Organizations representing veterans and military families have given up on trying to get Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville to relent on his blockade of military promotions. Tuberville has remained mulish that there’s only one way out of the mess he created: The Pentagon must end its policy of reimbursing servicemembers for travel to obtain abortion care out-of-state when necessary. The groups have tried lobbying and they’ve tried pressure, and Tuberville won’t budge.
"He's put his foot down, so we've moved on. We're not focused on Sen. Tuberville anymore," Besa Pinchotti, director of the National Military Family Association, told CBS News. "We're focused on moving these promotions forward in another way.” Mary Kaszynski, VoteVets director of government relations, echoed that, saying, “We’re now (focused) on the others around Sen. Tuberville in the Republican caucus and Republican donors.”
Tuberville has remained undaunted, even after several of his colleagues recently held an intervention on the Senate floor, in turns pleading with, mocking, and excoriating him to his face. All of the Republican senators who participated are veterans, but their arguments didn’t faze Tuberville, who has never served. After that debacle, the entire GOP Senate conference held a meeting last week just to deal with him, which achieved nothing.
In fact, the only thing that confrontation accomplished was sending the pigheaded senator to The Wall Street Journal, where he reiterated his uncompromising position. “I hate to hold people hostage like this,” he said, his only concession that what he’s doing is harming people. “They have nothing to do with this. But what do you do? Do you fight for the Constitution?” Of course, there’s nothing in the Constitution that says anything about abortion.
What he’s fighting for is his own interpretation of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortions with few exceptions. The Pentagon’s lawyers determined that the reimbursement policy doesn’t conflict with Hyde. The place for Tuberville to pick this fight would be in the courts, but he couldn’t be the star in that case. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal is unsympathetic to Tuberville’s position, pointing out that “all of the solutions Tuberville finds acceptable would require others to bend, not a concession on his part. Any compromise will only be on his terms.”
That’s why the advocacy organizations are moving beyond their pressure campaigns on Tuberville; he simply won’t respond. Television ad campaigns in Alabama, petitions, meetings with retired generals—they’ve tried everything against Tuberville. “It’s by far the biggest campaign we’ve ever done,” Kate Marsh Lord, a spokeswoman for the Secure Families Initiative, told CBS News.
So they’ve gone to his Republican colleagues, making them responsible for their asshole member. “The response from Republicans was tremendously positive,” Kaszynski said. “They took every nearly every meeting request that we made. I think we saw this with what happened with the Republican senators on the floor.”
The real test of their campaign comes this week, when the rule change Democrats are proposing to bypass Tuberville’s block will be considered by the Senate Rules Committee. It’s a modest proposal, allowing all but the highest-level officer promotions to be considered as a bloc for the duration of this Congress. It’s not a permanent rule change, but it would neutralize Tuberville through 2024. It should pass easily in the committee but will need at least nine Republican votes to pass on the floor.
It’s the only way around Tuberville and the only way the logjam is broken. A floor vote hasn’t been scheduled on the resolution, giving the Pentagon and the advocacy groups time to appeal to Senate Republicans. They’ve got to make standing with Tuberville absolutely toxic.
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