After Sen. Thom Tillis announced his opposition to Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the president excoriated the North Carolina Republican and vowed to support a primary candidate against him next year. Tillis promptly declared that he was not running again, depriving Trump of leverage and reclaiming the “pure freedom” to speak his mind.
And speak he did. While Trump had promised to protect Medicaid funding, Tillis argued that his bill would eventually deprive almost 12 million Americans of health care coverage, including 663,000 in North Carolina.
“Republicans are about to make a mistake on health care and (betray) a promise,” Tillis warned on the Senate floor. “I’m telling the president that you have been misinformed: You supporting the Senate mark will hurt people who are eligible and qualified for Medicaid.”
Tillis subsequently joined all 47 Democrats and two other Republicans (Rand Paul and Susan Collins) to vote against the bill, which passed the Senate 51-50 after Vice President J.D. Vance cast a tiebreaking vote. Trump has set a July 4 deadline for a vote on the bill in the House.
Washington gossip immediately focused on who would succeed Tillis in the Senate, but his departure poses two larger questions: What is happening to the base of the Republican Party, and to the character of the U.S. Senate?
Last May, Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, wrote an insightful article in The New York Times, lamenting the same Medicaid cuts that infuriate Tillis and stating that his party’s position was “both morally wrong and politically suicidal.”
When Ronald Reagan denounced “welfare queens” in the 1980s, he could dismiss them as unswerving and undeserving Democrats, not hardworking, taxpaying Republicans. But today, Hawley maintained, the GOP is increasingly the party of the working class, and “Republicans need to open their eyes: Our voters support social insurance programs. More than that, our voters depend on those programs.”
Exit polls last fall reinforce his point about the changing makeup of Republican loyalists. In 2020, voters earning less than $100,000 a year backed Joe Biden over Trump by 56 to 43. Last year, that same income group supported Trump over Kamala Harris by 51 to 47. Voters without college degrees voted Republican 56 to 43. Those who said their economic situation had declined under Biden, almost half the electorate, overwhelmingly favored Trump by 82 to 16.
Tillis makes a similar argument and describes his own boyhood: growing up in a trailer, working as a cook and waiter at a fast-food joint, finally making enough at a warehouse to afford a trailer of his own. These are our voters — your voters, he’s telling Trump — and these are the people who will be hurt by your policies.
Even as the Republican Party has been broadening its base, however, it’s been cracking down on dissent and diversity. Other strong-minded lawmakers who have defied Trump — Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Jeff Flake and Bob Corker — have been driven into exile and denounced as heretics.
“In Washington over the last few years, it’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species,” Tillis stated.
Tillis is no liberal — he’s not even a moderate — but he is a pragmatist, a professional legislator who served as speaker of the North Carolina House. As The Washington Post reports: “He built a reputation for himself as a bipartisan dealmaker, working with Democrats on legislation to address gun violence and codify the right to same-sex marriage. He also worked on the failed effort last year to pass a bipartisan immigration and border bill.”
While Trump did not start the trend that is making dealmakers like Tillis an “endangered species,” he has vastly accelerated it. All good politicians understand the imperative to reward friends and punish enemies, but Trump has taken his tirades to a new extreme, denouncing anyone who shows even a hint of disloyalty. And social media has given him a lethal new weapon to carry out his virulent vendettas.
Trump is the worst example of politics as Holy War in today’s capital, but he’s hardly the only one. Tillis rightly points out that Democrats were deeply intolerant of two of their own members who actually worked with Republicans, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and helped drive them out of office.
“They got things done,” Tillis said. “But they were shunned after they courageously refused to cave to their party bosses to nuke the filibuster for the sake of political expediency. They ultimately retired, and their presence in the Senate chamber has been sorely missed every day since.”
Tillis will be missed as well. The ranks of his “endangered species” — lawmakers who know that “compromise” is not a curse word, but an essential element of real-world problem solving — keep shrinking.
Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He can be contacted by email at stevecokie@gmail.com.
