Tillis looked him in the eye and said: No court nominee in an election year. So much for that.

The evidence of Republican hypocrisy in pushing through a Supreme Court nominee in an election year is abundant, but still this little tale of Sen. Thom Tillis’ reversal should be added to the pile.

A Massachusetts man wrote to The News & Observer last week recounting his encounter with the senator. Mark Sternman was an employee of the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency when he went to a Boston meeting of the New England Council, a nonpartisan alliance of businesses, academic and health institutions that support economic development. The council regularly hears from elected officials and business leaders. On April 11, 2017, the featured speaker was North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis.

Sternman has attended many of the meetings, hearing mostly from Massachusetts politicians. But he keenly remembers the Tillis visit because North Carolina’s junior senator spoke with him personally. After Tillis delivered his remarks, he took questions from the audience. Sternman said he asked about the Senate’s refusal to consider President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, in 2016. Tillis assured him that if a similar situation arose involving a president of his own party, he would also refuse to consider a Supreme Court nominee in an election year.

As the meeting was breaking up, Sternman said Tillis approached him and repeated his vow to treat a Republican president’s possible election-year nominee just as he had treated Obama’s.

“That impressed me. He went out of his way to reemphasize the point by looking me in the eye and saying, ‘I’m telling you the truth,’ ” Sternman said. “He shook my hand and thanked me for the question.”

All that came back to Sternman last week as President Trump announced he would appoint a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg one day after she died on Sept. 18 and just weeks before the Nov. 3 election. Tillis immediately said he would support Trump’s nominee even before the president announced his nomination of U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

“When I heard Ginsburg died, I immediately flashed back to the conversation and thought: What is he going to do?” Sternman said. “To hear his position in 2017 was the complete opposite in 2020 was pretty disappointing.”

The Tillis campaign did not respond to a request for comment. The New England Council’s website does indicate that Tillis was the speaker on April 11, 2017.

Sternman is not nonpartisan. He now works for a Democratic state senator in Massachusetts. But his account of Tillis’ statement corresponds with the senator’s words on the floor of the Senate in 2016 when he said, “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.”

In 1988, Sternman went to the U.S. Supreme Court to watch his father, a corporate lawyer in New York City, argue a case there. He remembers that Chief Justice William Rehnquist recused himself because he had a relative connected to the case. Justice William Brennan presided instead.

His memory of the court’s scrupulous approach to objectivity is challenged by raw Supreme Court politics in Congress. “For 30 years I had this familial connection to the court and how it should work,” he said. “This isn’t my understanding of how the process should work.”

Sternman had been impressed by the North Carolina senator who took time after a speech to seek him out and thank him for his question. Now he feels betrayed by the answer.

“For someone seeking election for one of the highest offices in the land, saying something that wasn’t true at the time, or wasn’t true as soon as it was put to the test, is really disappointing.”

This story was originally published September 28, 2020 at 2:37 PM.