Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) vowed Sunday to continue blocking Defense Department promotion nominees until Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin rescinds his recent policy change forcing taxpayers to pay for service members’ abortion travel.
“Democrats haven’t explained how abortion makes our military stronger or safer,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “The only war they are focused on winning is the culture war.”
In February, the Pentagon announced that it would henceforth cover the costs for service members, their spouses, and their dependents desiring to kill their unborn babies to travel from states that have restricted abortion to ones that have not. In addition, the traveling service members will get paid time off. Both of these expenses, of course, come out of taxpayers’ pockets.
“When word of this new policy leaked in December,” penned Tuberville, “I warned Pentagon officials that I would block their nominees in the Senate if they went through with it. They did it anyway. I’ve kept my word and put a hold on their nominees.”
Predictably, Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have attacked Tuberville for exercising his prerogative as a senator because it stands in the way of their agenda.
“Senator Schumer and some of the other senators have claimed that my hold on these nominees is unprecedented. Well, it’s not. My hold is far from unprecedented,” Tuberville said Wednesday. “In fact, Senator [Michael] Bennet [D-Colo.] himself threatened to do the exact same thing just a few months ago. Why? Because the Air Force planned to move Space Command from Colorado to Huntsville, Alabama.… Two years ago, we had a senator from Illinois put a hold on 1,000 nominees over the promotion of one single officer. So far, my hold has affected 184 nominations.”
Tuberville’s hold doesn’t prevent these promotions from being approved by the Senate. It merely forces senators to vote on each nominee individually rather than approving whole blocks of nominees at once.
But senators are apparently too busy taking vacations to do that. In his op-ed, Tuberville noted that between recesses and other days off, the Senate has been out of session for more than half the year to date.
