Retiring Sen. Tillis admits the Hegseth vote was a mistake and Trump's impeachment was legitimate.

…(cont) September 18th: the senator goes further. Of the same man he voted to confirm, he says, "He needs to go," and he says he'd support an impeachment resolution to make that happen.

September 27th: the senator calls the president's own endorsement in a Texas Senate primary a "colossal mistake."

October 5th: the senator's new book, on shelves this week, calls his vote to confirm that same secretary "the biggest regret of my career."

October 6th: the senator sits down with a television interviewer and calls the president's own impeachment, the one over January 6th, "weighty," and a legitimate "vote of no confidence."

That's the list. Five things, five weeks, one senator. I'm not going to add anything to it. I just want to ask about it, the way I'd ask about a car that starts fine on Tuesday and won't turn over on Wednesday — same car, same driveway, same key.

Here's what I keep in the garage: a coffee can of mismatched bolts, every size, no two alike. When something doesn't thread right, I don't blame the bolt. I blame myself for grabbing the wrong one out of the can. That's regret, the kind I understand. You pick wrong, you own it, you reach for a different one next time.

Is that what's in the book? The senator isn't saying he reached for the wrong part. He's saying the part he installed with his own hands, the one he voted to certify fit for the job, turned out defective. Can a man call his own confirmation vote the biggest regret of his career and still trust the process that produced the vote in the first place?

And here's the other thing I keep circling back to, the way you circle a parking lot looking for your own car. The vote he regrets, in his own words, was "the biggest regret of my career." The other vote, the one over January 6th, he calls weighty, and a legitimate "vote of no confidence." Can one vote be the biggest regret of a career, and the other a legitimate judgment, and both of those get held by the same man, in the same week, on his way out the door?

I don't know. I'm asking.

Oh — hold on, one more thing, before you put the book down. I almost walked right past it, same as I almost miss the exit every time. Not this year, not ever, as far as the record shows. He's not asking you for a vote anymore. He's asking you to buy a book.

So here's the last question, and I think the answer to it is sitting in the receipts, not in my head: when a man calls one of his party's defining votes a mistake, and the other one legitimate, on his way out a door he's already decided to walk through — who exactly is left to pay for either opinion now?