GOP congressman threatens 'hot' civil war if Democrats win in Georgia

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) claimed on Monday that if Democrats win two Georgia Senate races, the country will erupt into another civil war.

“What happens tomorrow in Georgia, if we have a Democratically controlled Senate, we’re now at basically full-scale hot conflict in this country, whereas right now we’re at a cold civil war,” he told Fox News.

“If Georgians don’t show up and ensure that we hold the Senate in Republican hands, then that’s what’s happening. Two additional votes coming out of the Senate in Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico and they lock it down for good,” he said.

Roy was referring to Tuesday runoff elections — one between Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) and Democrat Raphael Warnock, the other between Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) and Democrat Jon Ossoff — that will determine what party holds a majority in the Senate for the next two years.

His suggestion of civil war comes just weeks after his own state party chair, Allen West, urged “law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution.” West denied that this was a call for pro-Trump states to secede from the union.

Republicans have attempted to make the Georgia Senate races a referendum on whether millions of Americans in Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia should be given full representation in Congress — hoping that conservative voters in the state will be motivated to stop other citizens from having the same rights they enjoy. Like Roy, they have suggested that statehood for the citizens of those two territories would make it impossible for Republicans to ever again hold a majority in the Senate.

This argument makes little sense. While Washington, D.C., has been reliably Democratic, Puerto Ricans have elected several Republicans — including their current resident commissioner, a non-voting delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives. And even if Democrats had gained four new Senate seats in the last Congress, Republicans would still have held a 53 to 51 majority.

In just one term in Congress, Roy has already amassed a long record of extreme comments. Last year, he attacked a 20-year-old survivor of the Parkland mass school shooting as “functionally illiterate” for criticizing Donald Trump’s family separation policies, likened anti-racism protesters to the white former cop charged with murdering George Floyd, and compared pandemic safety guidelines to “Nazi Germany.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.