Thom Tillis reverts to his old self in rejecting much-needed border deal | Opinion

We’ve said before that there have been many different Thom Tillises in the near-decade he’s served North Carolina in the U.S. Senate. Spineless Thom Tillis, flip-flopper Thom Tillis, and, lately, bipartisan dealmaker Thom Tillis.

Unfortunately, Tillis acted more like an older version of himself on Tuesday when he announced that he would vote no on a border deal and foreign aid package that a bipartisan group of senators spent months negotiating.

The bill includes significant funding for security improvements at the border and imposes new restrictions that make it more difficult for migrants to claim asylum and automatically shuts down the border to new entrants if the number of migrants encountered on a daily basis surpasses a certain threshold. It also authorizes new aid for Israel and Ukraine.

It would be the biggest congressional change to immigration law in decades. That should be welcome progress to Republicans in Washington who have spent years demanding tougher legislation on immigration and border security. And yet much of the GOP has come out strongly against it, now including Tillis, who called it a “futile procedural exercise.”

Tillis has said on numerous occasions that he would not support the legislation unless it had the support of a majority of Republican senators, so at least he is staying true to that word. But you’ll forgive us if we expected a little more from someone who describes himself as a “a national leader pushing for secure borders … working to break decades of gridlock and inaction from Republicans and Democrats.”

Instead, that gridlock and inaction will only continue, prolonging a status quo that politicians like Tillis have railed against for years. Once again, he seems to be sacrificing the big picture for the small: his political considerations.

Tillis seemed to be more supportive of the bill last month after media reports said Donald Trump and his Republican allies were plotting to kill the border deal so he could continue to use the border crisis to campaign against Biden.

Tillis rightly slammed that idea, saying, “I didn’t come here to have the president as a boss or a candidate as a boss. I came here to pass good, solid policy … It is immoral for me to think you looked the other way because you think this is the linchpin for President Trump to win.”

At the time, Tillis seemed to understand what he has always understood: that the border crisis is something that needs fixing. So why are he and his fellow Republicans standing in the way of legislation that could start to fix it?

No, this bill isn’t everything Republicans may have wanted. It may even contain some stuff they don’t like. But that’s how governing works. A lot of Democrats aren’t keen on the bill, either, and it certainly contains provisions that are tougher than anything President Biden has supported in the past. But many lawmakers and the president were willing to compromise, because it was the only way Senate Republicans might agree to send more aid to Ukraine.

In his statement, Tillis said that the bill contains provisions that are “highly problematic” and claimed that the Biden administration has “refused to use existing laws already on the books” to address the border crisis.

That has been an argument echoed by many Republicans, who think that Biden needs to take more executive action on the border, despite the fact that Biden has already taken more immigration-related executive actions than Trump did throughout his entire four years in office. But many of the Trump-era policies that Republicans want Biden to revive were struck down by the courts. He cannot simply shut down the border on his own.

At least Tillis does — at times — understand the importance of bipartisanship and compromise in governing. That’s certainly more than can be said for people like U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop, who called the bill the “bipartisan sellout of America” and appears unwilling to accept any outcome except total capitulation to extreme GOP demands.

But if Tillis is willing to abandon his principles whenever his Republican colleagues leave him standing in the middle of the aisle alone, then what good are they?

This story was originally published February 6, 2024 at 11:39 AM with the headline "Thom Tillis reverts to his old self in rejecting much-needed border deal | Opinion."