Tillis: Choose Democracy and #PledgeToCount Every Vote
If Tillis wants to show us that he truly stands for democracy and for increasing access to one of its most fundamental pillars, he can #PledgeToCount every vote. We are calling on Tillis and other elected officials as well as current candidates to use their power to ensure that every vote in NC and beyond gets counted this election. If Tillis refuses our demands and chooses his career over our democratic process, then we can end his reign of harm in the coming weeks by firing him at the very location he has tried to impede our access to — the ballot box.
Tillis and Trump, who know the current election doesn’t look good for their chances, have plans to keep their legacy of harm afloat and will stop at nothing to ensure that their bullying tactics are effective. Both have been attempting to undermine voting with Tillis claiming last month that he has “grave concerns” about North Carolina’s absentee by-mail system. This claim came less than two days after he said he had so much faith in the system that he challenged his Democratic challenger, Cal Cunningham, to vote by mail. This complete 180 came after the Election Board made changes to make mail-voting safer in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s clear that Tillis is fighting for himself and not for North Carolinians, and his policies are hurting our state’s most vulnerable populations. Tillis has voted at least seven times to allow drug companies to raise drug costs and repeal the requirement that insurance companies cover prescription drugs. Further, as Speaker of the House in North Carolina, Tillis led the charge in 2013 to block Medicaid expansion and did so proudly. During the 2014 GOP primary, Tillis ran a radio ad saying that he “stopped Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion cold. It’s not happening in North Carolina, and it’s because of Thom Tillis.”
Expanding Medicaid would have closed the healthcare gap for hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians, and closing the healthcare gap is wildly popular among NC voters. Instead of committing to increase access to healthcare, Tillis votes again and again to decrease it.
During his time in the NC General Assembly, Tillis pushed to drug test low-income families receiving government assistance, a personal campaign that he later walked back after receiving public backlash. To express his disdain for recipients of government assistance even further, Tillis suggesting pitting recipients of social services against each other saying, “We need those folks [who have no choice but to seek help] to look down at these people who choose to get into a condition that makes them dependent on the government and say at some point you’re on your own. We may end up taking care of those babies, but we’re not going to take care of you.”
Thom Tillis is so opposed to government assistance that even a global pandemic leading to unemployment rates higher than those during the Great Depression isn’t enough to spur him into action for the Americans he claims to represent. The latest version of the HEROES Act passed the House on October 1, but the GOP-majority Senate, Tillis among them, is showing no signs of responding to the pleas of their constituents to provide relief.
While slow to push through legislation that would provide COVID relief, Tillis has been quick to introduce legislation in the past, including the misleadingly titled Justice for Victims of Sanctuary Cities Act of 2019. His bill aimed to pressure local sheriffs into complying with ICE and goes so far as blackmailing them if they refuse. The bill would allow for civil action from crime victims as well as the loss of federal grants for sheriff’s departments who won’t require their deputies to enforce federal immigration law.
As Speaker of the House in NC in 2013, Tillis also enthusiastically passed one of the most restrictive voter suppression laws in the country aimed at “target[ing] African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The federal court in Richmond found that the primary purpose “wasn’t to stop voter fraud, but rather to disenfranchise minority voters.” Tillis’s bill proposed requiring residents to show identification before they can cast a ballot, while eliminating same-day voter registration, shortening the length of early voting by seven days, and ending out-of-precinct voting.
Thom Tillis’s harrowing record does not reflect that he cares about North Carolinians. His time in office has been harmful to his constituents as a whole and to marginalized populations and low-income residents of the state specifically. Time will tell if Tillis is willing to put democracy and the will of the people over his personal political ambitions. The choice is his, and the people of North Carolina are ready to end his reign of harm.
