Some say he acted in fear of Donald Trump’s MAGA vengeance. Others see a principled decision – though perhaps too late – to place duty to less fortunate constituents over the interests of his Republican Party.

Either way, the stunning decision by Thom Tillis, North Carolina’s senior senator to walk away from a reelection campaign and retire at the end of his term has triggered political shockwaves across the nation.

In Tillis’s view, which he has asserted in doomsday speeches to colleagues behind closed doors and to the nation on televised addresses, President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” will leave tens of thousands of North Carolinians without medical care and many without nutrition. Even more, he publicly warned his Republican colleagues that the bill’s unpopularity will cause the GOP to lose tenuous majorities in the Senate and the House, leaving Trump as a truly lame duck and his legacy shattered.

On Tuesday, the Senate passed the bill after Vice President J.D. Vance broke a 50-50 tie. Tillis was joined by fellow Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky and Susan Collins of Maine in voting with every Democrat against the measure. The bill now goes back to the House.

For his opposition and decision, Tillis is now an instant political celebrity, rising from relative obscurity nationwide to the focus of news reports on every network and political talk show. He’s today’s Jimmy Stewart reprising the role of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” speaking hard truth to power, suddenly a hero to some (including Democrats) and a traitor to others (led by President Trump).

The full impact of Tillis’s retirement will evolve over many months and contain as many competing analyses as those over the B-2 bombing of Iran’s Mount Fordo.

Within hours of Tillis’s announcement, speculation about potential Republican successors went viral with counts reaching up to a dozen or more and featuring names such as presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump (North Carolina-born, though now a Florida voter), her Republican National Committee co-chair Michael Whatley (promoting himself), a handful of congressmen (among them Chuck Edwards), some elected state department heads and a few windmill tilters. 

The first sorting occurs in the first week of December, when candidates for office in the 2026 election must qualify. The big sort happens in March with the party primary. In the meantime, columns like this one – written by and for politics junkies – will pop and sizzle with the latest who’s-in-who’s-not chatter. 

But all that may obscure a deeper story to be explored in the aftermath of Tillis’s announcement, a story with direct impact on Buncombe County and neighboring counties.  

One view is that the fallout adds chaos to existing turmoil within the local Republican organization, which must feel like the guy whose house catches fire and he suddenly realizes he failed to pay his casualty insurance bill. 

After Republicans batted zero-for-everything in Buncombe County races,  the local party dumped chairman Doug Brown in favor of former police union president Rondell Lance, himself a failed candidate.

But just weeks into the job, Lance announced that he was quitting effective June 20 because the job was more than he had reckoned it to be. A new election will be held later this month. Coincidentally, Republican activists within Congressional District 11, which covers 16 counties in the mountains, ousted chairwoman Michele Woodhouse from Hendersonville in favor of former Henderson County chairwoman Merry Guy. 

Both of these changes have left open wounds, but most aggrieved is Woodhouse, a longtime party activist known for a willingness to treat politics as hardball, not a social experience. For her, the defeat is personal.

She blames Tillis for orchestrating her ouster by backing Guy, and she blasts Edwards for failing to come to her aid. In an interview hours after Tillis’s announcement, a smoldering Woodhouse took credit for forcing his decision, and with solid evidence. 

In 2023, she initiated a party revolt against Tillis by way of a censure resolution, a public reprimand. It castigated Tillis for his less-than-zealous support for Trump during the president’s impeachment proceedings for encouraging the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Although Tillis voted against conviction, he said he did only because he didn’t think then that Trump would return to office. 

“I wrote the censure resolution,” she told me, which was passed by the state GOP executive committee. Then she carried the resolution across the state, ultimately getting 53 of the 100 counties to pass its own censures. The animus against the senator took hold and polls showed him ripe for defeat in 2026.   

“Thom Tillis has no support from the grassroots. He votes like a Democrat,” she told me. “His politics are liberal.”

To the question of whether this will damage the GOP’s chances in the mid-term election next fall, Woodhouse remains the contrarian, seeing opportunity amid the chaos. She considered Tillis a dead man walking, facing certain defeat for re-election and bringing the ticket down with him.

“If Tillis was on the ballot, all Republicans on the ballot would be at risk because so many of the grassroots can’t stand him,” she said. “Now the people who were going to stay home aren’t going to stay home.” 

That view finds some support from Chris Cooper, professor of politics and public affairs at Western Carolina University and a widely quoted expert on state politics. All the media attention given to the impending scrum within the Republican field for the nomination may lure the largest voting bloc – independents – to choose Republican ballots, he said.

“It may be the unaffiliated [voters] who determine the Republican candidate,” he said in an interview. This could harm the chances of an extremist from the party’s MAGA wing and enhance those with more centrist views, he said – a likely stronger place to be in the general election against a Democrat. 

