Bulwark Takes - GOP Senator Goes OFF on Trump’s Budget Bill

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

Republican Senator Thom Tillis followed up his announcement that he won't seek reelection with a surprise Senate floor speech blasting Trump's budget bill that would cut Medicaid for over 600,000 people in North Carolina. Sam breaks down the speech and the Trump-Tillis feud that unfolded before Tillis' announcement.

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor for you. Hey guys, it's me Sam Stein, the managing editor at the Bulwark. It is Sunday evening. It's like 9pm. I have no life. And so I'm doing this video for you guys, but I'm doing it because a pretty remarkable moment just happened on the Senate floor relative, I guess, to what we usually get on the Senate floor. Senator Tom Tillis of North Carolina, who today, hours ago, revealed that he would not be seeking re-election this term, gave a fairly impassioned speech ripping apart his own party's bill, the reconciliation bill,

ripping apart his own party's bill, the reconciliation bill, over what he essentially deemed a lie that Republicans have told either to themselves or to voters about what the bill would do with respect to Medicaid cuts. I want you to just take a listen to what Tillis said on the floor, and then I'm going to offer some thoughts about that on the other side. That between the state directed payments and the cuts scheduled in this bill, there's a reduction of state directed payments and then there's the reduction of the provider tax. They can't find a hole in my estimate. So what they told me is that, yeah, it's rough, but North Carolina's used the system, they're going to have to make it work.

All right. So, 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. When the White House, which is advising the president are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise. And you know, the last time I saw a promise broken around health care, with respect to my friends on the other side of the aisle, it's when somebody said, if you like your health care, you can keep it. If you like your doctor, you can keep it.

We found out that wasn't true. That made me the second Republican Speaker of the House since the Civil War, ladies and gentlemen, because we betrayed the promise to the American people. Two years later, three years later, it actually made me a U.S. Senator, because in 2010 it had just been proposed. And just anticipation of what was going to happen was enough to have a sea change election that swept Republicans into the majority for the second time in 100 years.

Now Republicans are about to make a mistake on health care and betraying a promise. It is inescapable that this bill in its current form will betray the very promise that Donald J. Trump made in the Oval Office or in the Cabinet Room when I was there with finance where he said, we can go after waste, fraud and abuse on any programs. Put aside whatever you think about his bolo tie. It is again, Sunday night and you know, no one's holding these people out as you know, fashion icons anyway. But the substance of the speech, there he is, a senator being like, the president is

misrepresenting what this bill does or he will be betraying the people who he promised he wouldn't cut their Medicaid. And he spoke specifically about the impact that the bill would have on his home state of North Carolina. I think he said something like 630 plus thousand people would lose their coverage under this bill. It's an extraordinary thing to see. Tom Tillis is not a flamethrower.

He's I guess considered more moderate because the party has moved so far in one direction. But when he came to office, he was a conservative. And here he is on the floor of the Senate just saying that the main policy priority that his party is pushing is built on harming hundreds of thousands of people, that the cuts that they are putting on Medicaid would be in the tens of billions That people who are voting for this bill and we expect that they're gonna vote on this tomorrow in the Senate will be dooming their own constituents to a life with

You know less health care options, maybe no health care options at all And if they're doing this after they had promised these very same voters that they wouldn't do it, that they were not going to cut their Medicaid. Now, like I said earlier, Tom Tillis is not running for reelection. He was endangered because both he was from a relatively swingy state, North Carolina has gone Republican mostly, but it's certainly a top Democratic target. But the real danger was that he would be primaried in the Republican primary because Donald Trump and others have just had it out for him. Primarily

for things like this. Tillis over the past couple days has just been enduring a whole slew of angry tirades from Trump on True Social. And after his retirement was announced, Trump went on True Social again, and he bleated, great news! Senator, in quotation marks, Tom Tillis will not be seeking re-election. The day before Trump had already said he was going to try to find someone to primary the guy. So the writing was sort of on the wall. So I guess the question is, what do we make of Tillis doing this? Obviously. I mean, there's obviously a lot of freedom that he must feel knowing that he doesn't have to, uh, posture for a primary because he doesn't have to run in a

primary and in fact Old colleague mine Andrew just a dare. Who's over at punch bowl news He caught up with tills after the fact and tills told him he had informed both Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune That he wasn't running for election last night and the quote that tills gave Andrew was quote I slept like a baby last night so I could see a sense of the freedom that he feels to not do these things. And he's going to use his time to, I guess, speak some truths. And when he's saying, uh, in the well of the Senate, you have been misinformed. You supporting the Senate bill will hurt people who are eligible

and qualified for Medicaid. That's him speaking, uh, truths. Right. And so, I mean, I guess I applaud that and yet, I don't know something about it feels a little off. Um, Tillis made a lot of moves to ingratiate himself to MAGA prior to this. Uh, he famously supported defense secretary Pete Hegseth, uh, and kind of threw him a life raft when it looked

pretty bleak for the guy. And you just think that, you know, also maybe the play here was to stick it around and see if you could challenge Trump while doing this stuff. Now I know probably if it ended poorly, you might have lost in the primary and maybe this is just the way it should be. know, probably if it ended poorly, you might've lost in the primary. And maybe this is just the way it should be. Um, but I'm thinking about Tom Tillis right now. I'm thinking about another retirement that was announced this weekend, Don Bacon, a moderate Republican from Nebraska. He said he's not going to seek reelection as well.

He's from Omaha. It's the swingy district in Nebraska. Another great opportunity for Democrats to gain office. But, um, here you have two sort of moderate minded people in the Republican Party who basically are just calling quits. And it's hard to not look at that and say, you know, we're in a bad place where people like that feel like they cannot stick around in Washington, D.C. and fight the fight.

And certainly they both concluded that they were screwed more or less. around in Washington, DC and fight the fight. And certainly they both concluded that they were screwed more or less. Otherwise they probably would have run. Um, okay. So that being said, I still apply to us for making the speech you did tonight. Uh, it's easy to contrast what he's doing with what a lot of other Republicans are doing, they know fully well the damage that this bill's going to affect on their constituents, and they know it's gonna hurt really bad.

And they're voting for it anyway. And some of them are just putting their heads in the sand and say, well, these are, states can handle it. These people aren't actually gonna get hurt. If they are getting hurt, they're probably, you shouldn't be on the program or maybe they're undocumented immigrants. Right?

But then you have people like Josh Holly, who spent months being like, we can't cut Medicaid. We can't get Medicaid. And then this bill comes around and he's like, it does cut Medicaid and I hate it. And I'm going to fight like hell to make sure it doesn't happen in the future, but I'm going to vote for it anyway. And you look at that and you look at Tillis and you just got to kind of tip your hat, I guess, in the end to Tillis for seeing the writing on the

wall, for seeing how bad this bill is and for deciding that he's just going to go for it and do what he can with the very little remaining time that he has before this bill passes and the remaining time he has in office and just tell it like it is. And so for that I suppose I tip my hat for Tillis and it was something to behold watching him give that speech. Okay, I've talked enough. Hopefully you enjoyed this.

Hopefully it was worth the Sunday night video.