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?”
If the Republican party was fed up with this. They could revoke his committee memberships and replace him with someone else at any time. So you have to ask yourself. Are they fed up really? Or is this all just performative. And is he doing exactly what they want.
I kinda like this line of thought, but it’s not completely tit-for-tat. Menendez isn’t re-electable, Tuberville is. So, dems would be giving up something they’re going to lose anyway, repubs would be giving up an incumbent.
A first term incumbent in Alabama who hasn’t even served half his term. They aren’t losing much seniority and unless they run a known pedophile again, he’ll be replaced with a republican.
The end goal of all of this seems to be about giving a long list of military appointees for a potential Trump part 2 presidency. No doubt these military appointees would be seeded with people who would go along with another coup attempt. So, yeah, it’s just all part of the plan.
They could revoke his committee memberships and replace him with someone else at any time.
This still wouldn’t stop the hold, any single senator can place a hold on any motion. Normally the work around would be to just call a vote to proceed, but because others are literally hundreds of promotions on hold, it wouldn’t really be possible to hold individual votes on them all.
I think the GOP was hoping to not have to rock the boat of a trump loyalist, they’ve been trying to mend the schism between their radical and traditional members since Jan 6.
I don’t have the energy to pore through Senate rules and find out why this is a thing. But letting one of the Senate’s biggest responsibilities be barred by a single Senator seems like a huge oversight.
It was originally utilized as an emergency procedure to halt a motion that may negatively affect an individual senator’s state. Giving the senator time to pause the motion until he has read through the bill.
If utilized for it’s original purpose, it’s not actually that problematic of a rule, as it doesn’t usually really take much to motivate a motion to continue if the motion is really important.
The issue is that holds were never designed not to be utilized for several hundred motions at the same time. The Senate got rid of holds all together at some point in the 90s but reinstated it the year or so after. I’m guessing this is going to cause them to close this particular loophole by amending the rules.
Though I doubt they will get rid of it all together, as conservatives benefit from holds like this and the filibuster a lot more than progressives.
If and when he stops, whoever is in the next safest seat will just pick up the baton.
They operate under a thin veil of plausible deniability, but they’re all aware of the game they’re playing.
