Jun.17

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Nuts and Bolts, Part I: Thom Tillis

For anyone who is interested in how the legislative sausage gets made—and that includes everyone who reads this site, right?—you don't often get the sort of direct view of things that was afforded by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) late last week.

Tillis did not intend to give people a look into the sausage grinder, mind you. Following the vote on the DHS funding bill, which included a Tillis-sponsored, slush-fund-killing amendment that went down in flames, the Senator wrote a somewhat heated letter to his colleagues. The letter leaked to Punchbowl News, and then found its way into the hands of a couple of right-wing talk show hosts. Because Punchbowl requires an expensive subscription, and because the letter has appeared and disappeared from several different Twitter accounts in the past couple of days, we're just going to reproduce it below, for anyone who wants to read it for themselves. After, we'll have a few thoughts that occurred to us while reading (which should make sense even if you choose not to read the letter):

Colleagues,

I hope you all have had an opportunity to get some rest after another vote-a-rama. I'm sure most of you would prefer to move forward, but I believe we will look back at this experience as yet another reason why we will have historic headwinds against us in November.

We missed an opportunity to remove a political albatross (the 1776 Fund) from around the necks of our colleagues who are in cycle. Instead, we added weight to that albatross by having 41 members vote to protect the program. In addition, we allowed two SAVE Act votes that had no place in vote-a-rama, which prompted a circular firing squad led by Tommy Tuberville and some of our republican colleagues.

I cannot understand why a supermajority of our conference voted against the side-by-side I offered. I went forward with offering the amendment at the request of members in cycle. The amendment simply ended the 1776 payout pot AND appropriated $1.7 BILLION to the DoJ fraud initiative.

I knew most democrats would not vote for my amendment because of the DoJ funding, but I thought it would be a good landing place for members to voice their concerns with the 1776 fund. How did I know democrats would vote AGAINST it? I asked them. They simply would not support the DoJ/Fraud funding, which is precisely why I had the provision in the amendment. The chance of this amendment passing and threatening the privilege of the underlying bill was ZERO.

If you voted against my amendment because you were afraid it would strip the reconciliation bill of privilege, you were misinformed or a victim of groupthink. If you did for that reason, you should have voted against the SAVE Act for the same reason. Had either version of the SAVE Act been adopted, the underlying bill would also have been at risk of losing privilege.

We took a major risk with the SAVE Act had democrats wanted to meddle. If I had been a democratic leader, I would have convinced a sufficient number of democrats to vote for it, and, immediately after it was adopted, I would have argued it was fatal to the privilege of the underlying bill.

But the real problem I have is that the President (and a few of our members?) forced us to take two more unsuccessful votes for the SAVE Act at the expense of our most vulnerable members in cycle. Susan Collins rightfully voted against it, representing her home state of Maine, which voted against it by nearly a 65/35 margin in a 2025 referendum. Rural state senators voted for it, but now they must explain why shutting down mail-in ballots, ending early voting, and complicating registration is a good thing for rural voters in big states. Other members will need to account for their past positions in support of the state laws that would be repealed or preempted if the SAVE Act passes. Even worse, Tommy Tuberville and others initiated a circular firing squad calling out Susan Collins and other republicans by name. Amazing: Members NOT in cycle attacking our most at-risk member because she supports the view of 65% of the voters in her state.

Tommy Tuberville said: "It was beyond EMBARRASSING that "Republicans" continue to block the SAVE America Act @SenThomTillis, @LisaMurkowski, @SenMcConnell, and @SenatorCollins have not only betrayed their constituents — they are ACCOMPLICES in Democrats' "Illegals First" agenda. The people of North Carolina, Alaska, Kentucky, and Maine deserve better."

I find this remarkable on several levels, but you would think a member of Tommy's comms team who has a spouse working on the NRSC's leadership team could see how this is only helpful to Susan's opponent. Do these people talk? Other members have referred to those who oppose nuking the filibuster and passing the SAVE Act as "traitors" and "defectors" on social media.

Everyone knew the SAVE Act votes would fail, yet we went ahead anyway because the President requested them at the expense of our members. This simply prompted more attacks on our own, which I assume was the President's goal.

Three of our most vulnerable members were already forced to vote on the first Schumer amendment, focused on the 1776 fund and the motion to commit. Cassidy and I voted against it to give our members room to vote for it.

