How long can it last and how will it end?
Those questions are still unanswered five months into U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s freeze on Defense Department leadership promotions and new appointees. The Alabama Republican is trying to stop “taxpayer funding of travel and paid time off over and above what other servicemembers receive” for the purpose of facilitating elective abortions, Tuberville Communications Director Steven Stafford said today.
Meanwhile, Tuberville’s home state awaits announcement of the move of the relatively new U.S. Space Command’s headquarters from Colorado to Alabama.
Alabama won a Pentagon base selection process, but Tuberville’s freeze would mean base command families would be ordered to move from a state where abortion is legal at all stages of pregnancy to a state where it is illegal.
Tuberville said in a column for AL.com in May that since “the Biden administration began illegally using tax dollars to facilitate elective abortion, I’ve used my rightful authority as a United States senator to slow down their civilian nominations and promotions from being confirmed.”
Stafford said today that the issue is “unauthorized use of taxpayer dollars to facilitate elective abortions. No one is disputing servicemembers’ ability to take leave and get an elective abortion in another state (access). What is at dispute is taxpayer funding to facilitate this.”
“You can see the pressure starting to ramp up on him,” Josh Huder of the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University said of Tuberville last week. “The Executive Branch is saying, ‘Look at what you’re doing.’ They’re making all sorts of hay out of it.
“But he’s also started getting it from his fellow partisans within Congress,” Huder said. “Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan is saying everyone just needs to get in a room. And you can sense the frustration of some of the other members.”
Sullivan did defend Tuberville’s “right to place holds on nominees on an issue of policy importance” on a recent “Meet the Press.”
Some conservative political columnists like Hugh Hewitt, however, are saying “enough.”
“But until now, never in my memory have those down in the ranks been given reason to believe that the political leadership is intentionally fouling up the chain of command by ensuring the best people are kept out of the top jobs,” Hewitt wrote in a July 19 Washington Post column. “Or, rather, that a solitary individual on Capitol Hill is doing this to the U.S. military. That person is Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.)”
The history of holding up votes didn’t start with Tuberville, Sullivan said. “What comes to mind is, actually, his fellow senator, maybe 10-plus years ago, holding up a whole slew of nominations,” he said. “It had something to do with Huntsville and NASA facilities. Something to do with aircraft carriers.”
That was a reference to retired U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican known for seeing that federal money supported Alabama military installations. Shelby briefly froze all former President Barack Obama’s appointees in a dispute of health care changes.
Illinois Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth also put a blanket hold on 1,100 military promotions in 2020 until Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper assured her in writing that impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alex Vindman will not be punished for his testimony.
Duckworth lifted her hold about two weeks later after Vindman was promoted to full colonel.
Holds are less formal than filibusters, the longest of which happened in 1964 over the Civil Rights Act and lasted 60 days. Holds are considered a preliminary move to a filibuster and traditionally honored by the majority leader in the Senate because they do not stop all legislating in the Senate.
“It’s not unusual for senators to go public with these holds to try to move the administration to get them to budge on something,” Sullivan said. “What does Sen. Tuberville want? What can he get away with? What is he looking for out of this exchange if he can’t get exactly what he’s looking for?”
“It’s not just a policy of interest to the Pentagon,” Dr. Sarah Binder said last week of Tuberville’s hold. She is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and professor of political science at George Washington University.
“It touches on a pretty live wire issue for Democrats and Republicans – access to abortion,” Binder said. “What to do in the wake of the Supreme Court decision? It’s harder for (the Biden administration) to give him something.”
The Supreme Court ruled in June 2022 that the legal right to an abortion no longer exists. But the Pentagon said in February it will pay travel expenses and leave for medical care for military members and their families. Available in that health coverage is support for decisions to terminate a pregnancy.
“Everybody’s playing politics at this level,” Huder said. “Everybody is going back and forth trying to leverage the power they have at their disposal.
“What the Biden administration is doing – he doesn’t have the power to legalize abortion – is saying essentially you can use paid leave and time off to go and get services should you need that. Making it an official reason to take off and do these things,” Huder said. “The question is: Is that overreaching? Technically, this is right on the cusp of things like the Hyden Amendment, which is a provision in appropriations bills that says public funds cannot be used to procure abortions.
“The question is: What does Congress do to respond to that? There’s always tension between the Legislative and Executive (branches),” Huder said. “The Legislative grants power to the Executive, it’s up to the Executive to interpret that and the Legislative holds the Executive accountable.
“That’s essentially what Tuberville is doing,” Huder said, “using his authority to hold the Executive branch accountable.”
Where Tuberville is out on a limb, Huder said, is the fact he doesn’t have a Senate majority to back him and probably not one in the House. “He’s simply blocking nominations to get attention and try to get the administration to come back…. He’s really limited on what he can do.”
The question is what Tuberville will take “if he can’t get exactly what he’s looking for,” Huder said.
Binder at the Brookings Institute agrees. Right now, Senate Democrats are trying to redirect Tuberville to, “We’ll give you a vote (on the Biden policy).
“Now, that might not seem like anything but in the Senate, they often don’t vote on it,” Binder said, “but whether Tuberville will accept and up or down vote, and I would assume it would fail, is that sufficient?”
(Updated Tuesday at 1 p.m CST to clarify Sen. Tuberville’s position on abortion paid for with public funding.)