Thom Tillis
Welcome to what is the 867th original profile here at “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day”, where we’ll be discussing the U.S. Senator from North Carolina, Thom Tillis, who is up for re-election in November, since he 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:
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, and 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. So it will come as little surprise that now when he’s up for re-election in 2020, he’s mum about the god-awful response the Trump administration has had to the spread of COVID-19. We should probably also mention Tillis employed 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.
Now Senator Tillis, over the past six years, somehow he has dug in and become even more conservative, not just maintaining his Personhood stance on abortion but also that he 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 has 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.