After that vote, I informed the most vulnerable in-cycle members that I would vote however a majority of them wanted me to. If it meant voting with them or, like the Schumer amendment, against them, I offered them my proxy for the night. I am not suggesting that you give members your proxy, but I am suggesting forcing votes that have no upside for in-cycle members AND attacking them when they vote is not helpful to saving our majority. I get in Tuberville's case it was likely to help boost him in the Alabama governor's race, but was it really worth calling Susan Collins an "embarrassing accomplice who betrayed her constituents?"

Based on last week's reconciliation experience, I hope we have learned a lesson that will not be repeated if we choose to move another reconciliation bill in this congress. In my opinion, last week's vote was a net loss for in-cycle members. I am not diminishing the importance of funding DHS, but the "gain" from that will not offset the "pain" we've created in key races.

The road to holding our majority is already difficult. We cannot afford any more unforced errors like this between now and November.

Respectfully, Thom T.

And now, our thoughts:

1. Tillis is not MAGA, but he's still a Republican, and no matter how much he disdains Trump, he still views himself as a contributing member of Team GOP. He agreed to offer the amendment so that any blowback from Trump and/or right-wing media would end up hitting him, and not members who are up for reelection this year. In other words, he took one for the team. This is worth keeping in mind when wondering why Tillis, along with the other nothing-to-lose senators like Bill Cassidy (R-LA), John Cornyn (R-TX) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) don't rebel nearly as often as you might think they would. They're still on Team Red.
   
   
2. It was hardly a secret, but this is black-and-white evidence that members coordinate their amendments and their votes to help out folks who are up for reelection and who are facing tough opponents. Indeed, it would not be too far wrong to say that everything Tillis did during the DHS bill vote-a-rama, he did with the idea of trying to help Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the Republicans' most vulnerable member this cycle.
   
   
3. On that point, no matter what kind of brave face the Senate Republican Conference might put on this cycle, they know they're in a rough place, and they know Collins is at serious risk of losing her job (and see below for more).
   
   
4. Tillis and, by implication, many other members, know full well that the slush fund is politically poisonous. That said, only 15 of them were actually brave enough to vote for the amendment to kill it. We would guess that among the 38 or so cowards are some sizable number who are hoping that the beast somehow gets slain in some other way, without the senators having to be the ones who wield the steely knife.
   
   
5. Similarly, some sizable number of Republican members know that the SAVE Act is some combination of poisonous, since it would motivate Democrats to get to the polls in droves, and a non-starter, since it will never overcome a filibuster.
   
   
6. We have often written that Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is the dumbest current member of the Senate, and that he is in the running for the dumbest member ever. Clearly, the more savvy Republican senators are in agreement with us, and disdain him for his idiocy and his selfishness. In this case, Tillis is clearly annoyed that Tuberville does not seem to know or care that: (1) the SAVE Act is very bad for members who do not represent states as red as Alabama, (2) that trying to jam the SAVE Act into the DHS bill risked torpedoing the whole enterprise, since the SAVE Act clearly is not budget-related, and (3) that people who are NOT running for governor of Alabama—like, say, Collins—have a different calculus, and one that the Republican conference must respect.
   
   
7. The Republican members—at least, some of them—know that Trump not only does not have their best interests at heart, but suspect that he deliberately tries to inflict harm on many of them. Specifically, the President keeps pushing the SAVE Act, despite the obvious problems that it presents for the Senate.
   
   
8. The Senate's somewhat legendary collegiality still exists at some level, even if it excludes members who are jerks, as Tuberville is. Not only did Tillis try to help out Collins, but he also clearly has decent working relationships with many Democrats, who were willing to be honest with him about their thinking.
   
   
9. The whole process really is 3-D chess, at least among the members who aren't nitwits. Note Tillis' analysis that the Democrats could have pulled a double-cross, backed the SAVE Act stuff, and then used that to take down the whole bill. It is improbable that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) would have tried it, as his members don't want to be on record voting for the SAVE Act (even if for duplicitous reasons). Still, you can be 100% certain that Schumer, and the other intelligent senators of both parties, saw that such a move was there on the chessboard.
   
   
10. Though Tillis is still a member of Team GOP, he may be a shade less enthusiastic about that than he was last week, and he may be more prone to rebel during the balance of his term.

We do love some good sausage-making around here, and this is some of the best we've seen in quite a while. (Z)