Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville ® said he voted against the nomination of the Pentagon’s next Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman over the military officer’s push to promote “woke policies.”
Tuberville said he objected Air Force Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown Jr.’s efforts to recruit and promote racial minorities in the ranks. He argued that such equal opportunity efforts threaten military readiness.
“I heard some things he talked about, about race and things that he wanted to mix into the military,” he told Bloomberg Television’s “Balance of Power” on Tuesday. “Our military is not an equal opportunity employer. We’re looking for the best of the best to do whatever. We’re not looking for different groups, social justice groups. We don’t want to single-handedly destroy our military from within.”
Tuberville’s comments are not entirely accurate, as the U.S. military since 1948 has had an equal opportunity policy, signed into law by President Truman via an executive order. The effort desegregated the military and guaranteed “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”
To Americans: why can one man stop these postings? Is the vote split down the middle and he is the decider? If so can’t he be evicted and replaced?
In the Senate, things like military promotions are generally done through a process called “Unanimous Consent”. Meaning “We all agree, we don’t need to vote on this.”
This is important for things like military promotions where there may be hundreds of them per year, if the Senate stopped to vote on each and every one of them, nothing else would get done.
BUUUUT… there’s that word “Unanimous”. It has to be all 100 Senators agreeing to move forward and in this case, Tuberville is that 1 in 100.
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/15/1187530846/tuberville-senate-rules-abortion-military
So, as far as removing him… There’s a couple of problems with that:
He’s playing by the Senate rules, there’s nothing saying he CAN’T do this, he’s just being an asshole about it.
The only way to remove a sitting Senator is by a 2/3rds vote of the Senate and nobody has a 2/3rds vote. 67 is a high bar and in most cases, they can’t get the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster on a vote.
Oh I see. Very interesting. So he is literally the only one holding it up, it’s not like a group. 99 vs 1.
Quite the predicament. Holding on I dare say in hope a certain Cheeto returns so they can put in their own guys?
That’s the going theory, but also this:
Tuberville is one of the Senators from Alabama, a state known for being notoriously racist.
One of the highest ranking people being blocked is this guy. Huh, you don’t say…
Fortunately the rest of the Senate decided to hold a vote and confirm him anyway, because the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff just can’t be allowed to remain vacant.
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No, he cannot be removed from the committee. Nor can he be recalled. At best he could be impeached, but just look at the House and tell me if you think they’d impeach Tubby. The problem is the way things are set up. Typically the Senate Armed Forces Committee clears a bloc of nominees and sends that bloc to the Senate floor and they vote on the bloc instead of each individual nominee. Even if they got rid of Tubby, he could still cause the exact same problem as any senator can object to the bloc and then each nominee has to be individually voted in. That is a multistage process requiring several votes to be taken. Multiply that by 600+ and that’s all the Senate would be doing for years. Sure, Schumer could start that, but as more than one place has said, it’d take all the senate’s time for the foreseeable future. So it isn’t a matter of the Dems doing nothing, but rather the list is too long for it to be a viable option to take for all the nominees.
Also doing the runaround has the nasty side effect of politicizing military promotions and would make bullshit like what McConnell did in the end of Obama’s presidency with the Supreme Court normal for military nominations. Do you really want that to be the norm?