After preventing more than 300 military promotions, Sen. Tommy Tuberville has picked one select officer he wants to promote

• Sen. Tommy Tuberville plans to circumvent his months-long hold on military promotions.

• He told fellow GOP senators he intended to force a vote to appoint a new Marine Commandant.

• Tuberville's single-handedly prevented more than 300 military promotions this year.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville privately told a group of Republican senators that he planned to circumvent his ongoing blockade of military promotions in an effort to appoint a new Marine commandant.

On Tuesday, according to The Hill, Tuberville conferred with his GOP colleagues at their weekly conference lunch about his intention to force a vote in the Senate on Wednesday in an attempt to confirm Gen. Eric Smith to head the Marine Corps.

In July, Gen. David Berger retired from his role as Marine Commandant, passing the baton to Smith to serve in a non-Senate-confirmed capacity in addition to his role as assistant commandant.

While traditionally military promotions are done in the Senate in batches via unanimous consent, Tuberville has pledged to block any such vote after the Pentagon changed its abortion policies to allow service members to be reimbursed for traveling out of state to receive abortion-related services following the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade's prior protections in 2022.

To get around his blockade, Tuberville's reportedly convinced sixteen GOP senators to sign a petition supporting a cloture motion. According to Senate rules, a lawmaker can bring a cloture motion to the floor once it's been backed by at least 16 senators, ultimately leading to a greater vote on the cloture.

If that vote passes, the topic of the cloture petition is then considered. In this case, it would be to force a one-off vote to confirm Smith to his new post.

Since Tuberville began his mission to block military promotions earlier in 2022,  he's single-handedly prevented more than 300 officers from receiving promotions. Top defense officials have publicly criticized the senator, including the Secretary of the Navy, Carlos Del Toro, who accused Tuberville of playing  "Russian roulette with the very lives of our service members."

Tuberville, who has no military experience and once claimed there's "nobody more military than" him,  doesn't appear like he'll lift his hold anytime soon. Just over a month ago, he said on a podcast that he thought the military was "a little overloaded to begin with" with four-star generals.

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