The debate over the “One Big Beautiful Bill” has unduly thrust one name into the spotlight: Senator Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). Tillis, one of three Republicans to vote against the bill in the Senate, has earned such epithets as “traitor” and “RINO betrayer.” But those who know Tillis’s record should hardly have been surprised since he betrayed voters on his most significant issue before joining the Senate: protecting the family.

In fact, Tillis has built his résumé with visible opposition to the conservative agenda:

• Tillis and then-Senator Kirsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) attempted to smuggle amnesty for illegal immigrants through the December 2022 lame duck session of Congress. The ill-defined proposal, which thankfully never got off the ground, would have traded legal status for millions of “DREAMers” in exchange for a modest increase in the number of Border Patrol agents the Biden administration could ignore. “The Tillis-Sinema proposal is nothing more than amnesty, cloaked with the fig leaf of ‘more funding’ for Border Patrol. In reality, this proposal would do nothing except encourage more families around the world to put their children, of all ages, in the hands of the cartels, enriching these blood-thirsty and savage organizations, driving even-higher numbers of unaccompanied minors to the border, and further overwhelming an already besieged Border Patrol,” said Tom Homan, then acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director at the time. “[T]his proposal will further entrench Border Patrol under the Biden administration as the final link in a human smuggling operation that originates with the cartels.”
• Tillis backed a “red flag” gun control law that the Biden-Harris administration immediately used as a pretext to crack down on Second Amendment rights.
• Tillis voted to confirm Merrick Garland as attorney general but opposed President Trump’s appointment for U.S. Attorney for D.C., Ed Martin, a longtime associate of Phyllis Schlafly.
• In all, Tillis voted with the Biden-Harris administration about half the time: 48% of his votes endorsed the most left-wing administration in American history, according to FiveThirtyEight. (ABC News has removed the feature, but here is the archived website.)

None of those actions should have come as a surprise to anyone paying attention during the debate over redefining marriage. Tillis could have hardly changed his stripes more than on the definition of family.

As the first Republican speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives in decades, he helped pass Amendment 1, a constitutional amendment which states, “Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this [s]tate.” Nearly two-thirds of the swing state’s voters passed the amendment over Barack Obama’s objections. When the state’s Republican leadership refused to challenge judicial tyranny, Tillis defended his state’s marriage protection amendment in court — and cited his stance in his 2014 defeat of incumbent Democratic Senator Kay Hagan.

Yet safely ensconced in the Senate, Tillis voted for the so-called “Respect for Marriage” Act. The supremely anti-conservative legislation imposed a sweeping, top-down redefinition of marriage on all 50 states. In essence, it stated that every state had to accept the definition of marriage in every other state. It also subjected businesses in general, and Christian business owners in particular, to the continual threat of costly litigation. Worse yet, it passed without any meaningful religious liberty protections.

The bill added a “bipartisan” fig leaf of religious protection, which constitutionalist Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) saw through. Lee offered an amendment protecting faithful business owners from “discriminatory action … wholly or partially on the basis of their belief in marriage.” Although Tillis voted for the amendment (which failed by one vote), apparently recognizing the need for the measure, he voted for the final bill, anyway.

In fact, Tillis did not reluctantly go along with the deficient bill’s redefinition of marriage; he actively “lobbied his GOP colleagues in Congress to vote in favor of” the legislation, according to the Associated Press.

Soon, Tillis found himself repeatedly censured by Republicans back home. The first measures came from the Granville, Duplin, Lee, and Dare County chapters of the GOP. “Thom Tillis, by his vote, deliberately abandoned the national and state party platforms on marriage … [H]is rejection of such a crucial plank of the GOP platform has damaged the reputation of his party and further marginalized the natural family,” said the last of those county resolutions.

Then, the North Carolina Republican Party formally censured Thom Tillis by an overwhelming 799-361 vote on June 10, 2023. When the delegates heard the announcement, they broke out into sustained applause, with a few letting out a North Carolina, “yahoo!”

The vote carried the threat that, if Tillis faced a contested primary, he could not use state party funds. And a primary seemed all-but-certain. A recent Catawba-YouGov poll cited by The Carolina Journal last week found Tillis’s approval rating nudged up to 33%, while 44% of Tarheel State voters disapprove of his performance — and that was before the OBBBA vote.

“Republicans across the state look forward to a robust primary,” said NCGOP spokesperson Matt Mercer following last month’s state convention. “Republicans are unified to keep our Senate seat to ensure President Trump’s agenda has the votes in Congress to continue delivering for the American people.”

When Tillis cast his lot against the president’s signature bill, the president came out swinging. On June 28, President Trump announced he would recruit a primary challenger to take on Tillis. At virtually the same moment, Tillis became the fifth of the 12 Republican senators who voted to redefine marriage who have retired or have announced their retirement in the last three years.

“Tillis’s retirement spares him a brutal primary and offers a dignified end to a long and often complicated career,” wrote Andrew Dunn of The Charlotte Observer. “But make no mistake: this wasn’t purely voluntary.” Indeed, the ground had long laid, seeded by Tillis’s serial betrayals of conservative values and his party’s most loyal voters.

Not every vote signals a betrayal, and not even dissent requires a member’s retirement. The OBBBA was rejected by a handful of principled, small-government conservatives — two of them from the same state: Senator Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie, libertarian-leaning Republicans from Kentucky.

The other dissents came from the party’s more liberal wing: Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), who co-sponsored the so-called Reproductive Choice Act to “codify” Roe v. Wade into law.

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), who voted against the OBBBA, accused the Trump administration of “withholding critical defense material” from Ukraine. He, along with a handful of Republican “moderates” reportedly including Reps. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) and Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), wanted to remove the bill’s defunding of Planned Parenthood. Fitzpatrick reportedly said, “we need simplicity” in the sprawling, 887-page bill. Curiously, while President Trump immediately vowed to recruit a primary challenger against Massie, he rewarded Fitzpatrick’s actions. “We’re gonna send some more weapons” to Ukraine, Trump announced during remarks Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We have to.” (The Massie primary threat also deepened the president’s feud with Elon Musk: When the Trump-aligned MAGA Kentucky PAC launched a $1 million-dollar ad campaign targeting Massie, Musk immediately pledged his support to the Kentucky incumbent.) The president has made no move whatever against Collins or Paul.

Collins and Fitzpatrick also voted for the “Respect for Marriage” Act.

MAGA activists miffed by middling members’ moderation should hardly marvel. The natural family is the fundamental building block of society. The family unit is an ancient, pre-political institution ordained by God as its members’ primary provider, caregiver, nurturer, educator, health care provider, and counselor. There are many ways to describe voting to allowing a bare majority of state legislators — or a rogue state Supreme Court — to redefine the primeval and rudimentary relationship defining the human race; conservative is not one of them. 

If the broader patriotic political movement learned nothing else from the OBBBA vote, it should remember: If a Republican refuses to defend a child’s right to his own mother and father, he is probably not conservative on any other issue. Making America great again begins with the health of our families.