Senate Republicans are starting to turn on Tommy Tuberville over his blockade of military promotions.
The Senate brought 61 individual nominees to the floor for a vote Wednesday night. Tuberville objected to all of them, tanking each officer’s promotion. He has repeatedly insisted that his blockade, a protest of the Department of Defense’s abortion policy, does not harm military readiness.
But his Republican colleagues were finally sick of hearing it. “No offense, but that’s just ridiculous,” Senator Dan Sullivan said. “He knows it. We all know it.”
Sullivan revealed that the military expects Tuberville’s blockade to affect 89 percent of all general officer positions, across all branches.
“Xi Jinping is loving this. So is Putin,” Sullivan said, referring to the presidents of China and Russia. “How dumb can we be, man?”
Sort of. This gets into the Senate rules so you really need to ask the Senate Parliamentarian. But my understanding is that under the normal rules, everything the Senate does is subject to some minimum amount of debate on the floor. Including each and every single one of these promotions.
The Senate can waive the normal rules if nobody objects, which happens quite often. For these military promotions, they are often bundled together and voted on all at once. but even a single Senator objecting can force them back to the normal rules. Coach said that the Senate can still approve these, one by one, like the normal rules say.
So, the Senate Leadership decided to offer them one by one, but still waive the debate time for each, which is still circumventing the rules and requires unanimous consent and Coach is continuing to object.
I think it’s a bit of performance theater ahead of a push to formally change the rule, which requires 60 votes, so they need Republican support to do it. But if you simply count up the outspoken Republicans who were fighting with Coach and add them to the Senate majority, the math doesn’t add up to 60 yet. I think the entire night was a performance for the five or six Republicans they still need to get to 60 votes.