U.S. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who still has yet to get over the 50% threshold in either of his Senate bids, drew headlines since our original profile for trying to "correct" the amount of deaths from Covid-19 to a far lower number.
n this date one year ago, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” first profiled the U.S. Senator from North Carolina, Thom Tillis, who first got his Senate seat back in the 2014 elections. Prior to heading to Washington, D.C., Tillis served in the North Carolina House of Representatives from 2007-2014.
Now, we don’t want to just focus on Tillis’ career in our nation’s capital in this profile, and point out that North Carolina’s state government not-coincidentally went full-on Looney Tunes right around the point where the Tea Party began influencing the GOP and putting partisan tools like Tillis into seats of power. Tillis was allowed to run for re-election unopposed in 2008, 2010, and 2012. And from his role as House Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, the entire state legislature got gerrymandered into a false majority, and North Carolina Republicans started passing laws like stricter Voter ID bills (while Tillis admitted there was not statistical evidence of fraud to justify the need for it) and votes to cut the number of early voting days (aimed at suppressing the vote and maintaining that false majority further that were all turned away by appeals courts), an amendment to the state Constitution to ban same sex marriage (and he hasn’t changed his position on same sex marriage even after the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling), the notorious “Motorcycle Safety Abortion Bill” (where upon a bill requiring helmets for motorcyclists was amended to become one of the harshest anti-choice measures in all the country).
Perhaps his most shocking moment as a state legislator was in 2011, when he gave his thoughts on using a “divide and conquer” strategy to combat people who receive government assistance:
“At some point, we’ll have to say, ‘First kid, we’ll give you a pass. Second, third or fourth kid, you’re on your own. What we have to do is find a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance. We have to show respect for that woman who has cerebral palsy and had no choice in her condition that needs help and we should help. And we need to get those folks to look down at those people who choose to get into a position that makes them dependent on the government and say at some point, 'You’re on your own. We may end up taking care of those babies but we’re not going to take care of you.”
Tillis never apologized for those remarks, instead claiming he “misspoke” a bit, and then going on to pledge his support for welfare drug testing (which repeatedly has proven not just a failed policy, but courts rule it an unconstitutional one).
After stacking the deck for himself with the laws he pushed for passage as a legislator to suppress the vote in his favor in the years prior, Thom Tillis did made his run for Senate in 2014, employing a data firm you may have heard of that year called Cambridge Analytica, who may have already used the data from a Facebook primary breach to help him win office with a meager 48.2% over Democratic Senator Kay Hagan, the smallest winning total for a Senator from North Carolina in an election, ever. We’ll note Tillis spent the months leading up to the election fear-mongering about the spread of the Ebola virus into the United States, saying that not enough was being done by the Obama administration to stop travel from Africa.
Tillis, since winning office in 2014, somehow he has dug in and become even more conservative, not just maintaining his Personhood stance on abortion, He drafted legislation that would overturn the Affordable Care Act with the promise of still protecting pre-existing conditions, but had to pull it out of embarrassment that it was so poorly written it would just strip protections from almost everyone with them. He cravenly caved in support of Donald Trump’s immigration policies like the spineless toad he is, for fear he would lose a primary election this year. He denies the existence of climate change, calling it “not a fact” and was the first U.S. Senator to write to Donald Trump asking him to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords. On guns, Tillis is extreme enough to have an “A+” rating from the NRA, probably because he was willing to even vote against a bill that would have prevented anyone on a terror watch list from purchasing a firearm.
Thom Tillis is so against regulating businesses that, and we’re not joking about this, in 2015 wondered why people were going to make restaurant workers wash their hands after using the bathroom. Yes, this is exactly the kind of guy you want making decisions for Americans as a legislator right now.
So it will come as little surprise that a guy who rode to office by fearmongering about a deadly disease like Ebolavirus and will scrutinize even science is simple as “food service workers should wash their hands”, while Tillis was up for re-election in 2020, he was mostly mum about the god-awful response the Trump administration has had to the spread of COVID-19. Instead, at a town hall in September of 2020, Senator Tillis threw any credibility he might have had out of the window by trying to make excuses for that abysmal response by becoming a “death total truther” and talking about conspiracy theories being spread by Qanon supporters that the “real mortality rate from Covid-19” was far lower because deaths from ”things like heart attacks, and slip-and-falls and things like that“ were being attributed to Covid-19. (Experts have said if anything, the numbers are too LOW.) Tillis went on to advocate for “herd immunity”, and throw cold water on the advisement of medical experts to continue social distancing until the populace was vaccinated.
And yet, AND YET… this absolute s***stain was re-elected in 2020, again failing to cross the 50% threshold, getting just 48.7% this time out against Cal Cunningham in a highly contested race. Since returning to the Senate, Sen. Tillis has voted against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, refusing to hold him accountable for a violent coup attempt on the Capitol that resulted in five deaths and very nearly could have caused the deaths of elected officials, voted against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 because he would rather do nothing to help Americans during a pandemic, against raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and has voted against the majority of President Biden’s Cabinet nominations. Barring any scandals forcing his resignation, Thom Tillis will now be in office until 2026.
We are now pausing from writing blog posts to drink profusely, given that fact.
One Year Ago, May 11th, 2020: Thom Tillis (NC)… Original Profile
Two Years Ago, May 11th, 2019: Kevin Yoder (KS)… 2019 Update
Three Years Ago, May 11th, 2018: Kevin Yoder (KS)… 2018 Update
Four Years Ago, May 11th, 2017: Kevin Yoder (KS)… 2017 Update
Five Years Ago, May 11th, 2016: Kevin Yoder (KS)… 2016 Update
Six Years Ago, May 11th, 2015: Kevin Yoder (KS)… Original Profile
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