Tuberville, who’s singlehandedly blocked hundreds of military promotions in protest over the Pentagon’s abortion policies, said he’s not going to change his mind and doesn’t care that people aren’t being promoted.
After the US Supreme Court reversed decades of precedent in overturning its decision in the Roe v. Wade abortion access case in 2022, the Pentagon announced its plan to reimburse service members who need to travel out-of-state to receive abortion services.
Tuberville, a Republican senator out of Alabama, took exception to the decision and said he’d use his power to stymie any military nominations and promotions he could. Since February, he’s blocked more than 300 promotions.
Tommy Tuberville sounds like some kind if ringmaster to a potato circus
At least he’s consistent with his party’s stance on hating both the military and the US
But Republicans praise the army, don’t they?
Praise is different than support.
We’re talking about hate / do not hate
They hate them too, don’t forget how fast they turned on the police who arrested jan 6 insurgents
They praise bills they voted against during ribbon cutting ceremonies
I believe that there is an active conspiracy to destroy the USA from within and this is proof of that. Follow the money and you’ll uncover who is behind it. My guess, China, Russia and maybe some Oligarchs around that.
No, it’s just the absolute demons y’all elect lol
Don’t forget the Saudis
He’s an ass, but this isn’t single-handed. He only has this power because his fellow Republicans (and Manchin, and probably Sinema) are allowing it. If a handful of Republicans wanted to fix this, they absolutely could.
From an NPR article:
Why don’t the Senate leaders stop him?
The current Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has made it clear he considers Tuberville’s blockade an abuse and an outrage. The GOP’s McConnell has also said he does not support the “blanket hold” on military nominations. Both have acknowledged the pleas coming from the Pentagon and from the ranks, and they have done what they could to encourage Tuberville to stand down.
But the leaders cannot simply bulldoze the senator from Alabama. Their power is restrained by Senate rules and traditions and by the sentiments of their respective caucuses.
If the issue here were an ordinary piece of legislation, the leaders would seek a unanimous consent agreement that would bring that matter to the floor. Individual senators may object to that with a notice that they seek “extended debate” on that legislation. This is an implicit threat to filibuster, and the majority leader routinely files a cloture petition and holds a vote.
If cloture fails, the legislation does not go to the floor. If three-fifths of the Senate supports cloture, the legislation can be brought to the floor with time limits on debate.
Presidential nominations have been largely exempt from this since 2013 when a Democratic Senate majority decided only nominations to the Supreme Court would be subject to filibusters. In 2017, a Republican majority decided to extend that exemption to include Supreme Court nominations.
Nonetheless, Tuberville’s maneuver has the effect of freezing confirmations for the current backlog presidential nominations because they are submitted in batches for group consideration and approval. The batching procedure itself requires unanimous consent, allowing even one senator to stand in the way.
The Senate majority leader could bring the nominations to the floor one by one for consideration by regular procedure, but that would require two to three days for each. Had the Senate tried to individually process even the first 150 promotions Tuberville blocked back in February, it could have done little else in the months since – and it would still be far behind on confirmations. That is scarcely practical when the military alone submits hundreds a year and the larger executive branch far more.
Moreover, just as the Pentagon bristles at having a single senator dictate its personnel policy, so the Senate leaders are loath to have individual senators deciding when and if the Senate can proceed with normal business using its usual procedures – such as the batching of nominations.
GOP: How could Joe Biden do this to our troops?
He’s stalling until Trump is elected, then push through the white supremacists.
Hopefully he’s kept waiting and then voted out himself.
The dems need to plaster this smug fucks face leering over a dead soldiers body with the caption “Because of Republican Inaction. I Wasn’t Ready.”
These ads write themselves.
This wouldn’t be that hard to fix - would only need 16 Republicans to join every Democrat in passing a temporary rules change to eliminate the ability for any one senator to block UC requests for military promotions; could automatically expire at the end of this Congress, so it wouldn’t be permanent, and they could still block it them with 2 senators if there was any particular promotion they had a problem with.
So part of me suspects that the Democrats are just as happy to have this in their pockets, because if there’s some sort of election-threatening military setback in 2024, now they can blame it on the GOP and Tuberville.
It’s not that the Democrats are happy with the situation, it’s that there aren’t even 16 sane Republicans left.
Sane, no, but sufficiently rah-rah troops / in the pocket of defense contractors to care about getting military promotions through in a timely fashion, yes, I think there are.
What a smug ass. A true representation of his constitutes.
.
I cant help but to have noticed a lot of places on Lemmy where autocorrect has clearly gone wrong. We need a phone keyboard that produces options and a squiggly when it wants to correct something, maybe. I turned off my autocorrect for that reason, which raises its own set of problems lol.
no offense intended, of course <3
s/constitutes/constituents, likely.