Every kid tries it at least once.
“But Jimmy’s allowed to do it.”
You already know how that went. They looked at you and said some version of: I don’t care what happens in Jimmy’s house. This is what happens in this house.
Because that’s what the standard was always about. Not whether something has ever happened before, anywhere, to anyone. The question was always whether you are going to allow it to happen on your watch.
“But Jimmy’s allowed to do it.” is the Republican response at every attempt to hold their fellow Republicans accountable. I’m focusing on Thom Tillis because he’s my senator — my representation, my name on his vote whether I like it or not. And he just gave us a masterclass in how that standard gets dodged.
Here’s the play: make a serious demand, accept a small technicality as if it settles the whole thing, then reach for a name from the last two administrations the moment anyone asks about the gap between the technicality and the truth. Watch him run every step of it.
Tillis held out his vote on Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche over two specific things.
The first was a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” — the number picked, transparently, to spell out 1776, the year of the nation’s founding, as if a patriotic price tag turns a slush fund into something noble. The fund was created as part of a settlement between Trump and the IRS to pay out people who claim they were politically targeted.
The second was the scope of another piece of that same settlement: audit immunity for Trump and his family.
Tillis knew exactly what these were, serious enough that he withheld his support until he got something in writing.
Here’s what “something in writing” turned out to be. Blanche posted two documents. One, signed, rescinds the fund. The other, addressing how far the audit immunity actually extends, isn’t signed at all. A former Justice Department lawyer said Blanche’s unilateral rescission has no legal force and doesn’t stop the fund from being revived down the road. Tillis and his colleague John Cornyn called it a “binding written order” anyway and declared victory — Cornyn ran the identical play, down to calling the same unsigned document a win.
So the leverage he fought hardest for got him a promise that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on — and that’s setting aside the more basic question of what it says about Blanche’s judgment that he created the fund and the audit immunity in the first place.
That’s not even the most damning part of this story.
Months earlier, Tillis made a different demand: sit down with Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors, or I won’t vote you out of committee. The meeting happened because he held his vote over Blanche’s head. Then the survivors told everyone, in their own words, what it actually was: an hour of deflection, interruption and gaslighting. No accountability offered beyond Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. No answers about why the DOJ had already moved Maxwell to a lower-security prison, or why survivors’ names and images ended up exposed while the names of alleged abusers stayed hidden. Survivors called it a box-checking exercise, arranged only once his confirmation was at risk — and said so, repeatedly, right up to the vote.
Sit with this: if it were your daughter, your sister, your wife in that room with Blanche, would an hour of “get to the point” and redirection have been enough to earn your vote?
When it mattered, Tillis’ own bar for good enough was: a signed order whose permanence has been challenged, an unsigned document he called “binding,” and credit claimed for showing up instead of for anything that was said once Blanche sat with survivors. None of this is acceptable to a respectable adult.
And then Tillis voted to confirm him anyway, pointing once again to what Obama and Biden had done in their own administrations.
“But Jimmy’s allowed to do it.”
It’s the rambling logic of an eight-year-old trying to convince their mother — not a man with a law degree and a vote on the Senate floor. The cleverness is the tell.
This approach feeds the sweeping belief that “everyone does it.” But look closer at the logic, and it’s worse than that. Point to Obama’s IRS, point to Biden’s pardons, and the argument is still: look how corrupt they were, look how little they deserved that power. At the same time, the identical actions on a larger scale get used to mean the opposite — see, everybody does it, so stop asking about it. The conduct hasn’t changed. Only the job it’s being asked to do has: evidence of corruption when it belongs to the other guy, a permission slip when it belongs to their own. That’s cynicism. That’s hypocrisy.
“Everybody does it” is not a defense. It’s not a solution. Ask any kid how well “everybody does it” goes over in any kitchen in America. Yes, scale and context matter — that’s a fair point, and historians are all over it. But chasing the whataboutism with facts is also a losing argument when there’s a specific moment sitting right in front of us.
Instead, have the discipline to stay with the question: why is Maxwell at Club Fed?
Senator — you’ve shown us you know how to hold a vote until you get real terms. You’ve shown us you understand what a hollow gesture looks like because the survivors told you afterward exactly what happened in that room. So which is it: are you going to keep reaching for Obama’s name and Biden’s name every time someone asks you to hold the line today, or are you going to use the leverage you’ve already proven you have on the thing that’s actually in front of you?
Watch for it in your own representative’s next vote, whoever holds the seat, whichever party. When the excuse shows up, you’ll know it now. Naming it out loud, every time, and treating the argument as exactly the juvenile retort it is — that’s what actually stops it.
“Jimmy’s allowed to do it” was never going to work in your house. It doesn’t get to work in ours either.
The standard was never about what’s happened before. It’s about what you’re willing to allow while your name is on the vote.
Have you ever mused, “I’m just going to leave the country”?
Well, I am now in the middle of that great adventure. Turns out leaving is not what you think it is. It’s complicated, it’s hard, often exciting, frequently overwhelming, and it’s a lot more interesting than the daydream.
If you’re curious, or if your own musing might someday become a real plan, come follow along on my new blog, So She Left
Democracy Spark provides ghostwriting for grassroots democracy organizations. You have the passion and vision, I have the words that move people to action. Let’s collaborate to bring our democracy back for the next generation.
Tillis is milquetoast! Im so sick of him…good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say.