Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene calls Rep. Chip Roy 'feckless' and a Trump hater. Here's why.

WASHINGTON — It’s a GOP smackdown. Rep. Chip Roy of Hays County found himself on the receiving end of Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s wrath for going against her effort to punish a Democratic U.S. House colleague.

Greene took on Roy on social media Thursday, accusing him of being a “feckless” Republican for voting against her resolution to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., suggesting he wasn’t really a Texan and calling him “Colonel Sanders.”

Roy, who is balding and has a white goatee, similar to the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain’s elderly character, did not take kindly to any of it.

“Tell her to go chase so-called Jewish space lasers if she wants to spend time on that sort of thing,” Roy told The Hill, a riposte that immediately made its way to X, formerly Twitter.

Several years ago, Greene posted a conspiracy theory that the 2018 California wildfires were started by lasers from space controlled by the Rothschilds, a prominent Jewish banking family. When the post surfaced during her freshman term in 2021, it drew sharp criticism as being antisemitic, which Greene denied. Greene was stripped of her committee assignments by the then-Democratic House majority for a series of incendiary comments.

Last week, Greene introduced a House resolution to censure Tlaib based on remarks the Michigan Democrat, who is Palestinian American, made at a rally calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.

The motion was defeated Wednesday with 23 Republicans, including Roy, voting to “table” or kill the resolution, and joining 199 Democrats to defeat it. After the vote, Greene referred to Tlaib as “Terrorist Tlaib.”

Roy said in posts on X that while Tlaib had made “outrageous comments,” Greene’s bill was poorly worded, “deeply flawed” and falsely claimed that Tlaib led an “insurrection” since the Democratic lawmaker did not even attend the small protest inside a House office building that was shut down by police.

Roy’s comment apparently enraged Greene.

“Oh, shut up, Colonel Sanders, you’re not even from Texas, more like the DMV,” Greene said in a post, using the acronym for the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia metropolitan area.

Roy, 51, was born in Bethesda, Md.; lived in Virginia; and attended the University of Virginia. He eventually made his way to Texas when he enrolled in the University of Texas Law School and worked for John Cornyn’s first U.S. Senate campaign in 2002.

Roy, who considers himself a Texan, dates his Texas ties to his family’s ancestors who were in the state from the mid-19^th century.

Greene also picked up on Roy’s description of her “feckless resolution” by using the same term to describe the 23 Republicans who opposed it as “feckless” and listing their names to her followers.

She went on to seemingly accuse Roy of being a career politician. “Which is why you’ll never hold anyone accountable!” she said in her post.

Roy has worked for Cornyn, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott when Abbott served as attorney general. Roy was first elected to Congress in 2018 in the 21^st District, which now stretches south from Austin to the outskirts of San Antonio and west to Fredericksburg.

The Georgia Republican also fired away at Roy for “hating” former President Donald Trump, voting to certify the 2020 presidential election for President Joe Biden and “not caring” about the insurrectionists who led the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

While the Texan largely supported Trump when he was in office, Roy in March endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president in 2024, even before DeSantis had announced his campaign for the nation’s top office.

Roy was one of only six U.S. House Republicans from Texas to vote to certify Biden’s election in 2021, just hours after the Capitol attack ended. However, Roy voted against both of Trump’s impeachments.

Aside from his jab about the space lasers, Roy did not address Greene’s posts on X, and his office declined to comment.

Greene on Saturday pledge to reintroduce her resolution to censure Tlaib.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Marjorie Taylor Greene criticizes Chip Roy over Rashida Tlaib