WASHINGTON ― Thom Tillis has always been a bit of a wild card.
With a year left in office, however, the retiring GOP senator from North Carolina is turning up the heat on the Trump administration, in what could become a headache for his party if he were to join Democrats in stymying the president’s agenda on Capitol Hill.
“What’s hysterical to me is how people think that my independence is something new and occurred after I announced my retirement,” Tillis told HuffPost this week. “Just go back to the first administration again. I disagreed fewer times, but I disagreed with advice that the president was acting on. Same thing here. We got to clean up the execution.”
No longer having to run for reelection in a battleground state, however, has freed Tillis to graduate from an occasional irritant (and one who might back down in a battle with the president) to a frequent critic willing to challenge Trump appointees directly. He’s not nearly as harsh towards the president as former Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) could be, but he’s the closest thing in the Senate during Trump’s second term — a committed conservative willing to break with the administration on a somewhat regular basis.
Tillis has already threatened to scuttle the path of any Trump nominee to the Federal Reserve Board over a Justice Department investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell that’s seen as overtly political. As a member of the Senate Banking Committee, Tillis could stop Trump from installing a loyalist to replace Powell, which would irritate the president, who is determined to cut interest rates faster, even at the risk of inflation rising.
