NC-Sen: On Thursday, three weeks after Sen. Thom Tillis published an op-ed in the Washington Post declaring that he would vote for a resolution rolling back Donald Trump’s bogus emergency declaration because it was his “responsibility” to “preserve the separation of powers” and to “curb” “executive overreach,” the North Carolina Republican decided it wasn’t his responsibility after all. Instead, Tillis joined most of the GOP caucus in voting against the resolution.
Tillis is up for re-election in 2020, and he pissed off plenty of conservatives at home when he temporarily said he was against the emergency declaration—so much so that he managed to stir talk of a primary challenge. In a Wednesday piece in The Hill, published the day before the vote, Rep. Mark Walker confirmed that he wants to run for the Senate at some point, and while he might wait until GOP Sen. Richard Burr retires in 2022, Walker he added that he “won’t rule out” taking on Tillis.
Tillis’ allies reportedly think that Walker could just be trying to get attention ahead of a 2022 bid, but even if they’re right, he’s hardly the senator's only potential primary foe. David McIntosh, the head of the radical anti-tax Club for Growth, said earlier this week that “Tillis is in danger of becoming a dead man walking” and predicted that either Walker or fellow Reps. Mark Meadows or Ted Budd would beat him.
The Hill writes that Meadows, the head of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, told them he has “no plans” to run, which is every politician’s favorite way of not saying “no.” There is, however, no direct quote from Meadows, and we also haven’t heard anything from Budd, who won his seat in 2016 with the Club’s backing.
The Hill adds that businessman Garland Tucker is considering taking on Tillis in the primary, but he doesn’t appear to have said anything publicly. Tucker founded the multi-million dollar investment firm Triangle Capital Corporation, which was sold for almost $1 billion last year. However, that sale came months after TCC’s stock crashed, an event that the company’s CEO blamed on Tucker and other former managers.
It remains to be seen if Tillis’ vote on Thursday will convince some of his would-be primary challengers to back off, or if they’ll just see him as even weaker. Walker notably did not close the door on a campaign after Thursday’s vote, with his communications director saying that the congressman “is humbled to have the support and consideration of conservatives across North Carolina, but is not planning to primary Thom Tillis.”
And there’s good reason to think Tillis’s spinelessness won’t improve his standing with hardliners. He’s also inflamed some Republicans by authoring legislation to try to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller from Trump—and wouldn’t you know it, he even wrote an op-ed titled “Why I want to protect Robert Mueller.” Tillis’ problems with the party base in fact stretch back many years, to his time as speaker of the state House, and he’s repeatedly been formally “censured” by local county GOP organizations on issues ranging from voter ID to immigration.
Team Blue is also hoping to target Tillis next year. National Democrats have yet to land a recruit, but now that Tillis has both irrevocably tied himself to Trump’s most extreme fantasies and demonstrated just how feeble he is, that job should get easier.