himself was no fan of immigration really. He kind of, in the abstract, should be in favor of it, but then he was often critical of it in specific cases. Is there a Ron Paul flavor to the MAGA movement? Because it seemed like Ron Paul certainly, in 2008 and 2012, the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, including Rand Paul, including Thomas Massie, [former Rep.] Justin Amash [L–Mich.]. It really seemed like a libertarian version of the Republican Party. Anti-war, end the Fed, limit the government was ascendant. Then that shifted gears heavily with the rise of Donald Trump and MAGA.

Well, that's an interesting question and I haven't really thought about it. I'll give you my gut response and then I'll think about it a little bit. I think where we are right now is in a blend of different factors. Part of this, when people talk about MAGA or they talk about the Freedom Caucus. I remember meeting with conservatives in the House before the Freedom Caucus existed when I was Ted Cruz's chief of staff. It was 2013, 2014. Then the Freedom Caucus was founded. Then the president comes along, and then it's MAGA, and so forth. We've had this evolution from 2008 onward. Now we're 17 years into the post-Tea Party, where all of those factors are now I think a part of where we are. Obviously, the overriding dominant force is the president and MAGA, but all of that is a piece of the fabric.

Back to the question about Ron. I think I would argue that, for example, some of the stuff about the Fed, and I get the stuff about the Federal Reserve and the interest rates, but still there is an anti-Fed, anti-government bureaucracy.

But it's very populist. Ron Paul is a populist…

There's that element that is there in part of MAGA. I do think the part about immigration right now is just recognizing, guys, we're at a point right now where we have 51-and-a-half, depending on which reports you look at, 51-and-a-half million people who were foreign-born. People will say, "Well, who cares?" We often have that. That's the highest percentage as an overall population we've really ever had in at least the modern era, if you go back to the early 20th Century.

Yeah, the '20s. Yeah.

But allegedly, we've peaked that number.

When America became great, yeah. 

But what I'm saying is though…But we also had a culture at that time that was assimilating, and saying learn English, and join in to the American dream, and all of that. Now, we've had this counterculture to that. Saying, "No, you don't have to do that," and you have [English as a second language], and you have everything else. How does that all produce a unified nation with an overall environment for success? I think that's part of the issue we've got right now.

Just to bust your chops a little bit, one said, "Latino immigrants are learning English at the same rate that my Italian grandparents did."

There's some of that. But there's also a whole lot of…

But I'm saying don't we want people from Cuba and Venezuela, people who are escaping socialism to come here?

Sure, 100 percent.

They're better Americans than I am probably.

Well, I got in trouble because I said I would rather deport white liberal Ivy League graduates, and would like to invite more people to come in otherwise.

Look, first of all, the expense for us in the state of Texas to manage that process is very high. Second of all, I question that number. Because I see a lot firsthand anecdotally in terms of what's happening in terms of language, and talk to a lot of Hispanic Texans who are a little fed up with the, "Hey, I came here, my parents came here, and they made me learn English. They made me do this stuff." Now they're seeing a different kind of environment.

Yeah. They're not making their kids learn English?

But then there's a wave here, and then there's schools, and then we're in a new era. I'm just saying, culturally what we're seeing here is that that's an impact.

I'm not disagreeing. Particularly at the border, at the southern border, hospitals and certain other kinds of facilities are overrun. If the federal government is saying, "We're in charge of the border," then they should be kicking in more money to help stressed areas for things like that. Is it immigrants' fault that we don't have a robust conception of what it means to be American? Because when I grew up, I'm a little bit older than you, but I grew up and America was a nation of immigrants. That was our whole thing was what is great about us, we can take people from shithole countries and turn them into great Americans, like Joe DiMaggio, etc.

Trump got in trouble for saying that.

I know. I know because he meant it, whereas I'm ironic about it.

What I would tell you is, of course, we're a nation of immigrants historically speaking, but understand that we're still a nation. And that has to matter. That's where I think there's a rubber meets the road issue right now. We've had a massive escalation over the last 30, 40 years. I actually don't care where people are from. What I care about is whether they're proudly putting the American flag up instead of another nation's flag, whether they're proudly joining in with our cause.

