(WASHINGTON) — GOP Sen. Thom Tillis was back on Capitol Hill on Monday as Senate Republicans struggled to pass their “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” he opposes — before President Donald Trump’s July Fourth deadline.
“I may look for an opportunity to speak again,” Tillis said during his fiery remarks on the Senate floor on Sunday night, in which he urged his Republican colleagues to reconsider their support for the GOP tax bill, which he said “breaks” President Donald Trump’s promises to protect Medicaid.
But on Monday it remained unclear whether any of his fellow Republicans would go along.
Monday morning, as lawmakers began another long day of debate, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer lauded Tillis for his remarks calling out the GOP megabill’s provisions he said would slash Medicaid in his home state of North Carolina.
“I salute my colleague from North Carolina. We all heard what our colleague from North Carolina had to say yesterday about this bill. My guess is about half — maybe more than half of the Republicans in the Senate agree with him. But he had the courage to speak the truth,” Schumer on Monday morning, as a vote-a-rama on the bill began.
“He said it himself: the bill devastates his state but make no mistake about it, it will devastate the states of almost every Republican here,” Schumer added.
But how Tillis will navigate the rest of his term in the Senate — and perhaps the rest of the reconciliation bill’s consideration — remains to be seen — after he abruptly announced he wouldn’t run for reelection when Trump threatened to support a GOP primary challenger.
While his speech railing against the measure’s Medicaid cuts displayed some of the “pure freedom” he noted in his retirement announcement “to call the balls and strikes as I see fit,” Tillis also told reporters at the Capitol on Sunday that he would never do anything to “undermine” or “surprise” the Senate Republican Conference.
“Look, here’s the thing, I was a leader. I’m never going to do anything to undermine my conference, and I’m never going to surprise my conference,” Tillis said..
“I let Senator Thune last night know that I intended to do this today. I’m not that kind of guy. I mean, if you’ve got a surprise or jam your conference to get something done, you’re a pretty shitty legislator, and that’s just not my style,” he went on.
“So, I’m going to stand behind John and the leadership and do everything I can to make them successful,” Tillis said.
In his speech to “explain” his vote Saturday against the motion to move forward on the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” he condemned the legislation.
“What do I tell 663,000 people in two years, three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding is not there anymore, guys?” Tillis asked at one point. “The people in the White House advising the president, they’re not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise.”
He said blasted the president’s self-imposed July 4th deadline to pass the legislation as “artificial.”
“I believe that we can make sure that we do not break the promise of Donald J. Trump — that he’s made to the people on Medicaid today,” Tillis went on. “But what we’re doing because we’ve got a view on an artificial deadline on July 4 that means nothing but another date and time we could take the time to get this right, if we lay down the house mark of the Medicaid bill and fix it.”
“What’s wrong with actually understanding what this bill does?” he said.
Tillis laid out how he’d done the work of understanding the bill over recent weeks, talking with leaders in North Carolina and members of the Trump administration about the impacts of the legislation’s Medicaid provisions on his state.
He said administration officials could not disprove his findings that there would be about a $26 billion cut in Medicaid across North Carolina as a result of the bill.
Tillis said he started his fact-finding process by asking Republican staff in the North Carolina legislature, members of Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s team and to the non-partisan Hospital Association for their estimates about this bill’s cuts to Medicaid in North Carolina.
“I asked three different independent groups: a partisan Democrat group, a partisan Republican group of experts, and a nonpartisan group of the Hospital Association to develop an intact assessment, independent, not talking, not sharing, reporting to me, and what I found is the best case scenario is about a $26 billion cut,” Tillis said.
He said when he presented those findings to the Trump administration, they were rejected.
“I had people in the administration say, you’re all wet, you don’t know what you’re doing,” he said.
Tillis concluded by saying that the Senate “owes it to the American people” to withhold advancement of the bill ” until it’s demonstrated to me that we’ve done our homework.”
“We’re going to make sure that we fulfill the promise And then we can feel — I can feel — good about a bill that I’m willing to vote for, but until that time, I will be withholding my vote,” Tillis said.
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