Tillis wobbles. In the run-up to the Senate’s vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, according to detailed accounts in both The Times and The Wall Street Journal, Tillis privately expressed serious misgivings about Hegseth’s character and worked vigorously behind the scenes to scuttle the nomination before the full Senate had to consider it. He failed.
On the day of decision, three Republican senators — Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell — voted no. Had Tillis joined them, Hegseth wouldn’t have been confirmed. Instead, Tillis did as Trump wanted. The Times reported that in the hours before the vote, Trump welcomed a group of North Carolina lawmakers aboard Air Force One and “noted Mr. Tillis’s impending defection.” Trump then asked if any of them wanted his endorsement for a primary challenge to Tillis.
What’s so sad about Tillis in the present is what moxie he showed in the past.
“He has put himself out there numerous times to do what’s right,” said Sarah Treul Roberts, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. During the Biden administration, Tillis bucked his party and crossed the aisle to join forces with Democrats on gun-safety legislation, on infrastructure spending, on same-sex marriage. He got attention and plaudits for being an outlier among the Republican toadies of the Trump age, and he seemed to relish that role, even as it earned him a formal censure from the North Carolina Republican Party. Cunningham and other political insiders who have observed Tillis for decades, going back to his years in North Carolina’s General Assembly, say that he’s a practical, progress-minded lawmaker at heart.
“He could have been a good and maybe even great senator in an earlier age, when bipartisan deal making was rewarded,” said Asher Hildebrand, one of my colleagues at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “But in an age when loyalty is the only thing, he has to shrink away from greatness — or at least the type of greatness he may have imagined when he took the job.”
Tillis’s backers say that he hasn’t changed; circumstances have. He wants to be in the mix, and he wants to solve problems, so when Joe Biden was president and Democrats were in the majority, he worked with them. Now Trump is back in the White House, and Republicans control both chambers of Congress; he’ll extend them the same courtesy. “It’s not about independence,” Paul Shumaker, Tillis’s longtime chief political adviser, told me. “What he has always said is that we need outcomes.”