I'd recommend that you don't ever come to New York on St. Patrick's Day.

I get that, but it's one thing when it's a reverent celebration of a moment or a day of celebration that way. It's another thing when it's an in your face political statement.

But bringing this back to the point, there are a lot of hard-working American families that are hurting right now. They need to be able to have access to jobs. They need to be able to have access to their schools, and to their hospitals, and to their police. We've had a flood that is inundated in fentanyl and all sorts of things that have been crushing a lot of our community. That pushback is real and goes back to what kicked off this thread of the conversation. I do think that we are in an environment that's blending the libertarian sensibilities, the Tea Party, the limited government view, with a "Hey," the federal government has a role here to stop the flood and deal with the fact that Texas is getting inundated, and other people around the country are getting inundated. I actually think that's good. I remember we were getting some input from some of the folks in Central America. They were like, "We're losing brain drain, we're losing a lot of our good people." I think we should be having a stronger policy working with our friends in the Western Hemisphere, building up other countries. I'd love to have the free flow of trade, people moving about being able to work. But you've got to have barriers, barriers in the sense of restrictions and processes that work. Nobody disagrees with that. But we do have to have, in my opinion, a cooling-off period here to reset and deal with a lot of the mess the Biden administration created. But at the end of the day, what you really need to do is have a smaller federal government focused on its core responsibilities. Because if it was actually just doing the basic job of defending the country and defending the borders, instead of meddling with all aspects of our lives, then I think they would do a better job of that.

Let me ask you about foreign policy because this is sometimes where, to the extent that the Republican Party has become skeptical of foreign interventions, that seems to be a direct legacy both of Bush's foreign policy….I will just be catty for a second and point out that Texas has a terrible record with presidents, from Lyndon B. Johnson to George H. W. Bush to George W. Bush.

The LBJ Ranch is in my district, by the way.

Yeah. In Gillespie County, if I'm not mistaken. Ron Paul is the Republican who said to other Republicans, "It is all right to question American foreign policy," like post-World War II really muscular foreign policy. Do you agree with that, or do you feel like it goes too far?

One of the things that's interesting about you is that you are generally principled, and you at various points have said, "We should not be intervening. We shouldn't be giving any countries a blank check, but we should be supporting countries," etc. Can you explain your foreign policy? And do you think you're reflecting a new Republican consensus that may not be a Ron Paul anti-interventionist, but is certainly not a George Bush neo-conservative?

Funny you say it that way. When I was Sen. Cruz's chief of staff, this is now over a decade ago, we talked about it in terms of a third approach, a third way of thinking about foreign policy and national security.

Let me see if I can cut to the chase this way. I grew up a child of the '80s, [Ronald] Reagan, etc. You were probably just ahead of me. I was a proud American. It was like good, beat the commies. Let's tear down the wall, all that stuff. Then fast-forward, and you have these wars that are ongoing, and I'm studying the Middle East, and then 9/11. Then you're backing the president, he's standing on the rubble. It's like, "They're all going to hear from us real soon." You're all there patriotic, wanting to say, "Yeah. What the hell? Get the bad guys." Then somewhere in that timeframe, and I'll get to the exact moment for me, but in that timeframe, I started to go, "What are we doing?" We're in endless conflict with no clear mission. Then that reset my thinking.

That was about 20 years ago now. Then fast-forward, I took a trip, a rule of law trip to Baghdad in the middle of the war. Went over there and met with people, did a whole tour. I just remember I was getting a tour from a three-star general. He's taking me up and he's showing me soccer fields they're building, and they're doing all this stuff. I'm going, "This is all well-intended, but what the hell are we doing?" It just became very clear to me that there was this whole industry built around this. That that wasn't a clear position for America to have a foreign policy position that's about our national defense and that is non-interventionist, to your point.

