GOP congressman denounces Democrats for naming a post office after a late colleague — despite doing it twice in the past 3 months

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) has spent the three months of his first congressional term flip-flopping on one very unimportant issue.

On Tuesday, Roy and six other Republicans voted down a bill to name a post office near Rochester, New York after the late Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter. They all gave some very apolitical excuses for the snub, but Roy's was the most blatantly hypocritical, Roll Call reports.

Slaughter died in March 2018 during her 16th congressional term, capping off a career of fighting for women's rights. Her husband Bob Slaughter died in 2014, and her congressional successor Rep. Joe Morelle's (D-N.Y.) first congressional bill aimed to name a post office after the Slaughters. The resolution easily passed on Tuesday, though not with a vote from Roy, who issued a statement saying "I don't think politicians should be spending valuable time naming post offices after other politicians." Roy neglected to mention that in his less than three months in Congress, he's co-sponsored two bills to rename post offices. One was for a late Army National Guard officer, and the other, ironically, was for retired Texas Democratic Rep. Charles Stenholm.

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Other opposers explained that they found naming post offices after anyone but veterans to be a waste of time, per Roll Call. They didn't seem to realize that authoring a whole statement to explain their protest vote was likely more time-consuming than just saying "yea."

Opposition surprisingly didn't come from Slaughter's vehement rival Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), despite The Buffalo News suggesting Slaughter actually spurred Collins' arrest on fraud charges last summer. Collins, along with two other Republicans, simply sat this vote out.