Tuberville’s Pentagon blockade and the shut-things-down view of government

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It’s not every day you hear top officials at the Pentagon publicly accuse a US senator of aiding communist states and enemies of the US.

But that’s where we’ve arrived in today’s story of modern Washington; an old-time custom is being used to grind the machinery of modern government to a halt as a senator takes a controversial public stand in the culture wars.

• The senator is Tommy Tuberville, the Alabama Republican known for making controversial statements.

• The old time custom he’s exploiting is the informal Senate policy of allowing individual lawmakers to place “holds” on presidential nominations.

• In the US military, where most service members move between jobs every few years, Tuberville’s blanket hold has halted promotions and movement among general officers.

• The culture war issue is abortion rights.

A public pressure campaign against a single senator

Months into Tuberville’s protest, the number of unfilled general officer positions is growing and it is having an adverse effect on the military and military families, according to Pentagon officials.

The civilian secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force appeared on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper Tuesday to publicly shame Tuberville.

“I would have never imagined one of our own senators would actually be aiding and abetting a communist and other autocratic regimes around the world,” Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, who was born under communist rule in Cuba, told Tapper, arguing that US military readiness is suffering.

“He’s playing Russian roulette with the very lives of our service members by denying them the opportunity to actually have the most experienced combat leaders in those positions to lead them in times of peace and in times of combat,” Del Toro said at another point.

Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth said holding these promotions will have a trickle-down effect and turn people off from a military career.

“I really worry that a lot of those officers who volunteer are going to walk away and basically say, I don’t want to deal with this,” Wormuth said.

Top US general must retire this month

The Washington Post has an exhaustive look at more than 300 promotions being held up, and how it’s affecting bases across the US and around the world, including the top positions for each major service branch.

The list of unfilled posts could soon include Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the top US military officer.

The current Chairman, Gen. Mark Milley, is required by law to retire before October 1 after eight years on the job. President Joe Biden tapped Air Force Gen. C. Q. Brown back in May to become the next chairman. Rather than schedule an individual vote to confirm Brown, Democrats are hoping the pressure of standing in the way of such a key position will make Tuberville relent on the entire array of held-up generals.

Tuberville said he’s not going to budge and told CNN’s Manu Raju that as far as he’s concerned, Milley can “work overtime.” To be clear, Milley can’t do that. The law specifically requires he step down.

Related: Raju has the latest on the Tuberville’s military blockade

While some fellow Republicans are publicly expressing frustration at the blockade, Tuberville told Raju he’s not feeling pressured by them to relent.

What does Tuberville want?

He doesn’t like a Pentagon policy meant to help service members stationed in states without abortion rights travel to other states to access abortion care. Tuberville thinks the policy violates a longtime prohibition against taxpayer dollars being used for abortions and he wants a debate and vote on the issue. But he has not offered an amendment or bill of his own.

Writing in The Washington Post, the service secretaries argued the reproductive rights policy is completely legal and also “critical and necessary to meet our obligations to the force.”

Where is this rule about ‘holds’ written down?

It’s not. There’s nothing in the Constitution, US law or the Senate rulebook that spells out affirmatively why and how individual senator should have the power to gum things up.

The holds courtesy evolved in the 1950s, according to this informative 11-page report from the Congressional Research Service, an offshoot of Senate rules, which allow individuals to insist on relatively large amounts of floor time to be used for anything, including relatively routine nominations. Normally, these noncontroversial nominations are dispensed with “unanimous consent,” meaning without the use of floor time.

Could Democrats get around the holds?

Technically, yes. It is possible to get around a hold by simply scheduling a debate and vote on each of the nominations.

But if Tuberville then insisted on using all available floor time – multiple days each – for hundreds of Pentagon nominations, the Senate wouldn’t have time for anything else.

Also, from a political standpoint, Democrats are clearly not minding that a Republican senator has put himself at odds with the nation’s military leaders. They’re looking for Republicans to lean on Tuberville.

The shut-things-down philosophy

It’s hard not to place Tuberville’s uncompromising and unapologetic view of the effect his promotion blockade will have on the military alongside a larger view of government on display in recent years.

Government shutdowns – those times when funding for government programs lapse, causing headaches for government workers and agencies – have become relatively frequent occurrences in recent years. There’s another one on the horizon.

CNN’s latest reporting is that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is urging his fellow Republicans to back a short-term funding bill and instead focus on a second funding standoff later in the fall.

These government spending negotiations are also a good reason why the Senate can’t spend all of its time on military nominations.

The spending standoff comes come directly on the heels of the fractious debate this spring in which Republicans insisted on cuts in exchange for meeting the nation’s debt obligations.

The Freedom Caucus has leverage because in order to become Speaker of the House, McCarthy had to agree to give them the ability to more easily challenge his position. There are already rumblings about a vote against him if he does not pursue an impeachment effort against Biden.

All of it adds up to a Washington where individual lawmakers on the right are perfectly willing to make government stop functioning to change the way it functions.

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