I had a new thinking about it. Where I am today is I just generally believe we should be highly skeptical of, I'll use endless wars as the moniker. And that our driving policy should be what do we need to do to defend our interests as a nation? If you're going to go and intervene or do something, what is the mission? When can it be done? Can it be done quickly with the least amount of cost, loss of life, etc.? Defend our position, and then get out. But we shouldn't be out and meddling in nation building, and all these things.

I think there's a trend in that direction in the right way. I think that has governed a lot of the impulses with respect to Ukraine, although we're still seeing it. I guess they're going to have this summit in Alaska here soon. We'll see if something will come of that. And seeing, hopefully, ends of conflicts in a number of different areas. But obviously, some still ongoing. I think we need to…we can't do anything about….Well, we can't own every skirmish or conflict around the world. I think when we do, I think we sometimes make them worse. Notoriously, Afghanistan, the Soviet Union, then fast-forward. All of the complexities and the tangled webs you weave.

But that all being said, where I break from some of my libertarian brothers and sisters is I do think there are things where we have very specific national security interests where we should be engaged. I think that they play long-term benefits. I do think the work with Israel, and Iron Dome, and other things, I think is beneficial for us. I get that, and there's debates with the Republican Party and among libertarians on that point.

Certainly, in Trump's first term, the Abraham Accords. Whatever else you can say about what's going on in the Middle East, that's a major change.

Sure.

You had the Arab League actually call for the end of Hamas rule in Gaza.

I still think that's the right driving direction of where I think and where I believe that the administration wants to go. But obviously, there's some different tensions going on now after the October 7 issue. I hope that'll all get drawn down and get to peace, and that they can get busy rebuilding and dealing with what they're going to do. But by and large, the United States needs to focus on its own house. We have not done that. We're $37 trillion in debt. We don't have, I think, the relationships we ought to have throughout the Western Hemisphere to try to minimize the pressure of that immigration flow. In other words, that shouldn't be a political pressure. It should only be an economic one of, "Oh, yeah, if I want a job in X or go to school." Then we have policies that manage all that. But we don't, we don't have that. We've been so far strained and so far over-extended in my view. We've spent, what, $10 trillion-plus, at least, on whatever we've done over in the Middle East in all of our engagements over the last 20-X years. At one point, I remember it was $70 trillion, and 70-something-thousand injured, and 7,000-plus dead. I remember that, but that was eight years ago. That doesn't even count the burn pits, by the way. Which I didn't vote for because it was a six or $700 billion entitlement. That's what we do though. That's a perfect example. Over-extend, endless wars, our guys and gals get hurt, then we create a massive entitlement that we can't afford. Because there's never any cost-benefit that people go, "OK, well, what are we going to do?" Well, I don't know. We had some guys over there and they're breathing bad stuff, so $600 billion. Then our kids and grandkids are paying high interest rates and inflation.

A final topic, and speaking of elections in Texas. Texas right now is doing a novel redistricting, a mid-decade redistricting. How do you feel about, not the aims of that, but the means of it? Is this legitimate or is this the worst kind of politicking?

I think, number one, I'm not gerrymandering, or gerrymandering we should say. It goes all the way back to the founding. Nothing new under the sun. California is 40 whatever to nine. New England is basically all blue, not red, but there are conservative areas there that could be a district if they weren't gerrymandered. Texas is not as gerrymandered as some of our blue brothers and sister states. Some of that in 2020 was partly a landing place that we landed. Where it's like, "Well, let's consolidate districts that are in a square or more rectangular, or more representative portion." I think they ought to stay within county lines. I think representation matters to match the culture and the community that you represent. Those are my driving principles, but politics are part of it. You can't unilaterally disarm…

Is it OK to redistrict, instead of doing it once a decade, based on the census?

There's nothing that says we can't. It's very clearly political. Not saying anything anybody doesn't know. Gerrymandering is political. I think there are seats to be gained there. In full disclosure, we were probably a little soft in how far we could have gone in 2020. I say we; we have no vote in that in Congress. It's the legislature in Texas. They're taking it up. I think in light of the very close divisions and wanting to make sure that they've got a majority in the House. And also, in light of, without reopening the immigration debate, you've got a census issue about citizens, non-citizens. The impact on…

Well, non-citizens don't vote though, but they are represented in the census. 

