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.
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.
Republicans operate in lockstep, getting one to break ranks and side with Democrats on anything is next to impossible, even when keeping in step would actively harm the Republican Party. If even one member of the party takes a stand on something, no matter the reason, the rest of the party backs them completely.