On Tuesday, Republican Senator Thom Tillis became one of only three GOP senators to cast a vote against President Donald Trump’s budget bill. Ultimately, his vote was mostly symbolic — the measure passed on a 51-50 vote, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tiebreaker.

But the vote has already had consequences for the two-term lawmaker from North Carolina. On Sunday, he made the announcement that he would not be running for re-election in 2026. His decision came a day after he took to the Senate floor to declare that he couldn’t support the bill because “it would result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities.”

Tillis’ retirement not only raises the stakes for what was already expected to be one of the most closely contested 2026 races for the U.S. Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-47 advantage, it could also topple political dominoes for congressional and state legislative races in a state almost evenly divided between Democratic, Republican and unaffiliated voters.

If Tillis had sought re-election “he probably could not campaign at Republican events without a legitimate fear of being beaten off stage,” Jonathan Felts, a North Carolina Republican consultant and Tillis supporter, told me. “The reality is, if we start with a clean slate, we’ll have a better chance of winning.”

Tillis is hardly a moderate. He is a conservative, veteran lawmaker who understands details and frequently speaks his mind. He not only knows how to build a consensus but also finds the value in it. He is exactly the kind of lawmaker the nation needs more of if we are to resolve our festering challenges.

But because of Trump’s total dominance of the Republican Party, independent thinkers like Tillis are reviled, not rewarded. How that plays out in the 2026 elections, especially in North Carolina, will be must-see TV.

The midterms are traditionally a fraught time for the party that holds the White House and the line-up of potential candidates to replace Tillis reflects those tensions.

Republicans are suggesting that Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump is a likely prospect. She grew up in Wilmington, attended North Carolina State University and served as co-chair of the Republican National Committee last year, along with another North Carolinian, Michael Whatley. But she now lives in Florida and currently anchors a weekly Fox News show.

“If Lara Trump enters, I think she clears the primary field,” said Christopher Cooper, political science professor at Western Carolina University. “Everybody else is going to want Donald Trump’s endorsement and clearly he’s going to give his endorsement to the person who shares his last name.”

But while Trump may be overwhelmingly popular among Republican primary voters, polls show his tariff and immigration policies, and the proposed Medicaid cuts, are increasingly unpopular among general-election voters.

That makes Lara Trump “a dream for Democrats … because she will not be able to separate herself from Donald Trump and all the things he just did,” said Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, in an interview on MSNBC on Monday.

Democrats are urging former Governor Roy Cooper to jump into the race. He had been rumored to be considering challenging Tillis before the senator announced his exit this week, but the 67-year-old former governor and state attorney general has been taking his time deciding.

Cooper won statewide all three times Trump won the state. He left office with high approval ratings and, if he’s at the top of the ticket, he could help Democrats down the ballot, including one of the most competitive congressional seats in the nation, North Carolina’s First District now held by Democrat Don Davis.

“Roy Cooper can do a lot of good for his party if he runs,” Chris Cooper (no relation) of WCU told me. “But everyone is wondering where his heart is right now.”

Other Republican names emerging are Whatley and freshman Representative Pat Harrigan, a West Point graduate and former Green Beret. Former Representative Wiley Nickel launched a bid for the Democratic nomination three months ago.

The essence of Tillis’ warning to his party is that Trump and the MAGA wing were once again overplaying their hand.

That’s what happened in 2024, when North Carolina Republicans nominated Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson on the strength of Trump’s endorsement, despite Robinson’s sketchy history of hateful, racist and misogynistic remarks. Robinson was crushed by Democrat Josh Stein, as were other Republicans running for statewide office, even though Trump won the state.

Tillis had earned a reputation in Congress as someone willing to work across the aisle — but the Republican Party of North Carolina censured him for it. They didn’t like that he was a key negotiator of the Respect for Marriage Act, which enshrined protections for same-sex and interracial marriages in federal law. They chastised him for highlighting the flaws in Trump’s immigration policies in his first term, and for supporting funds for red flag laws, which allow courts to authorize the removal of firearms from people undergoing a diagnosed mental health crisis.

Tillis announced he wouldn’t vote for the $930 billion in Medicaid cuts in the Senate’s budget reconciliation bill because it would “betray the very promise Donald J. Trump made in the Oval Office” that the bill would “not touch Medicaid.”

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the cuts to Medicaid will cause 11.8 million Americans to lose their health insurance over 10 years, either from the loss of Medicaid or from coverage losses in the Affordable Care Act, and as many as 300 rural hospitals could close.

As a former speaker of the House in the North Carolina Legislature, Tillis had done his homework. He knew that if he voted for the bill, he would be either leaving thousands of working people without health insurance or asking the conservative state Legislature to fill the massive budget gap.

“What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore?” Tillis asked on the Senate floor.

In his statement on Sunday, Tillis blamed both parties for stifling compromise and middle ground and pointed to the recent departures of conservative-leaning Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

“They got things done,” Tillis said. “Too many elected officials are motivated by pure raw politics who really don’t give a damn about the people they promised to represent on the campaign trail.”