Represented in the census and count persons, but counting persons, then how are they represented in terms of voting purposes? That's a debate. I think that's a factor in Texas, and in California, and in New York, and everywhere else. I think when we factor all that in, I do think that there's room here for the legislature to redistrict. Again, my political bent, or my personal philosophical bent might be the better way to put it, is cleaner lines, less gerrymandered districts. But man, again, you can't unilaterally disarm, so I get the political desire of the legislature to act, but I don't get a say.

Texas, over the course of your time here…you were telling me before, you're from an old Texas family, but then you grew up in…

In Virginia, yeah.

In Virginia, but you're back. Certainly, since the turn of this century, Texas is the destination. Florida can have whatever it wants, but Texas, it's going to become the most populous state in the country probably by 2050, if not before. It is also increasingly the cultural heart of America. It has an identity in a way that California does, or maybe New York. Florida does not. Why do you think people are coming to Texas? Is it the weather? Is it the fire ants? Is it the floods? Why do people come here and why is Texas thriving?

You picked the three things not to come here.

When my great-great-great-grandparents moved out to Dripping Springs, Texas, it was 1853-ish.

Where were they coming from?

They came from Georgia. Then my Roy side of the family came via Tennessee, Arkansas, in the 1870s, I think. But in any event, they all converged in that space. Then my family has been in Texas for the last 170-something years.

The reason I bring that historic perspective up is it was tough living. It was…you had to want it. You had to want to deal with…You had hostilities with Comanches. You had tough heat without air conditioning. All the stuff, you can go down the list. It was tough, so you had tough people. I think that bred a culture that was mixed with a great historic culture that was the Tex-Mex mix. Then the Germanic mix that came in—somewhat illegally too at the time.

Texas has been under Six Flags.

Correct.

Different countries. It's one of the great mixing pits of America.

I think all of that has combined though to create a culture that is Texan and people are proud of that. They want to adopt that. People get surprised. I see people come down, they see a Hispanic guy in South Texas with a cowboy hat and a big belt buckle. They go, "What's that all about?" It's like that's because it's who we are. You go to a goat roping and you're going to have a mix of people there.

But I do think, importantly, and the thing that I worry about in preserving and protecting Texas, because I think as Texas goes, to some degree the United States goes, is preserving that culture. That culture of independence, of personal responsibility, where government isn't providing for you. I'm very worried. The Texas government is bigger than it should be. We spend more than we should. Texas isn't as free as it should. It is highly regulated. Highly regulated. Cato [Institute] has done some big studies on that that you can go look at.

I don't think we're safe enough, I don't think we're free enough. There are things that I think we need to do to improve. But the reason people come to Texas is because of what it represents, and because of the freedom to be able to engage in commerce, to be able to live your life. I think we're at a crossroads. I think in order to maintain that Texas spirit and that Texas culture, we're going to have to double-down on the things that made us great. That means, in my opinion, a hard move to freedom. A hard move to a truly limited government.

You can't go around saying that Texas is the best thing since sliced bread and the federal government's the problem when you're a state of 30-plus million people and your Austin state government is the size of France or whatever. If our state government is bureaucratic, then we're not what we ought to be. We've got work that we need to do there, but it's a great state with a great mix of people, and people who respect what it means to work hard and to make their own lives.

I think the tech boom is a little bit that, it's the modern version of that. There's a reason Elon [Musk] comes and puts Tesla there. There's a reason that we've had a huge tech community because they like that, I'll call it libertarian spirit and ability. I think from a free enterprise standpoint, Texas is pretty free. I think from a regulatory, compliance, etc., standpoint, property taxes, there are things that we need to do to improve freedom in Texas and be the beacon of hope for the next century.

All right. Chip Roy, thanks for talking to Reason.

Thanks, Nick. Appreciate you guys.

• Producer: Paul Alexander
• Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

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