As Texas congressional districts go, the 21st is pretty easy to parse. The outline of it, which dips into Austin and enfolds a vast swath of the San Antonio suburbs, looks like a lumpier-than-average flightless bird, or a small-headed figure wearing a cape in a windstorm. It is rich and Republican and has been represented by Rep. Chip Roy since 2019. Roy was born and raised around suburban D.C. and got two degrees from the University of Virginia. After a brief career in investment banking—”nearly three years,” according to his official bio—Roy moved to Texas and into the world of conservative politics for roughly the same reason that an aspiring actor might move to Los Angeles, or that someone looking to make a bunch of money at once might rob a bank instead of a florist. Even in the sinecure-intensive world of conservative politics, where even the most unctuous and otherwise unemployable goober can count on a job even when the party is out of power, you have to go where the opportunities are.
This is not to say that Roy doesn’t really believe all the things he says he believes. 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. The nature of Roy’s deep and seemingly authentic personal offense at the existence of LIV Golf—”It just pisses me off,” Roy said in 2022, “I could just put on the Golf Channel, I could watch golf, now it’s fully charged political”—suggests that he is if nothing else in the right political party. 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 was just going where the work is for people who want to make a living in that industry. Roy worked in various high-level assistant roles for Ken Paxton and Ted Cruz and John Cornyn; he ghostwrote Rick Perry’s presidential campaign book, which was entitled Fed Up!
Representing the 21st Congressional District in Texas is a job that someone with Chip Roy’s politics could hold for as long as he wanted, provided he never developed the sort of principles that would get in the way of him doing the job in the way that someone with those politics would it. That hasn’t been a problem for Roy, exactly. As with most House Freedom Caucus members, the times when Roy has broken with his party have mostly come when he felt they were doing too much governing, or when it seemed like the House of Representatives itself was at risk of doing too much governing. That ideological and practical aversion to even the most basic Congressional function made Roy and his cohorts very useful when the party was out of power: “18 more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done,” he said in July of 2021. “That’s what we want.” He was able to deliver that, and to create the sort of broken and abstracted political situation necessary for the triumph of Trumpism.
The problem is that is just how Chip Roy is all the time, which means that he would be left out and unhelpful in a Republican-led House that sees its role as delivering ornate flattery and sweatily gung-ho support of whatever it is that Donald Trump is on about at any given moment. Roy favored Ted Cruz over Trump and his own gnarled principles over Trumpism’s relentless and servile managing up, and his seemingly quite real distaste for Congress as a concept and Trump as a leader led him to get more and more obviously bored in the job. He and the rest of the Freedom Caucus kept opposing various Trumpian gambits because he believed they could with some time and attention be made even worse, and then caving when it became clear that fidelity to Trump’s vinegary whim was both more important than anything else to their fellow Republicans and absolutely necessary to their own political survival; at some point, Roy grew a moderately distressing goatee.
As is often the case with libertarians, this can almost seem admirable if you can somehow look past every other thing they believe. Chip Roy is just not built to issue fulsome birthday wishes to a blowzy and dimwitted autocrat, and that really is a matter of principle, but it is more salient that all of his other principles amount to “using the power of the state to make vulnerable people’s lives harder, shorter, and worse” and I guess also “no Saudi money in golf.” Like many members of the Freedom Caucus, Roy is leaving the House to seek a different office that would allow them to keep doing all the awful things they want to do out from under the long shadow cast by Donald Trump’s thumb. There is still a lot of damage to be done out there, and Roy will be seeking to do it as Paxton’s successor in the office of Texas Attorney General.
This necessarily creates an opportunity for someone who is a little bit less ambitious and a bit more personally agreeable than Chip Roy, and who can do the job of a Republican Member of Congress in the current moment, which is to vote as directed and be prepared to go on television at a moment’s notice to suck up to the President. Roy is proof that being born and raised in the upscale suburbs of Washington, D.C., is not a disqualification for winning such an office in Texas. There is, in fact, a rich tradition of people who repatriate 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. But new people will come, for the same reason that Chip Roy came, which is that there is work to be found.
Mark Teixeira, strictly speaking, does not need work. He made hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a long and accomplished career in Major League Baseball, and caught on as an analyst on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball team right after retiring. He had a 9,764-square-foot home in Greenwich, Conn. and seemed quite happy to be raising his family there. “It’s my ninth year here now which is the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I was a kid, and I really feel like this is the place for the long term,” Teixeira told the website Darienite in 2017 when they interviewed him at the opening of a Bowlero in Milford. After the 2020 season, Teixeira left ESPN and announced that he’d be moving his family to Texas, where he spent the first years of his career with the Texas Rangers, to focus on “opportunities” that include “focusing more time on investing and philanthropy.” He sold the Greenwich house for $7 million in May of 2021, and announced that he would be seeking the Republican nomination in the state’s 21st Congressional District late last week.
“As a lifelong conservative who loves this country, I’m running for Congress to fight for the principles that make Texas and America great,” Teixeira said in the statement announcing his candidacy. “It takes teamwork to win—I’m ready to help defend President Trump’s America First agenda, Texas families, and individual liberty.” Like Roy, Teixeira bears the potentially disqualifying mark of not always having been a Trump supporter: He hosted a fundraiser for Marco Rubio back in 2015. Unlike Roy, though, Teixeira is a World Series champion and a former New York Yankee and the sort of person Trump instinctively tends to favor—very rich, New York-affiliated but not actually New Yorker-ish, large white teeth, an obvious avid willingness to do whatever it is that Trump might ask them to do. These are the sorts of winners that Trump likes to have standing behind him, or laughing at his jokes. He hates them, of course, but that is true of everyone else in his orbit. If they know it, they know enough not to make a big deal out of it.
The most important thing about the Issues page on Teixeira’s campaign website is that it doesn’t matter, or that nothing on it matters below “In Congress, Mark will champion President Trump’s America First agenda,” which are the first words on the page. But the most striking thing about it is that there aren’t really any issues on it as the term is commonly understood. In the place of anything shaped like a solution, there is only a familiar liturgy of problems and the little linguistic signifiers that mark Teixeira as a contemporary conservative political candidate. There is nothing really interesting or illuminating about that, and where it is surprising—Teixeira pledges to “fight Cultural Marxism” and protect the “God-given right to keep and bear arms from infringement, federal or otherwise”—it is mostly in how it reflects what and where the baseline is for conservative politics at this point. Even in that sense, there is little of use to learn from the assertion that the Second Amendment in the constitution has been elevated to more of a biblical commandment, or that even three-time Silver Slugger winners are saying and capitalizing Cultural Marxism now. Or, anyway, there is little to discover there that the political reality of every day had not already revealed.
Teixeira really was a good ballplayer, but the job he seeks—and, given the district’s political alignment, which he will certainly get if he wins the primary—will push him back towards Replacement Level. 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 idea is not even to be a teammate, because while Teixeira would surely make for a more agreeable clubhouse presence than Roy, this isn’t really a team sport. 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 expense of themselves and every person they ostensibly represent—to someone whose only identifiable passion and sole identifiable political belief are about the act of taking and having. It is the easiest job imaginable, and one for which Teixeira is absolutely as prepared as any other candidate. Anyone who would seek such a job would, in the bleakest and most elemental sense, absolutely deserve it.
