In the end, President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which is beautiful in the same way that North Korea is a Democratic people’s republic, came down to a 50-50 tie in the Senate, broken by Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday.
Republican Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Susan Collins of Maine sided with Democrats in voting against a bill that will gut Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare by $1.1 trillion. By 2034, nearly 12 million people will be uninsured, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
After all, those billionaire tax cuts aren’t going to pay for themselves.
Trump threatened to orchestrate primaries against any Republican who rejected the bill. But Tillis, who, with Paul, also voted against advancing the bill last Saturday, already announced that he won’t run for reelection next year.
In a statement released on Sunday, Tillis said, “I look forward to having the pure freedom to call the balls and strikes as I see fit and representing the great people of North Carolina to the best of my ability.”
To no one’s surprise, the vast majority of his GOP colleagues rejected their own freedom and continued to give Trump exactly what he wants, to this nation’s great detriment. The bill now returns to the House.
If Trump’s bill was a test for Senate Republicans, they again failed miserably. They voted for a bill that they know will cause untold harm to their constituents. That’s why Tillis’s actions garnered so many headlines. By declining to run again, Tillis defanged one of Trump’s favorite threats and gave himself space to say out loud about Trump’s policies what many Republican lawmakers may believe but are too cowardly to even whisper.
“What do I tell 663,000 people in [North Carolina] in two years, three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding is not there anymore, guys?” Tillis asked during his Senate floor speech on Sunday. “The people in the White House advising the president, they’re not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise.”
Tillis was still giving Trump more grace than he deserves. The president wasn’t duped. He was targeting the most vulnerable for even more pain, including millions of his own supporters, while shoveling money toward those who least need it.
Speaking of billionaires, Elon Musk, Trump’s former BFF, promised political retribution against anyone who voted for Trump’s bill.
“Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame,” Musk — who is threatening to launch a new political party if Trump’s bill passes — posted Monday on his social media site. “And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth.”
Now Republicans were caught between twin threats from Musk and Trump being hurled from opposite corners — primaried if they do, primaried if they don’t. And they chose to stand with Trump.
But the untenable situation in which Republicans found themselves is one of their own making. For 10 years, they have overwhelmingly failed to challenge Trump and are complicit in allowing his second presidency to operate like something akin to fascist monarchy. They have surrendered their political autonomy to support things, like Trump’s rancid bill, that they would stomp into dust if proposed by a Democrat.
It’s telling that Tillis — who caved to pressure from Trump to confirm Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defense secretary in February — didn’t believe that voting against a bill that will hurt his constituents would help his chances for reelection.
Instead, like former GOP senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Bob Corker of Tennessee who ran afoul of Trump by criticizing him, Tillis decided that he’d rather flee than fight.
“In Washington over the last few years,” Tillis said in his announcement, “it’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.”
All but extinct already are Republicans willing to oppose whatever fresh hell Trump wants to inflict on this nation. For Tillis, who stuck to his word and rejected Trump’s bill, his Independence Day is here. But most of his fellow GOP lawmakers proved yet again that they care less about keeping their promises to the voters they were elected to serve than in keeping their jobs and serving Trump.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.