Vice President Kamala Harris can run but she can’t hide from the policy disasters of the Biden-Harris administration, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview.
Roy spoke to Breitbart News in Washington from the Young America’s Foundation National Student Conference moments after he addressed a packed ballroom of young conservative students.
“It’s been kind of entertaining to certain degree — although sad — to watch our Democratic colleagues, to watch the media, to watch the administration, and to watch the vice president herself run away from the very clear tapping by the current president of her as vice president to run point on dealing with the border crisis,” Roy told Breitbart. “Now they want to try to hide behind wordsmithing about ‘well, she’s supposed to engage with the countries in the Northern Triangle, Mexico, she wasn’t in charge, she wasn’t the borders czar.’ It’s all word salad, they’re trying to chop this up.”
Roy said there is plenty of blame to go around, but despite media spin, Harris deserves her fair share.
“Call her border czar, don’t call her border czar, I don’t care,” he said. “Fact is, [Biden] gave her a clear job and she clearly failed.”
Roy continued:
The buck stops with the President. [Homeland Security Secretary] Alejandro Mayorkas carries a lot of the blame. But she carries a whole lot of the blame because she didn’t even bother to go talk to the border patrol chief, Jason Owens. She didn’t talk to the previous Border Patrol chief, Raul Ortiz. She only stopped at the border once for a brief photo op en route to a fundraiser in LA. She stopped in El Paso, which wasn’t even the center point of the mass flow across the border, all of the children getting sold into sex trafficking trade, all of the fentanyl killing Americans, all of the empowerment of China, all of the empowerment of cartels, all of the people that are coming into our country who are on the terrorist watch list or who have criminal records.
Lakin Riley is dead because of their paroling people in the United States. I could go on and on. Harris bears an enormous chunk of the responsibility. And I think that’s going to be a very clear center point of the debate heading into the fall.
Roy advised Republicans to hone-in on Harris’s failed record as well as her complicity in “the cover up about the mental state and the mental health of the presidency” and “enabling” the other plotters seeking power for themselves.
“They set aside the president, took him off of the top of their ticket,” Roy said. “He very clearly doesn’t have the full cognitive capabilities to carry out the powers and duties of the office. Everybody knows that and can see it. That endangers us. They put him in that position for political power. They did it on purpose. They obfuscated, they lied, they covered it up. Kamala Harris was a part of that.”
But Harris is culpable for more than the border crisis and coverup, Roy explained.
“Now they have Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket. Well, guess what? She’s Biden-Harris administration,” Roy said. “She owns all of the failures of this administration. She owns the inflation, she owns the open borders, she owns the failed foreign policy, she owns the radical climate agenda. She owns a radical woke agenda that is destroying our country and ripping out the soul of our country. So this is all I think going to be center point of the debate this fall. Do I think border is probably first and foremost? Probably. Certainly one of the top two or three things, and she’s been an abject failure on it.”
Roy said Harris, lacking any accomplishments of her own, will be forced to spin the Biden-Harris administration’s failures in appealing to voters.
“I’m sure she’ll pitch a lot of the same tropes that Joe Biden was putting out there,” he said. “She’ll say, Oh, the economy’s better or say – she’s gonna have a lot of words, but she literally has nothing to run on that she has ever done.” Roy elaborated:
To the extent you can give her anything at all, it would be that as a prosecutor, and or as attorney general, that she put some criminals in jail. But she’s run away from that, right? She doesn’t want to talk about that. And so the one thing you could actually say that maybe she did, she’s running away from. Literally you can point to nothing else. As vice president name something. As senator name something she ever did.
I think a reporter actually asked the White House Press Secretary, “hey, what has the Vice President done?” Nobody has an answer because what literally – I mean, I’m gonna try to be objective here, just take off my partisan hat – what has she actually ever done? All she ever does is go out to be a mouthpiece for the radical progressive Democrats that are killing our country, that are destroying everything about the fabric that makes America – dividing us by race, claiming that a man can have a baby, advancing the radical transgender ideology, advancing the things that are destroying our military through the woke ideology, killing it – the very same things, by the way, endemic in the Secret Service that led to the President being shot.
She is responsible for all of that because she’s been one of the loudest voices for all of that ideology, destroying our government.
Roy referenced a new body created by the House to investigate the Secret Service failures that led to the assassination attempt on Trump but warned against Washington falling back on another do-nothing-but-talk-about-it committee.
“As I just said to these students here, we don’t need another report,” he told Breitbart. “We don’t need another paper tiger committee that doesn’t produce what needs to be produced.”
Roy said the task force must “come forward and produce something quickly, get to the truth, make it available to the American people, and then put together the very specific recommendations that we will enact when President Trump is in the White House and Republicans have control of the House and the Senate on day one in January, that we’re going to fundamentally transform and remake the Secret Service, the FBI, our military, all of those that are responsible for, caring for, and securing the United States.”
He continued, “the fundamental role of government is to secure the blessings of liberty. The Constitution says it’s the fundamental role of the federal government. Our borders are wide open, our Secret Service can’t even protect the president United States, our military is woke and weak and engage in endless conflict. We need to change that immediately. And we need a plan to do that. And that’s what I hope will come out of whatever these folks who are on the task force put forward.”
Roy believes the younger generation represented by the students attending YAF’s conference must play a critical role in saving the Republic:
You’ve got a generation that’s staring at $35 trillion of debt, they’re staring at the open borders, they’re staring at academia and an education system that’s been trying to indoctrinate them, advanced the worshipping at the altar of the climate agenda as opposed to the Lord Almighty, you know, divvying us up by race, all of these things that are meant to destroy western civilization – in short what has been good and great about this country for the last almost 250 years. We’ll be celebrating our 250th birthday in two years. And I believe fundamentally that this generation is the generation that’s going to have to step up and save freedom. It’s not even just about saving America. It’s about saving freedom. And I think in two years, as we celebrate a birthday, we want to be on a new direction, a new trajectory.
Fairly or not, the young generation must recapture what made America great after decades of failures by generations preceding them.
“I hope some of us who grew up in the era of Reagan – I came of age in the 1980s, I’m just over 50 years old – I hope we can join forces with this generation once we move past the damage that has been created by the sort of baby boomer and hippie generation that frankly, left this country far worse than they found it,” he said. “We’re gonna have to be the ones that save it.”
Roy said his message to the conference was “that it’s going to take courage to say no. “This generation is going to have to be the generation that stands up and says no – no to government largesse, no to the false promise of welfare, no to the false promises of statism, no to all of these fake, false promises the government can care for you.” He continued:
Reagan was correct when he said government isn’t the solution, government is the problem. And we need to minimize government. We need to get government out of our lives. But the key message to them, the key message to the next generation, they’re gonna have to be the generation that sacrifices and that takes the more difficult road, take the road less traveled. They don’t go for the easy handouts. They don’t go for the easy “oh, please give me give me,” they’re gonna have to be the ones that say “no, I don’t want that. I want to live free. I want to start a business. I don’t want that government support or help. I don’t want that supposed handout. I want to make my own way because that’s the American dream.”
Roy is encouraged by what he sees in students like those involved in YAF and believes the futures is bright for conservatives and the nation.
“I think this next generation can establish that the counterculture is going to be that it’s cool to be conservative, and it’s cool to believe in limited government, in freedom, and hopefully they’re going to be willing to do that,” he said. “And Young America’s Foundation has done a good job of giving a platform for these kids to be able to come here and come together and talk about it.”
Bradley Jaye is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter at @BradleyAJaye.
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