Thom Tillis faces a final Trump test. Will he betray North Carolina?

At least a dozen U.S. Senators will join more than 100 U.S. House Republicans on Wednesday in voting against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral college victory. North Carolina’s senior senator, Richard Burr, reportedly will not join that effort. Junior senator Thom Tillis has not publicly revealed his intentions, and as of Monday, his office had not answered a question from the Editorial Board about whether he will vote against certification.

If Tillis does, it would be a disenfranchisement of the millions of North Carolinians and Americans who cast ballots in a free and legal election. It would be a betrayal of his office — and his country.

Let’s be clear about two things:

First, the premise behind this election objection, as voiced by Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, does not have legal merit. Hawley contends that states including Pennsylvania failed to follow their own election rules in 2020, but federal judges have rejected that notion. Republicans also say their objection is merely giving voice to constituents who have grave concerns about the election. But those concerns were borne from the lies that the president and Republicans have spread, and judges have rejected those claims, as well. There was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. There were no dumped votes or rigged machines that changed the election’s outcome. The president lost, fairly.

Second, this effort in Congress on Wednesday will not succeed. Enough Republican senators — including Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski and, notably, Trump loyalist Tom Cotton — have said they will vote to certify the election. The Democratic majority in the U.S. House will do the same. Joe Biden will be affirmed as our country’s next president.

Republicans, including Tillis, know all of this. The decision not to certify is a political choice, a move to please the many Trump supporters who might hold sway over their future in office. It’s a decision to prioritize personal ambition. It is a cowardly calculation.

Such a choice is not new for Tillis and other Republicans, but too often, North Carolina’s senator has failed to stand up to the president and for his state. He allowed Trump to bypass Congress and threaten N.C. military projects to fund a southern border wall. He’s declined to demand that the president stop spreading falsehoods about COVID-19, and he has been equally timid about the president’s election lies. On Sunday, Tillis posted a clip of being sworn in for his second Senate term, saying he was “honored to earn the trust of North Carolinians to continue serving them in the United States Senate.” Yet he fell short of that service with his silence in the face of the president’s desperate and dangerous weekend attempt to change the election results in Georgia.

Now Tillis faces a final test on President Trump. The senator’s slowness to defend the Constitution against Wednesday’s effort is damning in itself. If he joins Republicans who question without proof the results of the presidential race, he will further poison the trust Americans have that their votes are counted fairly. He will set a precedent that such votes may be declared illegitimate in the future — that any party with control of Congress can invent reasons why an election is invalid, then act on those falsehoods. He will be saying — quite simply and not merely symbolically — that he and other members of Congress can take from Americans the power to pick their president.

That’s what more than 100 Republican members of Congress are doing Wednesday. They’re rejecting what voters told them, what election officials certified, and what judges have affirmed. We condemn any North Carolina official, Republican or Democrat, who joins such an effort, and we urge Sen. Tillis to finally and forcefully do what’s right for the people he says he serves.