Tillis’ impending departure is a signal that he doesn’t believe his party is capable of correcting course. Sadly, it appears he may be right.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

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Zohran Mamdani got three chances to repudiate the expression “globalize the intifada” in a weekend interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker. It would have been easy, and politically smart, for the Democratic candidate for New York mayor to say that he’d been educated about the phrase’s violent connotation and that he regretted not rejecting it sooner. Instead, he ducked each time, saying that although he does not use those words himself, he would decline to “police” the language of others.

So give Mamdani credit for this: He has the courage of his convictions. Now he ought to bear the responsibility for them, too.

I was a journalist living and working in Jerusalem when I got a taste of what the word “intifada,” Arabic for “shaking off,” means in practice. I had just moved into an apartment in the Rehavia neighborhood when in March 2002 my local coffee shop, Café Moment, was the target of a suicide bombing.

My wife, whom I hadn’t yet met, was due to be in the cafe when it blew up but had changed plans at the last minute. Eleven people were murdered and 54 were wounded that night. Multiple perpetrators, members of Hamas, were arrested and then released nine years later, in an exchange for Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit.

Two weeks later, I was at the Passover Seder of a friend in central Israel when the news filtered in that there had been a bombing of a Seder at a hotel in Netanya. Thirty civilians were murdered there and 140 were injured. Among the dead were Sarah Levy-Hoffman, Clara Rosenberger and Frieda Britvich, all of them Auschwitz survivors.

Two days after that there was an attack on a Jerusalem supermarket. Two were murdered: a security guard named Haim Smadar, a father of six, who stopped the bomber from coming into the store, and a high school senior named Rachel Levy. Rachel would have been about 40 now had she only not been at the wrong place at the wrong instant.

Life in Jerusalem was punctuated over the following months by suicide bombings that occurred with almost metronomic regularity. Among those I’ll never forget: The Hebrew University campus bombing, which left nine murdered and 85 injured, and the bombing of Café Hillel, another neighborhood favorite of mine. Seven people were murdered there, including David Applebaum, an emergency-room doctor who had treated scores of terrorism victims, and his 20-year-old daughter Nava. She was going to be married the next day.

On Jan. 29, 2004, at 8:48 a.m., I was fussing over my newborn daughter in her crib when I heard a loud boom and saw a plume of black smoke rise from Azza Street, behind my apartment. I was at the scene within three minutes and wrote down what I saw later that evening.

The ground was covered in glass; every window of the bus had been blasted. Inside the wreckage, I could see three very still corpses and one body that rocked back and forth convulsively. Outside the bus, another three corpses were strewn on the ground, one face-up, two face-down. There was a large piece of torso ripped from its body, which I guessed was the suicide bomber’s. Elsewhere on the ground, more chunks of human flesh: a leg, an arm, smaller bits, pools of blood.

In the carnage, I failed to spot a reporter who worked for me, Erik Schechter. His injuries were described as “moderate,” meaning shrapnel wounds, vascular damage and a shattered kneecap. He spent months in recovery.

There were many more atrocities in Israel over following years, culminating in the orgy of murder, rape and kidnapping that was Oct. 7, 2023. But the intifada also was globalized. One woman murdered and five others injured at the Jewish Federation office in Seattle in 2006 by an assailant who told eyewitnesses he was “angry at Israel.” Six Jews murdered by terrorists at the Chabad House in Mumbai, India, in 2008. Four Jews murdered in a kosher market in Paris in 2015. A young couple murdered in May after leaving a reception at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum by a killer yelling “Free Palestine.” An elderly American woman, Karen Diamond, who died of burn wounds last week after being the victim, with at least 12 others, of a firebombing attack in Boulder, Colorado, by another assailant also yelling “Free Palestine.”

There are rich and legitimate debates to be had about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. policy toward it. None of us should look away at the devastating toll the war in the Gaza Strip exacts on Palestinian civilians. And nobody has a monopoly on truth or virtue: Those who want to condemn Israeli policy are fully within their rights.

But a major political candidate who plainly refuses to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” isn’t participating in legitimate democratic debate; he is giving moral comfort to people who deliberately murder innocent Jews.

There are liberals and progressives who’ll continue to make excuses for Mamdani. They will argue that his views on “globalize the intifada” are beside the point of his agenda for New York. They will observe that he has a predictable share of far-left Jewish supporters. They will play semantic games about the original meaning of “intifada.”

To those supporters, one can say only good luck. They’re making Donald Trump’s case about the radical direction of too much of the Democratic Party better than he ever could.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

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Fast on the heels of the recent “No Kings” protests against President Donald Trump comes an odd suggestion that Americans would be better off today if we had remained part of the British Empire — an empire whose titular head (drum roll, please) is King Charles III, the British monarch.

The fact that some Americans even think this way illustrates how out of touch they are with America’s history and ideals.

