Retiring Republican Sen. Thom Tillis has finally found the courage to condemn the vote that mattered most—after he cast it.
In a new book due Tuesday, the North Carolina senator calls his deciding 2025 vote to confirm Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth the “biggest regret” of his career.
He also says he “should’ve stopped” Robert Kennedy from becoming health secretary.
The admission is extraordinary because Tillis was not a helpless bystander. The Senate was split 50-50 on Hegseth, and Tillis’s yes vote allowed Vice President JD Vance to break the tie.
Here is Tillis making his case now, with his reelection worries safely behind him:
The Associated Press reports that Tillis makes the claims in How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents, a book arriving during his final months in office.
Tillis writes that he was skeptical of allegations about Hegseth’s management style, treatment of women, and drinking, which Hegseth denied. The senator says he spent hours talking with the White House, Hegseth, and people who had worked with him before deciding he could not corroborate the worst claims.
He nevertheless admits that his overriding concern was becoming “the lone voice in the wilderness” who blocked one of President Trump’s choices. The book also faults Kennedy’s tenure, criticizes several other administration officials, and claims dozens of Republican senators complain privately while praising the president in public.
That is a revealing defense. A senator’s job is not to wait until enough colleagues volunteer to absorb the political cost. It is to cast the vote he believes is right and accept responsibility for the result.
The official Senate roll call shows exactly how much his decision mattered: 50 senators voted yes, 50 voted no, and Vance supplied the tie-breaker.
Local coverage in North Carolina also highlighted that Tillis now says he should have stopped Kennedy:
Tillis goes much further than expressing two isolated regrets. He claims at least 30 Republican senators have privately voiced serious reservations about actions taken by President Trump while praising him in public when cameras appear.
If that allegation is true, it says as much about those senators as it does about the administration. Private grumbling is not oversight, and anonymous concern is not courage.
A tell-all book after announcing retirement is not the same thing as standing up when a vote can still change the outcome.
Tillis still calls President Trump an “amazing political talent” and directs much of his fire at advisers and officials around him. He also criticizes tariffs, immigration operations, the Iran war, and several other Cabinet choices.
The national headline captured the irony: the senator is repudiating a vote that only succeeded because he supplied it.
None of this means a senator must rubber-stamp every President Trump nominee. Honest disagreement is part of representative government, and the Senate’s advice-and-consent power exists for a reason.
But Tillis is asking readers to admire a confession that exposes his own failure to act on the judgment he now claims he possessed. He wanted colleagues to share the risk, so he cast the decisive vote and left the consequences to everyone else.
The lesson is bigger than one retiring senator or one Cabinet secretary: conviction that arrives only after the political danger has passed is not conviction. It is reputation management.
The post Thom Tillis Says He Regrets the Vote That Put Hegseth Over the Top appeared first on 100PercentFedUp.com.
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[H/T 100PercentFedUp]
