Tillis emerges as a bipartisan dealmaker
WASHINGTON >> Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, was basting her Thanksgiving turkey when Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., gave her a call with an important update: He had made progress in their effort to convince more Senate Republicans to vote for their bipartisan legislation to protect same-sex married couples.
“He’s always working on it,” Collins said of the second-term senator. Her husband pleaded with her to get off the phone and focus on Thanksgiving, but less than a week later, the bill passed with 12 Republican votes — thanks in part to Tillis’s relentless focus.
“He is an extraordinarily good vote counter,” Collins said.
Over the past year, Tillis has muscled his way to the heart of nearly every major bipartisan effort to emerge from the evenly-divided Senate, taking a lead role in negotiating legislation on hot-button issues including gay rights, guns and immigration — all without drawing much attention to himself.
It’s a politically tricky trifecta that few Republicans — many fearing primary challenges from the right — would want to touch. But Tillis’s willingness to find compromise despite the political blowback is desperately needed, his colleagues say, as a wave of retirements has taken many more bipartisan-minded lawmakers out of the chamber just as it needs to find a way to compromise with a narrow and fractious House Republican majority that barely managed to elect a speaker earlier this month.
“I see him as stepping into what otherwise would be a bit of a void because of the loss of those members,” said Collins, referencing the retirements of institutionalist Republican Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama and Roy Blunt of Missouri, who all at times helped forge compromises to keep the government running.
A hard-right faction of House Republicans have extracted concessions from newly elected Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., that make showdowns over lifting the debt ceiling and funding the government more likely next year — putting even more pressure on the shrinking pool of lawmakers like Tillis who can forge compromise.
“It is really worrying that people like Rob Portman are leaving,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. “And my hope is that people like Thom and others will step up to help make the Senate work.”
But Tillis, a former management consultant who jumped into local politics 20 years ago and later quickly climbed the ranks in the North Carolina State Legislative Building to become its speaker, rejects the label of “dealmaker” and emphasizes the conservative stamp he’s placed on the legislation he’s worked on. He describes his decision to help craft compromises as driven not so much by an affinity for centrism but by a frustration with the inability of some of his co-workers to effectively work together. He chooses the issues he wades into carefully and with an eye to their impact on his career.
“I don’t believe in this kumbaya, everybody-be-happy, lets-all-be-bipartisan [thing],” Tillis told The Washington Post in an interview. “I think you’re bipartisan on a transactional basis. If you’re always bipartisan then you’ve lost your mooring on your ideological worldview.”
Nevertheless, Tillis has had his hand in nearly every bipartisan piece of legislation to emerge from the Senate in the past year and a half: from the $1 trillion infrastructure package, to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that expanded background checks for some gun buyers that passed in the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, Tex., to the Electoral Count Act that updates the presidential certification process to avoid a repeat of the pressures President Donald Trump put on his vice president, Mike Pence. (Tillis did not vote to convict Trump during his second impeachment for his role in that event.)