Mark Teixeira Is Ready To Do Whatever It Is Congress Guys Have To Do:

His refusal to go along or get along as a charter member of the ultra-strident House Freedom Caucus suggests that he is at least sincerely committed to the core libertarian principle of annoying as many people as possible at all times.

But moving to Texas, for someone with ambitions like Chip Roy's, is also a business decision. He identified that he had the necessary skills, which in Roy's case were a high motor, stringently punitive politics, and a deeply disagreeable personality, and went where the work is for people who want to make a living in that industry.

... at some point, Roy grew a moderately distressing goatee.

There is, in fact, a rich tradition of people who make a pilgrimage to Texas because they see it as a place where their personal unpleasantness and politics would be understood as something much closer to cool, or just normal. Not all of these people will make it as Texans; some will return to places with more reliable electrical grids and less of the overbearingly predative and socially abject style of Freedom that contemporary conservative governance offers.

It is not a job for an exceptional person to seek or do; even someone like Chip Roy, who is exceptional primarily for how dedicated he is to his own rancid principles, can't really do it in the way that this moment and this president demand.

The way that a person qualifies for a job like this, in a party like this, in a moment like this, has less to do with anything they believe in or want to do than it does with what they are willing to give up—in fealty, in dignity, in self-annihilating service, and at the eventual expense of themselves and every person they ostensibly represent—to someone whose only identifiable passion and sole identifiable political belief are about the acts of taking and having.