This Shows the Senate’s Rules Need to Change

Even as the U.S. military faces threats in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, Tommy Tuberville—a first-term Republican senator and former football coach without a whit of political experience, and maybe a half-whit of knowledge—is single-handedly blocking the promotion of 367 generals and admirals.

He has been doing so for nine months and hasn’t let up, even after one of the stalled generals, Marine Corps Commandant Eric Smith, suffered a heart attack—and Tuberville’s hijinks probably contributed to it. Because the nominee for assistant commandant has been held up, Smith has been working 18-hour days at both jobs, a situation that he’d recently described as unsustainable. (He is recovering in the hospital. Now the Marines’ third-ranking general is having to do three jobs at once.)

Tuberville has carried on his crusade, despite urgings and protests from the Senate’s GOP leadership, the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defense, and a petition signed by 1,000 family members of officers whose entire lives—in some cases, plans to relocate and place their children in new schools—have been thrown into chaos by what they denounce as the Alabama senator’s “political showmanship.”

Smith’s heart attack earlier this week roused a handful of top GOP senators to pressure Tuberville more loudly, but to little effect so far.

The freshman senator has been able to persist because of a bizarre, outmoded Senate rule. In weighing whether to confirm a president’s high-level political nominees, the Senate investigates, holds committee hearings, and conducts floor debates before voting. But for many nonpolitical assignments, the Senate leaders ask for “unanimous consent,” a procedure that takes a few minutes. This is especially the case for nominations and promotions of military officers—thousands of which take place every year. There is no time for the Senate to vote on each individually; nor, unless someone on the Senate Armed Services Committee has raised an objection, is there a need to do so.

However, according to the rules, even a single senator can object to the request for unanimous consent—and thus hold up the process. For nine months now, Tuberville has been doing this with the entire slate of military nominations and promotions—affecting 367 top-level officers. They include 151 one-star generals and admirals, 137 two-stars, 66 three-stars, and 13 four-stars—in all, more than 40 percent of all the generals and admirals in the U.S. armed forces.

As a result, according to a fact sheet compiled by the Senate Armed Services Committee, the following posts are either vacant or filled by acting officers who lack the legal authority to make many decisions that are required: chief of naval operations, Air Force chief of staff, Cyber Command commander (who also serves as director of the National Security Agency), U.S. military representative to NATO, and directors of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Missile Defense Agency, as well as the commanders of the Pacific Fleet, the 7^th Fleet, the 5^th Fleet, the Pacific Air Forces, the Air Combat Command, and the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command.

When I wrote about this in September, there were 273 blocked promotions and unfilled senior offices. The number has risen by almost one-third since then, and if the block continues, it will rise by another three-quarters—to 650—by the end of this year.

Tuberville has mounted his crusade as a protest to the Defense Department’s policy on abortion. After the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade last year, leaving abortion policy to the states, the Pentagon said it would pay the travel expenses for a servicewoman who wanted to have an abortion but who was based in a state that outlawed it. (The Justice Department passed a similar allowance for pregnant prisoners.)

Starting in February, Tuberville put a hold on every military promotion and nomination, saying he would not let up until the Pentagon dropped its abortion policy. Since then, DOD and DOJ lawyers have ruled that the allowance is legal; no one has filed a lawsuit to challenge it; the Senate Armed Services Committee voted down a motion to suspend the policy; and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has offered to let a vote on the measure come to the floor (where it would certainly be rejected).

None of this has appeased Tuberville.

The rules do allow the Senate to take formal votes on individual nominees, but doing that for 367 officers, one at a time, would take many months. Senate leaders have also been reluctant to make exceptions for the most senior nominees, saying it would create a bad precedent. Enlisted members of the military might think that their immediate superiors are considered less important than the top brass, and future obstructionists would be encouraged to follow Tuberville’s example, knowing that the most serious consequences would be sidestepped.

Nonetheless, Schumer scheduled votes on three of these officers and won overwhelmingly on all three. The margins were 95–1 for Adm. Lisa Franchetti as chief of naval operations and Gen. David Allvin for Air Force chief of staff, and 86–0 for Lt. Gen. Christopher Mahoney as assistant Marine Corps commandant.

Tuberville voted to confirm all three. (The one nay vote was cast by Kansas Republican Roger Marshall.) However, he has not agreed to drop his objection to a unanimous-consent vote on the remaining 364 officers.

So this will not end the standoff. Ultimately the Senate must change its rules. I would suggest requiring three senators—not just one—to obstruct a unanimous-consent motion. But any rule change would require the votes of 60 senators—all the Democrats and nine Republicans. The problem is that despite the near-universal view that Tuberville’s move is harming national security and military morale, there may not be nine Republicans willing to step up.

Much of the Republican “base” agrees with Tuberville’s position. In a CBS/YouGov poll in August, 68 percent of primary-voting Republicans said they think abortion should be illegal across the nation in most or all cases.

Tuberville is also a favored acolyte of Donald Trump, who, despite his role as defendant in four criminal trials, seems headed toward being the Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential election. Tuberville won Alabama’s Senate primary in 2022—even though he’d lived in Alabama for only a short while and despite a financial scandal with a hedge fund that he co-owned—entirely on the basis of Trump’s endorsement. He then handily defeated his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, who had barely won a special election in 2017 after the Republican candidate, Roy Moore, was accused of sexually assaulting a minor. (Moore denied the allegations, and no criminal charges were brought against him.)

In various interviews, Tuberville has defined the three branches of government as the House, the Senate, and the Executive. He has said that the United States fought World War II “to free Europe of socialism.” He has denounced the Navy for being “too woke,” saying, “We’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers.” Asked in an interview on a Birmingham radio station whether white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, he replied, “Well, they call them that—I call them Americans.”

In short, Tuberville can in no way be regarded as a serious figure. Kyle Whitmire, political columnist for AL.com and winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for commentary, called him “a fire hydrant of crazy talk” who leaves behind him a trail of “stupid stuff” “the way pulpwood trucks belch smoke along back country roads.”

In the old days, a Senate leader would banish someone like Tuberville into oblivion, threatening to pull his committee slots, canceling contracts in his district, and finding someone to run against him in the next primary. But the two parties don’t have the same leverage over the rank-and-file that they once did.

Meanwhile, the world looks at the chaos unleashed by this petty egomaniac and wonders whether American-style democracy is worth emulating after all.