Thom Tillis took on President Donald Trump’s administration in a monthslong battle to quash the criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — and won.
Now he’s urging those around the president to take his latest ultimatum seriously — that he won’t confirm for attorney general anyone who excuses the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
“Hopefully they’ll take me at my word when I say anybody who equivocated on the Jan. 6 rioters, I just can’t support,” the North Carolina Republican said about Justice Department nominees.
Tillis has major leverage as a member of the Judiciary Committee, where Republicans have a one-vote advantage and he can exercise an effective veto.
That’s exactly what Tillis did in the Senate Banking Committee with would-be Powell successor Kevin Warsh — until Wednesday, when he cast a vote allowing Warsh to move to the floor for confirmation next month.
He did so only after a three-month stalemate over the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Powell lied to Congress during a Senate hearing last year — a probe that Tillis warned was an attempt by Trump advisors to target the independence of the Federal Reserve.
A flurry of 11th-hour negotiations led to U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announcing last week she was closing the probe, with Tillis describing in an interview how he “spoke to people in DOJ several times over the course of a few days” around the time of the announcement. He also said he was “also sort of bouncing off where Chair Powell was, too,” though he declined to say if he spoke directly to Powell.
It was a rare instance of a sitting senator successfully using leverage against an administration of his own party and coming out on top.
“Every single member of the conference has the same option,” Tillis said about whether other GOP colleagues could replicate his model. “I’ve seen people do silly things like blanket holds and stuff like that that are not sustainable.”
In the hours after the committee vote Wednesday, Tillis again spoke out against the whitewashing of Jan. 6, recounting Wednesday how he was the last senator to leave the chamber the day a mob of Trump supporters temporarily suspended the counting of the 2020 Electoral College vote. He previously sank Ed Martin’s U.S. attorney nomination because of his previous comments related to the riot and his work defending those who took part in it.
“I’ll scrub it when a nominee comes forward, and I’ll apply the Martin standard,” Tillis said of any pick to succeed ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi. “By the way, I don’t think Martin is employed by the DOJ anymore, either, is he?”
There are some differences between the situation with Powell and the vacancy atop the Justice Department.
Hanging over the Fed chair negotiations was a May 15 end date for Powell’s term, Trump’s determination to replace him and the administration’s realization that TIllis was not about to back down from his pledge to keep his hold as long as the criminal investigation was ongoing.
“I think they understood if we didn’t get it done today, tomorrow, this week, that he wouldn’t be seated by the time the term expires,” Tillis said of the administration.
There is not the same pressure to fill the AG post. Todd Blanche, who was confirmed last year as deputy attorney general, is now serving as acting attorney general, and he is free under federal law to serve at least into late October.
Some argue he could essentially serve indefinitely, with many pointing to the tenure of former Deputy Labor Secretary Julie Su, who served as acting secretary for nearly two years under former President Joe Biden.
That could effectively mean Trump could wait out Tillis, who is retiring and will relinquish his seat in January — though that would also risk a potential Democratic midterm takeover of the Senate majority.
Tillis said Wednesday he would be sticking to his principles regardless of how the attorney general vacancy plays out. He said his fight to protect Powell and how it was resolved this week was “very important” for ensuring the Federal Reserve’s independence.
Tillis also linked the months-long fight to another hotly debated topic: the fate of the chamber’s 60-vote legislative filibuster that Trump wants to see axed. Like most GOP senators, Tillis wants it to stay.
“Then a simple majority would have been enough to discharge [Warsh] from committee,” Tillis said, noting that the organization of the Senate — including the makeup of committees — is done by consensus due to the filibuster.
Tillis is in a unique position. Due to his impending retirement, he is free of political consequences, and he’s on a host of key committees that give him an outsized role in several of the administration’s priorities. He has been increasingly outspoken about decisions within the Trump administration and from corners of the party he disagrees with — though he’s been careful to stress that he believes he has a respectful relationship with Trump and wants him to be successful.
Trump, for his part, suggested Tillis had already left the Senate in a Fox News interview last week where he was pressed on the Warsh blockade: “You know Thom Tillis is no longer a senator, right? He quit.” Tillis quipped back at the time, “I’m not dead yet.”
On Wednesday, Tillis urged the administration to share more information with Congress on its Iran strategy, questioned whether a “first-semester law student” would believe the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey was credible and urged the House to “recognize reality” and end the Department of Homeland Security shutdown.
“We own the shutdown right now because we can’t get the House to vote on something that 100 senators voted on,” Tillis said. “The American people are not dumb, and they know that the holdup now is not Democrats in the House. It’s Republicans.”
