Exclusive: Why Chip Roy can't support the 'big, beautiful bill': 'The swamp does what the swamp does'

As reconciliation talks ramp up, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is doing what he can to reel in Republican defectors.

Johnson can afford to lose only three Republican votes and still get reconciliation out the door, which is shaping up to be a tall task as more and more Republicans take issue with different aspects of the "big, beautiful bill." Among them is Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, who outlined his grievances in an exclusive interview with Blaze News.

'I didn't come here to perpetuate a broken system. I understand that we have a thin majority, but we should deliver.'

"Reconciliation is all about balancing our current priorities to make sure that our spending and our tax policy results in something that could be remotely described as deficit-neutral or reducing the deficit," Roy told Blaze News. "So that's kind of the first, you know, measure of whether you're going to do something successfully or not."

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As Roy noted, codifying President Donald Trump's campaign promises is the unofficial measure of success on the Hill. While Trump himself has greenlit 151 executive orders as of this writing, only five bills from Congress have actually been signed into law.

"We need to deliver on the tax policy that President Trump ran on, and that would extend what he did in 2017," Roy added. "We need to deliver on spending restraint. We need to deliver on the priorities that the American people sent us here to deliver on."

"The problem is the swamp does what the swamp does," Roy told Blaze News.

Although reconciliation covers some of the MAGA mandate, Roy says it is still too flawed in its current state for him to throw his support behind the bill.

'It's a broken system, and this bill doesn't make it better,' Roy added. 'It frankly, arguably, makes it worse.'

"The problem is we've got a flawed bill. That's the bottom line," Roy added. "It has some good tax policy and some not-so-good tax policy. Some of it is not extended as it should be. We've got some good spending restraint and some bad spending policy."

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Roy used the proposed Medicaid reforms as a case study. One tool Republicans have used to trim down Medicaid costs and uproot fraud has been to enforce work requirements so that fewer people are able to take advantage of the system, allowing vulnerable and disabled people Medicaid was intended for to have access to the resources they need.

But as Roy pointed out, these so-called reforms have flaws of their own.

"They put the work requirements in, and they said, 'Oh, we've got work requirements,' but they don't take place until 2029, after the Trump presidency," Roy told Blaze News. "They have waivers to the work requirements even when they kick in in 2029. They do not address all the ridiculous federal funding of certain states at the expense of other states."

"It's a broken system, and this bill doesn't make it better," Roy added. "It frankly, arguably, makes it worse."

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Roy said that unless the bill was significantly amended to rein in spending and actually reform Medicaid, he wouldn't be able to support it.

"It has to be amended," Roy told Blaze News. "I'm not going to be able to support it as it's currently drafted, and those amendments are going to need to be, you know, relatively significant."

"I didn't come here to perpetuate a broken system," Roy added. "I understand that we have a thin majority, but we should deliver."

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