Thom Tillis has nothing left to lose, and on Thursday he made sure everyone knew it. The retiring North Carolina Republican took to the Senate floor, whiteboard in hand, and delivered a broadside against the SAVE America Act that could have been drafted in Chuck Schumer’s office. He didn’t merely announce his opposition. He promised sabotage.
“I will use every device I have available to slow down the wheels of government,” Tillis declared, nearly shouting, if the House sends over another reconciliation bill carrying President Trump’s election integrity provisions.
Sit with that for a moment. A Republican senator is threatening to grind the federal government to a halt, not to stop wasteful spending or an unconstitutional power grab, but to stop a bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote in American elections.
The timing was no accident. On Wednesday the House passed the National Defense Authorization Act with SAVE America Act language included, sending it to the Senate on a 217-209 vote. On Thursday the House Budget Committee voted 20-14 to adopt a reconciliation resolution opening a second path, one that would allow the measure to pass the Senate with a simple majority rather than the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.
The walls are closing in on the excuse-makers, and Tillis knows it. So he grabbed a whiteboard and put on a show.
His Own Words Convict Him
Here is where the senator’s argument devours itself. Tillis insists the bill cannot be implemented before November, complaining that “my God it needed to happen two years ago.” He’s right about that much. It did need to happen two years ago. And two years ago, versions of this legislation were passing the House and dying in the Senate, blocked by Democrats and a handful of Republicans hiding behind the filibuster.
Tillis was among the obstacles then, and he is the obstacle now. The arsonist has arrived to lecture us about the fire.
His mockery gave the game away. “Whether it’s the SAVE Act, the SAVE America Act, the new SAVE legislation that’s being proposed in the House, SAVE goes to Hollywood, SAVE goes to Hawaii, whatever the sequels are, all of them are fundamentally flawed,” he sneered.
That is not the language of a man with good-faith implementation concerns. That is contempt, aimed squarely at the president and the tens of millions of Americans who consider citizen-only voting a baseline requirement of a functioning republic.
Tillis loves to remind audiences that he implemented voter ID as speaker of the North Carolina House, and he does support a watered-down alternative, a grant program encouraging states to adopt voter ID rules with federal audits for those that refuse. In other words, he supports election integrity in theory, at some future date, through a mechanism with no teeth, administered by a bureaucracy that would take years to stand up.
This is the oldest trick in the moderate Republican playbook. Endorse the principle, then strangle every practical means of achieving it.
The Pattern Is the Point
This was not a one-time eruption. Tillis was one of four Senate Republicans who voted last month against attaching the legislation to an immigration enforcement funding bill, drawing the president’s public rebuke. He told his hometown paper the bill is “dead” and dismissed the entire effort as “theater.”
He has vowed he will “never vote” to touch the filibuster, calling the idea “foolish and lazy.” At every fork in the road, on process, on procedure, on principle, Tillis finds a reason to land exactly where the Democrats need him.
And then came the most galling line of all. Tillis warned that pushing the bill would “convince the American people that you can’t count on your election results,” which he called dangerous and irresponsible. Understand what he is arguing.
Attempting to secure elections undermines confidence in elections. Requiring proof of citizenship casts doubt on outcomes. By this logic, the lock on your front door is an insult to your neighborhood. It is the sort of reasoning that only makes sense inside the Beltway, where the appearance of integrity matters more than the substance of it.
President Trump has framed the stakes plainly, insisting that requiring identification to vote should be something no American opposes. Polling has shown for years that overwhelming majorities agree, across party lines. The Senate’s job now is simple. The House has done its work twice in one week. The full House is expected to vote on the reconciliation resolution as early as the week of July 20. Every senator who stands in the way, Democrat or Republican, will be doing so in full view of an electorate that wants this done.
Scripture speaks to men who commit to a course and then turn against it.
And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.
Tillis put his hand to the plough of voter ID years ago in Raleigh. Now, with nothing to fear from voters he no longer answers to, he looks back, and worse, he stands athwart the field daring anyone else to finish the row.
North Carolina will replace him soon enough. The question is whether the Senate’s remaining Republicans will let one retiring member’s grudge against the president outweigh the clear demand of the American people. The math Tillis keeps invoking cuts both ways. Fifty votes is all it takes.
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