Granted, the British throne today doesn’t wield broad authority as it did in 1776, when the American colonists, in their Declaration of Independence, spelled out King George III’s “History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny.” But the nature of today’s ceremonial monarchy doesn’t make the United Kingdom’s form of government preferable to ours.

For starters, power in the United States is vested in the people, not in the government, and certainly not in a sovereign. We have no kings. We have no princes or princesses, counts or countesses, dukes or duchesses. As President Abraham Lincoln stressed in his “Gettysburg Address,” dedicating the cemetery where 3,500 Union soldiers were laid to rest after the historic Civil War battle, ours is a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” It is not a government of the nobility, by the king, for the benefit of the gentry.

Moreover, the presidency, unlike the Crown, isn’t hereditary — it is not passed from parent to child, dynasty to dynasty. We can kick elected officials out, as we do regularly. Not so the British monarchy, which traces its bloodlines back to 1707, when the English and Scottish kingdoms were united as Great Britain.

Then, there’s the critical matter of the U.S. Constitution, the legal bedrock of our country, and the Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, spelling out the all-important “unalienable Rights,” or personal liberties, to which the Declaration of Independence refers.

Although the United Kingdom is described as a “constitutional monarchy” or a “parliamentary democracy,” and is ranked among the world’s freest countries, it has no formal constitution. Instead, as the London-based Constitution Society points out, its constitution is an amalgam of Acts of Parliament, court decisions, common law, and “understandings of how the system should operate.” More important, there are “few checks on the power of a government with a majority in the House of Commons” — unlike the United States, where the Constitution itself established an ingenious system of checks and balances meant to right the ship of state when politics pulls it too far off course.

Ours is a nation of ideas and ideals. That’s what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are all about: the people’s freedoms and how to organize a government that respects and protects those freedoms.

This is not to say things are perfect. For example, the United States has been having an issue with the liberties outlined in the First Amendment, from cancel culture to the unhinged voices in politics and on social media.

However, as we’ve seen time again during America’s 250-year history, the most effective antidote to unhinged speech is more speech — rational speech — not repression.

The United Kingdom, regrettably, has chosen the latter: repression. According to Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, British police during the past decade have investigated more than a quarter million “non-crime hate incidents,” which he described in The Wall Street Journal last fall as speech exhibiting “‘perceived’ hostility or prejudice against any ‘protected characteristic.’” Imagine being investigated because you said or wrote something that somebody else “perceived” as hostile, prejudicial or hurtful.

At each major crossroad in America’s history — the Revolutionary War, the westward migration, the Civil War, the Great Depression, the two world wars — we’ve leaned into our values and ideals and emerged stronger for it.

If you’d rather live in a society where the police can be called whenever someone says something that hurts someone else’s feelings, send me a postcard. I’m staying here.

Because, despite the imperfect nature of the continuing American project, the United States is and remains the only nation founded on ideas — ideas intended to enhance and expand human liberty.

Richard Lorenc is president and CEO of Lexandria, a project of the education nonprofit Certell Inc. intended to help develop U.S. high school students into principled citizens. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

 

Politics and intellectual consistency go together like banana on pizza. But the reaction from Democrats to last week’s Supreme Court ruling on judicial authority deserves special attention.

In a 6-3 ruling Friday, the justices limited the ability of lone federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions that restrict the ability of the executive branch to enforce statutes or regulations. The practice was largely unheard of for much of American history but came into general use in the 1960s.

In recent years, however, the number of such edicts has soared as Republicans and Democrats ask judges to restrain a president of the opposition party. Democrats have been especially aggressive in this fashion against President Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal describes the playbook: “Find plaintiffs who can claim harm, sue in a favorable jurisdiction and argue that a ruling with nationwide scope is essential to maintaining order.”

The case in question involved Trump’s order on birthright citizenship. Attorneys general in blue states sued to block the decree, and a federal judge ruled in their favor. The Supreme Court did not address the constitutionality of the president’s order, and it acknowledged that universal injunctions may be appropriate in certain instances. But the ruling declared that most injunctions may protect only the plaintiff in question and apply only in the court’s jurisdiction.

“When a court concludes that the executive branch has acted unlawfully,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority, “the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

Many analysts portrayed the decision as a victory for Trump, and some Democrats lashed out at the court. But the ruling is ideologically neutral and will apply when Republicans are in the minority and a Democrat occupies the White House. In fact, many Democratic critics are arguing with themselves.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, was once an opponent of nationwide injunctions, declaring in April 2024 that right-wing “activists are exploiting the current makeup of the judicial system to circumvent the legislation process and overturn the will of the American people.”

That same month, Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said, “Activist plaintiffs should not be able to hand-pick individual judges to set nationwide policy.”

No less an authority than Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan noted during a 2022 speech to Northwestern University law students that “it just can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years that it takes to go through normal process.”

Justice Kagan sided with the minority Friday. Perhaps she re-evaluated the arguments. Or perhaps her constitutional principles depend on who sits in the Oval Office.

— Las Vegas Review-Journal

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