With Supreme Court flip-flop, Sen. Tillis seeks to hold his seat by abdicating his job

Anything President Trump wants, Sen. Thom Tillis is willing to deliver. North Carolina’s junior senator is clinging to Trump’s coattails in a desperate hope that his blind subservience to the president can get him re-elected to an office that is supposed to be about independent judgment and leadership.

That’s why he says he’s supporting the president’s audacious and divisive move to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just weeks before the general election. (North Carolina’s other senator, Richard Burr, has not publicly taken a position on when the seat should be filled.)

Trump’s last-minute grab is consistent with his disregard for norms, fairness and Americans who are not part of his base. But the willingness of Republican senators to go along represents a towering act of hypocrisy. Republicans denied President Obama’s right to fill the seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia nearly nine months before the 2016 election on the grounds that a vacancy on the court should not be filled in an election year until the people have spoken at the polls.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was the architect of that rule and Tillis agreed. Tillis said in a 2016 speech on the Senate floor: “The campaign is already underway. It is essential to the institution of the Senate and to the very health of our republic to not launch our nation into a partisan, divisive confirmation battle during the very same time the American people are casting their ballots to elect our next president.”

But on Saturday Tillis took the stage at a Trump rally in Fayetteville to say that the McConnell rule no longer applies. “The president has the responsibility and the authority to nominate a justice,” he told the MAGA-hatted crowd. “As a member of the Judiciary Committee, I’ve seen the list of justices. He’s going to nominate one of those justices and I’m going to vote for their confirmation.”

Now that is a profile in compliance. Not only does Tillis endorse the Senate considering Trump’s nominee late in an election year, he’s committed to voting yes before the nominee is vetted or testifies.

Tillis has now improbably managed to outdo his last spectacular flip-flop. Remember his 2019 op-ed in The Washington Post in which he said he could not in good conscience apply a double standard to presidents because of their party? He wrote that he opposed Obama’s executive orders to get around congressional opposition and he would oppose Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to get funds for the southern border wall.

But, under pressure for taking an honest stance, Tillis promptly turned around and voted in support of the president’s usurpation of Congress’ sole authority to allocate funds.

It’s an odd campaign strategy to run for office as a senator who will be a rubber stamp for the most incompetent, deceitful and self-aggrandizing president in U.S. history. But that’s Tillis’ platform.

Still, it’s interesting to wonder what might happen if the senator who wrote the Post op-ed could, despite having painted himself in to a rhetorical corner, somehow re-emerge in this moment of national concern and do the right thing.

Tillis, Burr and all Republican senators should think beyond political gamesmanship. A rush to stuff the court with another Trump appointee – one who could be approved despite Trump being rejected at the polls – will deeply divide the country and weaken public faith in the Supreme Court.

The president does have a constitutional right to fill a court vacancy, but senators have a constitutional obligation to honestly weigh whether the Senate should consent. Their duty is not to serve Trump. It is to serve the nation.

This story was originally published September 21, 2020 at 12:20 PM.