Chip Roy: Constituents say ‘shut down border or shut down government’

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said Monday that his constituents want lawmakers to shut down the government if there is no deal on the border.

“I sure don’t think we ought to be giving more money to Ukraine without forcing the change in the border. We need to. It’s the only tool we have,” he said on Fox News’s “Your World With Neil Cavuto.”

“I mean, I don’t want to — I’m not trying to rattle about shutdown for the sake of it. But the people I represent, they’re like, ‘Good lord, shut down the border or shut down the government until you wake up President Biden and [Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas to do their job,’” he continued. 

Roy suggested last week that conservative lawmakers need to withhold funding to force the Biden administration to agree to the GOP’s border demands. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) attempted to walk back concerns of a shutdown over the weekend, saying Roy was not threatening to shut down the government in his remarks. 

Roy also said Monday that Texas has had to take matters into its own hands regarding the border to “defend” itself.

“We’ve had to spend out of our own money to do what the federal government is supposed to do,” he said. “And it’s long past due for us to do something about it. It’s why I don’t think we should be funding the government without getting change.”

Some conservative lawmakers have already threatened to shut down the government over the border. Roy circulated a “Dear Colleague” letter last week urging lawmakers to hold up government funding legislation until Democrats and the White House agree to border security and asylum reforms included in H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act, which the House passed in May with exclusively GOP support.

“We must make funding for federal government operations contingent on the president signing H.R. 2, or its functional equivalent, into law and stopping the flow across our border (with demonstrable near-zero results),” he wrote.