Reed's resolve prevails: Tuberville's hold on military promotions loosens

Back on Sept. 25, my column featured Sen. Jack Reed’s efforts to overcome Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s ill-conceived, months-long hold on military promotions.

Those efforts finally bore fruit last week, when Tuberville (who apparently prefers to be called “Coach” rather than “Senator”) dropped his hold on the advancement of more than 400 senior U.S. military officers.

Reed, head of the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services and leader of the effort to get the promotions past Tuberville, breathed a sigh of relief. Demonstrating his strong feelings about Tuberville’s actions, Reed said, “No senator should ever attempt to advance their own partisan agenda on the backs of our troops like this again.

“Senator Tuberville’s actions have been an affront to the United States military and the Senate. He has jeopardized our national security and abused the rights afforded to all senators.”

Tuberville, whose main claim to fame seems to be his prowess as a college football coach, disrupted the lives of more than 400 officers and their families to protest a Pentagon policy on reproductive health – a policy the affected service members and families had nothing to do with. But they proved to be the lever to which he had access.

The military recognizes that many women are involuntarily assigned to bases in states where abortions are now illegal, and so feels an obligation to facilitate a service member’s travel to another state when such a procedure becomes necessary.

In my opinion, it is simply the right thing to do.

Tuberville was enraged that the Pentagon would authorize and fund such trips, so he took it out on soldiers up for promotion.

MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell called Tuberville’s 10-month blockade “grotesquely stupid and cruel.”

Last week, facing mounting resistance from within his own party, Tuberville backed down and allowed most of the promotions to proceed – albeit 10 months after they were proposed.

This was not a case of Tuberville doing the right thing; he faced the specter of an embarrassing floor vote that would have changed Senate rules to get around his blockade.

As Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate on Dec. 6, “He finally gave up the fight not as a heroic gesture but because he was about to get pummeled.”

“No matter whether you believe it or not, Senator Tuberville, this is doing great damage to our military,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, in one such floor speech last month.

“I don’t like Mr. Tuberville’s technique of making his point, and I think it’s getting to a breaking point, quite frankly,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia.

With reference to the holds being lifted, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said, “It’s about time.”

In September she said, “Holding military nominations hostage is not a winning tactic for anyone, especially in light of retention challenges and the very real threats we face in the Pacific and elsewhere. These holds are starting to have cascading impacts that are degrading our national security.”

Fox News tried to fight back, decrying Tuberville’s “abandonment by his weak-kneed Republican colleagues” who finally bailed on Tuberville’s “principled stand” against the Pentagon’s abortion policy.

But such protestations sounded hollow, in view of the fact they were trying to defend a relatively petty cultural issue against national security.

“In short, Tuberville – a former football coach who was elected to the Senate on a fluke and has almost no knowledge of government (he once identified the three branches as the executive, the House, and the Senate) – was simply grandstanding,” concluded Kaplan.

While some 425 promotions quickly sailed through on a single voice vote, Tuberville is still holding 11 senior nominations hostage (four-star general and admiral level). His rationale for this continuing hold is that some of them have views that are “too woke.”

On Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, Tuberville said: “Secretary Del Toro … needs to get wokeness out of our Navy. We’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers over the loudspeaker!”

That’s one we have to nip in the bud immediately, right?

Meanwhile, the nominees whose promotions are still blocked by Tuberville include the front-line commanders of the Pacific Fleet, the 7th Fleet, the 5th Fleet, the Pacific Air Forces, the Air Combat Command, and the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command.

An additional six nominations were placed on hold by Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., due to “concerns that he has regarding those nominees’ stances or actions relating to divisive diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the military,” according to a statement released by his office.

Schmitt did not detail the specific accusations against the officers he singled out, but his list includes Air Force Lt. Gen. Kevin B. Schneider, to be commander of Pacific Air Forces (already being held up by Tuberville), and Navy Rear Adm. Shoshana S. Chatfield, President Joe Biden’s pick to be the military representative to NATO.

Chatfield’s purported crimes were reported to include “speaking out on women’s issues.”

She apparently ruffled Schmitt’s feathers when she said that 80% of Congress “are men, which means that most of the issues that become laws are only important to men.”

Support for the holds ebbed in recent weeks as the U.S. military faced increasing threats on several fronts, most recently in the Middle East. It became harder for a number of Republican senators to back Tuberville’s antics while the world was burning around them.

As Murkowski said, “Senator Tuberville should drop [the holds], now, and find another way to express his concerns.”

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Sen. Jack Reed prevails: Tuberville eases hold on military promotions