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Thom Tillis wants to make the Senate work a little more like the North Carolina Legislature.


A full review of the rules, starting in the Republican Conference, with an eye toward big changes. Chairmanships no longer based on seniority. Members having to choose between leadership spots or significant legislative positions.

And most of all, says the former speaker of the state House in Raleigh, it’s time for Republicans to stop paying attention to process complaints about hearings and regular order and reconciliation and the way it gets played in the political media—voters don’t care about that, he says—and focus on passing bills that become laws.

“When people are fundamentally opposed to the policy, they start screaming process,” Tillis told me in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “It’s hard to debate the result. They may not like the process, but if they don’t like the process, change the rules. Otherwise, you should use whatever rules are available to produce the outcome.”

Tillis wants to be cremated, and he wants the urn to say: “Husband. Father. Grandfather. RINO.”

Except he likes to make the initials stand for “Republican in Need of Outcomes.”

Tillis needs outcomes in the Senate. And he needs them as the finance chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He’s sick of trying to explain to donors and voters how a year with full control of all three branches of government has so far lacked any major legislative success. The GOP-led Congress is now barreling toward Christmas facing huge doubts about pulling off tax reform—and with the expectation that failing to get it would be penalized at the ballot box.

“If we fail to produce an outcome, it will be a very difficult couple of cycles in the U.S. Senate and in the House,” Tillis says. “If we don’t, then I think we will be fighting hand to hand in every state to point to the record of the members who are up for reelection and then to point to the credentials and the quality of the candidates in these other states we’re targeting.”

Tillis still professes hope for tax reform, and for health care, and for comprehensive immigration reform. But he also opposes putting the Dreamers fix that Democrats are demanding into a year-end legislative agreement, and says he’s prepared to vote against the appropriations bill, and potentially help cause a shutdown, if that’s how President Donald Trump and others try to strike a deal. That’s how they play politics down in North Carolina.



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Tillis grew up in trailer parks, moving almost two dozen times as a child as his father moved from job to job. All his brothers are named Thomas, too, but he’s the only Thom, rather than Tom: When he was 20, watching a “Jeopardy” champion, he decided to rebrand himself. He didn’t graduate from college until he was 36, but by then was already on a successful career that took him through PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM, before a local fight for a mountain bike path started him on a very fast rise through politics that had him in Washington in just over a decade.

As speaker, Tillis was ruthless. He started out with a review of the rules in Raleigh, stripped out many and changed others, and used the new set to turn North Carolina’s Legislature into an engine for churning out big wins guided by the Koch brothers-backed American Legislative Exchange Council, on whose board he sat.

Democrats complained that Tillis rammed bills through in the middle of the night with no public review, pulling state government out of alignment in a state where registration is almost evenly divided among Democrats, Republicans and independents. Then there were the redistricting maps that Tillis oversaw, which have now been blocked by the Supreme Court.

The widespread sense of overreach, as embodied by the HB2 “bathroom bill” that Republicans pushed through after Tillis departed for the U.S. Senate, helped propel Democrat Roy Cooper to his narrow win in the governor’s race last year.

But among core Republicans in the Legislature and beyond, there’s not much regret over a renaissance that took them from Tillis as just the second Republican speaker in a century to supermajorities with the capacity to regularly flex their power to override the governor’s vetoes. Politically, the situation is so bad for Democrats that they are now defining success in next year’s state legislative races not as winning, but as chipping away even a little at the GOP’s dominance.

Republicans could use a little of that North Carolina hardball in Washington, Tillis says. And as for complaints like those from Arizona Sen. John McCain, who cast his vote against Obamacare repeal as a protest against the way the bill was being rammed through without proper debate and review, Tillis blames the Democrats. “It’s a very noble purpose, but it doesn’t really exhibit any grasp of what’s been going around here in terms of tactics used by the minority,” he says of McCain’s stand.

Click here to subscribe and listen to the full podcast, including Tillis’s dream of going to Burning Man and how he sees Breitbart and the Huffington Post as the same.

He acknowledges that Republicans were guilty of obstruction when they were in the minority. But now Democrats are in the minority, and he says that’s their problem.

These are strange times in the Senate Republican Conference. McCain, facing a dire cancer diagnosis, is on a final mission to pull his party back from Trump. Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker has teed off on the president with the freedom of a politician who isn’t running for reelection, warning that the president is risking “World War III” and claiming his colleagues say pretty much the same in private.

Tillis won’t say whether he’s one of them.

“Sen. Corker behaved in exactly the same way I would if I felt something was unfair or inappropriate,” he says, squirming as I press him to defend Trump.

“Some of what the president’s doing is trying to maybe use words and tactics that may resonate with the leadership in North Korea. It is absolutely unorthodox, but the situation is going to get more dangerous if we just continue the status quo,” Tillis begins. Pressed further, he allows, “There are certain things that are said that aren’t helpful.”

It’s a delicate time to be a Republican senator. Only one of their number—Jeff Sessions—endorsed Trump in the GOP presidential primary last year, and he’s now attorney general. Their leader, Mitch McConnell, is increasingly unpopular with the GOP base. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is trying to throw out many of them, using his visceral connection to the Trumpian grass roots to endorse insurgent bomb throwers like former judge Roy Moore in Alabama.

Tillis says he doesn’t know either of them. He figures Moore might change if and when he’s actually part of the conference. As for Bannon, maybe he won’t be as much of a problem for Republican incumbents as he claims to be. (“He’s a useful voice,” Tillis says.)

Tillis doesn’t know what to make of Trump—just last week he was using his question time at a hearing with Sessions to ask Trump’s attorney general to explain a presidential tweet about the future of the Dreamers, which both men admitted they didn’t understand. But he suggests that maybe some of what Trump is doing is purposeful chaos, which reminds Tillis of people he used to work with during his career in research and development who’d throw out all sorts of ideas to see which ones stick.

He knows that this is a generous reading of the president, and not all of it is strategic.

I ask him whether Trump makes him proud to be a Republican.

“I’m actually proud to be a Republican based on the ideals that being a conservative stand for,” Tillis retorts. “So I don’t need any one person.”