WaPo: “Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) is a big outlier when it comes to his fellow Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The committee is stocked with senators from conservative states, such as Tennessee and Alabama, both of which President Donald Trump won by 30 percentage points last year. A couple of Republican members come from Missouri, which gave Trump a more than 18-point win. And the chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), comes from a onetime swing state that has instead shifted hard right the past decade, giving Trump a win by more than 13 points in November.
Then there’s Tillis — whose state has narrowly sided with Trump in three straight elections. The 10-year veteran of the Senate is the only Republican on the Judiciary Committee from an actual battleground state, making him the ultimate swing vote on a committee with 12 Republicans and 10 Democrats.
He’s the lone senator whose first political impulse is not looking over his shoulder toward the fiery base of primary voters. Because of that, Tillis had a political incentive to announce Tuesday that he was opposing Trump’s controversial nominee to serve as the top federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia, interim U.S. attorney Ed Martin.”