Op-Ed: Mike Fragoso: Advice for Sen. Thom Tillis

Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) announced recently that he will not be running for reelection in 2026. A stalwart of the establishment wing of the Republican Conference, he joins the interesting club of Republican Senators who hung it up after two terms — Rob Portman, Pat Toomey, and Bob Corker. How should he go about his last 18 months in the Senate? I worked with those two-termers on their way out the door, and earlier in my career worked for another Senator, Jeff Flake, who opted not to run for reelection with 16 months left in his term. Here’s what worked, and here’s what didn’t.

Stay focused. Senator Portman spent his last two years in Congress racking up legislative win after legislative win. Whether it was the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the wide-ranging inspector-general reforms, codifying gay marriage, or countless smaller but consequential wins, he pushed for them until the clock stopped. I recall running into him in the Cloakroom around Christmastime — weeks or even days before his term was to expire — and being asked pointed questions about why McConnell wasn’t supporting this judge, or whether there was any path forward on that bill, or whether we’d hold the line on a piece of legislation he opposed.

Portman’s good friend, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, similarly was cutting deals and getting wins on her way out the door two years later. Focusing on outcomes can make a difference.

Know what you want. When the Senate was considering the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) in 2017, Senator Corker knew exactly what he wanted: fewer individual tax cuts and more corporate tax relief. He also knew he wasn’t running for reelection so he could use his vote as leverage in the 51-49 Senate. As such he was able to guide the negotiations effectively so the final bill reflected his preferences — at which point he gave Leader McConnell his vote. Similarly Senator Flake wanted one thing and one thing only during TCJA: a DACA fix. In the very last moments of TCJA’s floor process, McConnell promised him floor time on the issue in 2018 in order to secure his vote. None of the DACA fixes passed, of course, but it was the closest shot on immigration reform over the last decade because Flake knew what he wanted and calibrated his tactics accordingly.

Stay true to your principles. When Senator Toomey was on his way out, he was the ranking member of the Banking Committee. The easiest thing in the world for him to have done would be to cater to elite financial interests to feather his nest once he left. Instead he stood firm for what he believed in — even if Wall Street disagreed. For example he never relented in his opposition to marijuana banking, even though industry favored it. He also voted against Portman’s gay marriage bill, foregoing an opportunity for politically advantageous virtue signaling, instead sticking to his long-held principles. He also pushed relentlessly for his conservative judges in Pennsylvania (selected through a longstanding deal with Senator Bob Casey), because he knew it was the last chance to do that and there are few things more important than a sound judiciary.

Don’t fall victim to the news cycle. The news cycle in D.C. thrives on Republican-on-Republican violence and retiring members are great fodder for it. Nothing good comes of this. Being a “truth teller” is a sugar high. Eventually you come down and have to keep dealing with colleagues who see you, not as their secret tribune, but rather as the proximate cause of the collateral damage they’re taking. And the press corps doesn’t have a vote in the Senate. The line between being a principled Senator, on one hand, and being a truth-telling pundit in the Senate, on the other, is fine but real.

Don’t make enemies. This is related to not falling victim to the news cycle. Whether it’s getting legacy initiatives over the finish line or continuing to play a role in Republican politics down the line, making new enemies is all downside. Of course, being unleashed can be a great opportunity to get revenge on old enemies! But kicking your erstwhile friends, free of political constraints, means those friendships were themselves the product of those constraints. It’s a good way, in fact, to make lasting enemies.

Don’t take hostages. Hostage taking is an unsavory tactic and rarely successful. It’s one thing to engage in strategic legislative obstruction — that’s just the legislative process — but taking nominees hostage for unrelated policy goals is a different matter altogether. Around this time in 2018 (after I had left his office) Senator Flake took a circuit-court nominee hostage in order to get the Trump administration either to change its policy on Cuba travel or tariffs (the precise goal shifted over time). As a result Flake faced retaliatory hostage taking from other Senators and a general uproar from his conservative supporters in Arizona. He didn’t get what he wanted in the end because the Kavanaugh nomination made his position untenable. A few months later, though, he did it again: blocking all judicial nominees unless McConnell would allow a vote on a bill protecting Robert Mueller from being fired. He delayed his own Ninth Circuit nominee’s confirmation for half a year. And for what? An unconstitutional bill responding to a media-inspired moral panic.

McConnell eventually confirmed his judges, who will provide decades of honorable service, but only after needless delay and pointless drama predicated on a political episode — the Mueller investigation — that’s already forgotten.

I don’t doubt that Senator Tillis will go out on the right side of these examples. But the temptations for an unleashed senator to transform from legislator to pundit, from deal-maker to hostage-taker are immense.

There’s a line often misattributed to C.S. Lewis that “integrity is doing the right thing when no one else is watching.” For Senators, I think, it means doing the right thing when you no longer have a reelection to force it.

Michael A. Fragoso is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and a partner at Torridon Law PLLC. He previously worked in the Senate for nearly a decade.