Chip Roy says Katie Britt thrown ‘to the wolves’ in SOTU response

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) defended Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) after her panned State of the Union response speech, saying she was thrown “to the wolves” due to her lack of Senate speech experience.

Roy went after GOP leadership in a thread on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, alleging that party leaders set Britt up to fail.

He said GOP leaders made a mistake by “throwing a freshman Senator to the wolves by asking her to give the rebuttal knowing she had not yet given even a Senate speech,” he wrote.

Britt’s speech was mocked as awkward, stilted and not genuine. It was even the focus of Saturday Night Live’s cold open, with Scarlett Johansson playing the Senator.

Britt was also criticized for using a story of sexual violence from two decades ago in Mexico as an attack on President Biden. She later said the anachronistic story was still emblematic of problems with Biden’s border policy, but Roy chalked the issue up to a lack of preparation by her party handlers.

He said Britt was left “without fact-checking [for] the speech to help protect her from making an error with an outdated anecdote, & thus allow radical progressive democrats to make THAT the story rather than their dangerous, purposeful open border policies endangering Americans.”

Roy said Britt’s speech distracted from policy issues the GOP wanted to focus on and called on Republican voters to reject the leadership.

“Want change? PRIMARIES,” he wrote.

The White House went after Britt on Sunday morning, slamming her “debunked lies” in the speech, referring to the human trafficking anecdote. 

“Instead of telling more debunked lies to justify opposing the toughest bipartisan border legislation in modern history, Senator Britt should stop choosing human smugglers and fentanyl traffickers over our national security and the Border Patrol Union,” deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement. “Like President Biden said in his State of the Union, ‘We have a simple choice: We can fight about fixing the border or we can fix it.’”