Why Tommy Tuberville 'caved'
Carl Gibson, AlterNet
December 10, 2023 4:58AM ET
Earlier this month, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) finally relinquished his months-long hold on hundreds of senior-level military promotions that requires US Senate confirmation. A new report lays out how his colleagues exerted pressure to convince him to relent.
In a Saturday article in Politico entitled "Inside the closed-door meeting where Tuberville caved," authors Joe Gould and Anthony Andragna published remarks from multiple Republican senators concerning their efforts to convince their colleague to give up his crusade that they said harmed US military readiness and increased global instability.
"One [commanding officer] I know personally told me: ‘I’m apolitical but one group of elected officials always had our backs — Republican senators. Now you guys hate us," Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), a veteran of the Marine Corps Reserve, said in the meeting with Tuberville. "The world has been turned upside down."
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Tuberville began the confirmation blockade in protest of a Pentagon policy instituted after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, in which the Department of Defense paid for the out-of-state travel costs for service members seeking abortions who lived in states where terminating pregnancies was made illegal. GOP senators told Tuberville that while they agreed with his anti-abortion stance, the damage his hold was causing distracted from the goal of supporting the military.
"We’re all very pro-life. But we just wanted for these [nominations] to move," said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who is a retired National Guard officer who served a tour in Iraq.
Members of the Senate Republican Caucus were reportedly mulling voting in favor of a motion by Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), which would have approved nearly all of the promotions in one fell swoop. The motion was supported by all Senate Democrats, and would have passed with nine or 10 Republicans joining their colleagues across the aisle. Sullivan reportedly told Tuberville that the final vote could have far more GOP support than that.
"f we’re forced to take this vote on the Reed [resolution], a number of us will feel compelled to support it. My hope is that instead of a vote of nine or 10 of us, that this could be a vote of 30 or 40," Sullivan said.
In addition to Reed, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona) also sought to enlist Republicans to support an effort to break Tuberville's hold with 60 votes, and spent approximately four months leveraging her relationships with GOP senators to end-run their colleague. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), who is a 25-year veteran of the US Navy, used his military credentials to sway Republicans.
"The thing that obviously worked was the political pressure from his own colleagues, just their strategy of putting this pressure on him is what got it done," Kelly said.
