I was energized while writing this newsletter. See if you can tell. In it, I take on some of the praise Chip Roy has received from pundits at my favorite site, The Dispatch. Excerpt from the portion for free subscribers:

I gotta get something off my chest. For years now, I have listened to some of my favorite pundits on my favorite site, The Dispatch, extol the alleged Sincerity and Serious Thoughtfulness of one Charles Eugene “Chip” Roy, who represents Texas’s 21st congressional district. Roy is a personal friend of Sarah Isgur, who hosts the Dispatch Live podcast and appears on (and will soon host) the excellent legal podcast Advisory Opinions. Isgur, Jonah Goldberg, and Steve Hayes have often talked up Roy and his alleged earnest nature. Even my favorite writer, Allahpundit, whom I will have to start learning to call “Nick Catoggio,” has given Roy points for sincerity, saying of Roy: “You may disdain his policies or his political style but by all accounts he means what he says.”

I beg to differ. It’s rare that I’m more cynical than Nick, but I don’t think Chip Roy is truly sincere about anything . . . other than, perhaps, staying in step with his voters. And if that’s how you define “principle,” then the United States Congress is chock-full of the most principled people on the planet Earth.

And an excerpt from the portion for paid subscribers, discussing Roy’s anger at Cheney for expressing opinions out of step with her conference, and citing the example of Mitch McConnell’s “no” vote on the second impeachment:

So why did McConnell vote no? As reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns report in their excellent book This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, McConnell explained his vote in this way: “I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference.” That’s basically the attitude Chip Roy is taking here. You want to be principled? You want to say what you actually believe instead of falsehoods that your colleagues believe? Fine, but then you don’t get to be a leader.

OK. Maybe that’s right. But you know who immediately put himself up for the leadership position once Cheney was booted out? That’s right: one Charles Eugene “Chip” Roy. He even sent a fundraising email boasting of how he was at the vanguard of the anti-Cheney movement:

On May 12, the day that the House GOP booted Cheney from her post in leadership, Roy’s campaign sent out a fundraising email boasting that Roy “was the FIRST to call Cheney out on her anti-Trump and self-serving hysterics.”

So apparently, Roy sees himself as a guy who, as leader, would never follow Cheney’s example of purposefully stating her actual opinion to a question asked by a reporter if the answer is out of step with the views of a majority of the Republican conference.

How, exactly, does that square with Isgur’s view that “[y]ou can not like what Chip believes, but believe me when I tell you that Chip believes it. . . . If Chip thought that his constituents would vote him out of office for believing what he believed and for voting the way that he would want to vote, he will happily leave Congress”?

I submit that it does not. You cannot possibly square that circle. You can fantasize all you like about Good Chip Roy. But Pandering Chip Roy will always emerge victorious.

But it gets worse.

It’s 6,000 words and over 3,000 are free. Subscribe here to read the part about Roy’s treatment of Cheney, and find out how it got worse.