Republican Senator Thom Tillis said on Sunday he believes White House adviser Stephen Miller “should go” and that his role in the Trump administration has been a “big problem”.
The senior senator representing North Carolina, when asked on CNN’s State of the Union if he thinks Miller should go, during a conversation about the administration’s immigration crackdown, responded to host Jake Tapper stating “Oh, of course I do.”
“He is not worried about substance. He’s more worried about form, but I also think that he has an outsized influence over the operations of the cabinet. And I believe we’ve got qualified cabinet members there that sometimes are doing less than what they want to, because of his direction and his outsized influence. He’s a big problem in this administration. He has been from the beginning,” said Tillis.
Tillis affirmed support for Department of Homeland Security Secretary pick Markwayne Mullin to replace Kristi Noem, claiming he believes Mullin will be independent from Miller’s influence, even though Mullin repeated similar falsehoods about the killings by federal agents of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
“It gives me pause that you had people like Stephen Miller calling the shots,” Tillis added. “It was Stephen Miller who said it was the position of the United States that we should go after Greenland. And Stephen Miller, that’s been repeatedly responsible for embarrassments for the President of the United States by acting too quickly speaking, first, and thinking later.”
Tillis, who is not seeking re-election this year, was the first Republican to call for the resignation or firing of DHS secretary Noem.
Though Tillis is optimistic about the replacement of Noem with Mullin, his colleague in the Senate, Democratic leaders are pushing for further reforms.
The House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said on NBC’s Meet the Press with Kristen Welker that the leadership change is not enough to reopen the government in starting to fund the Department of Homeland Security again.
“What we want is a situation where ICE is actually conducting itself like every other law enforcement agency in the country as opposed to using taxpayer dollars to brutalize or in some cases kill American citizens,” Jeffries said.
“What we need is a change in policy, not simply a change in personnel,” he added. “Now, Kristi Noem was a disgrace. She was totally unqualified… She called American citizens domestic terrorists without any justification whatsoever. But we need dramatic, bold, meaningful and transformational changes to get ICE under control.”