One other question remains: What’s to become of Tillis’s legacy? If he expected or hoped for hugs and high fives for a job well done, he must be sorely disappointed. I wasn’t surprised to see that derisive responses like Woodhouse’s saturated social media, which has been Tillis’s fate for many months. Praise for him from Democrats was equally predictable.

What was surprising to me – and almost certainly to Tillis – has been the response from such former allies as Chuck Edwards, who benefited from the senator’s financial backing (estimated at $1 million to win the congressional seat), who regarded him as a mentor, and with whom he shares a political consultant. Here’s the statement issued by Edwards’s office:

“I have always respected his dedication to making life better for North Carolinians and his willingness to engage in thoughtful policy discussions, even on issues where I may not have agreed with him.”

Edwards-backed gun measures were deep in ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’

Buried deep within the 1,116-page House version of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” were a pair of little-noticed, rarely acknowledged measures strongly backed by Edwards since his first days in Congress.

When the Republican congressman from Henderson County discusses his support for the president’s massive tax-and-spending bill, he typically focuses his remarks on recasting its controversial cuts to Medicaid, child nutrition and more as excising “waste, fraud and abuse” from the federal budget, the all-purpose rationale for all Republican-backed program cuts. 

Edwards has yet to mention publicly his quiet but fervent backing for a pair of measures also in the OBBB supported by the NRA and other pro-gun groups that would remove federal restrictions on the sales of sawed-off shotguns, gun silencers and an attachment that enables semi-automatic handguns to match the killing power of military assault rifles. 

These aren’t things needed by your typical hunter or sports shooter and “beautiful” may be in the eye of the beholder. But they are desired by some gun aficionados, who are often single-issue voters who believe that their 2nd Amendment rights are smothered by the National Firearms Act.

That law has restricted sales of some firearms since 1935, back when Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly and Al Capone were in the headlines. At the time, the law had strong public support, including from the NRA.

Times change.

With Edwards’s backing, the gun lobby is attempting to lift these restrictions.

Since taking office in 2023, the congressman and former licensed firearms dealer has co-sponsored bills with such innocuous names as the SHORT Act (an acronym for Stop Harassing Owners of Rifles Today) and the Hearing Protection Act.

The SHORT Act would lift the 90-year-old federal restrictions on purchases of sawed-off shotguns, which are deadly at close range and easily hidden in clothing and violin cases. Gun dealers lust to sell them in an otherwise saturated market as a new product renamed “assault shotguns” as used by Army Rangers when taking down a house full of terrorists. 

This measure would also lift restrictions on an attachment called a pistol stabilizing brace, which clamps the grip of a semi-automatic handgun to the shooter’s arm so it can be aimed and fired as with a rifle stock. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) determined that these attachments effectively convert semi-automatic handguns into short-barreled rifles that can be easily concealed. 

The ATF had solid reason for concern: Semi-automatic handguns with stabilizing braces have been increasingly used in mass killings, including one in which nine shoppers were slaughtered in a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, and 10 partiers killed in a nightclub in Dayton, Ohio. The ATF investigator in the latter case tried to describe the weapon: “It’s not a sporting rifle. It’s not a hunting rifle. It’s made for the military and short-range combat.” 

In a 2023 interview with Asheville Watchdog, Edwards defended the attachment, saying it was designed “to help disabled veterans defend themselves.” Yet none of the marketing videos produced by manufacturers made any such claim.

The Hearing Protection Act states that its purpose in legalizing silencers – renamed “noise suppressors” to shed any link to snipers and assassins – is to silence the weapon out of concern for the auditory health of law-abiding shooters. If this change also protects the hearing of criminals so often-depicted using “silencers” on TV crime shows, so be it.  

The Hearing Protection Act was tucked into the One Big Beautiful Bill when written in the House and passed – with Edwards’s vote – in early June. The SHORT Act’s provisions (which had been endorsed by Edwards) were added in the Senate upon the OBBB’s arrival. The now-combined measures appeared to be moving smoothly forward, largely unseen outside the pro-gun world. 

Until last Friday.  

On that day the Senate parliamentarian – the non-partisan staffer who determines whether proposed legislation meets the legislative purpose that it purports to serve – struck the pro-gun provisions, saying they didn’t belong in a tax-and-spending measure. 

When I contacted Edwards’s office for comment on Monday I was told he would have no comment because he had no role in influencing the Senate’s deliberations.

[Correction: Due to an editing error, Vice President J.D. Vance’s title was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.]

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Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Tom Fiedler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter and dean emeritus from Boston University who lives in Asheville. His Democracy Watch column appears every other Wednesday. Email him at tfiedler@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

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