The Alabama Senator Who Was Punishing the Military for Being “Too Woke” Has Ended His Cursed Crusade

Sen. Tommy Tuberville dropped his hold on the promotion of more than 400 senior U.S. military officers for one reason only—to avoid abject humiliation, which was about to come his way if he didn’t relent.

For 10 months, the first-term Alabama Republican blocked the promotions as a protest of the Defense Department’s policy on abortion. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, leaving abortion policy to the states, the Pentagon said it would pay the travel expenses for servicewomen who wanted to have an abortion but were based in states that had outlawed it. (The Justice Department passed a similar allowance for pregnant prisoners.) Tuberville put a hold on every military promotion and nomination, saying he would not let up until the Pentagon changed its policy.

He was able to do this because of a peculiar Senate rule. In weighing whether to confirm a president’s high-level political appointees, the Senate investigates, holds hearings, and conducts debates before voting. But for many nonpolitical assignments, Senate leaders ask for “unanimous consent,” a procedure that takes a few minutes. This is particularly true of nominations and promotions of military officers—thousands of which occur each year. To vote on all of them individually would take hundreds, even thousands of hours.

However, according to the rules, a single senator can object to the request for unanimous consent—and thus hold up the process. This is what, until this week, Tuberville had been doing for 10 months: blocking the routine advancement of nearly half of all the generals and admirals in the U.S. armed forces.

On Tuesday, he lifted his hold, telling reporters, “It’s been a long fight. We fought hard. We did the right thing for the unborn and for our military, fighting back against executive overreach.” This is sheer nonsense. In a rare political move, all three service secretaries publicly condemned Tuberville’s tactic as a hindrance to military readiness. More than 1,000 family members of officers signed a petition urging him to “stop playing politics” with their lives. And as for executive overreach, the Senate Armed Services Committee rejected a motion to overturn the Pentagon’s rule. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer offered to hold a vote on the Senate floor, even though the measure lost in committee; Tuberville declined the offer. The Pentagon’s lawyers deemed the rule legal. Not even anti-abortion groups challenged the rule in court.

In short, Tuberville—a former football coach who was elected to the Senate on a fluke and has almost no knowledge of government (he once identified the three branches as the executive, the House, and the Senate)—was simply grandstanding.

He finally gave up the fight not as a heroic gesture but because he was about to get pummeled. Schumer was going to bring to the floor a measure that would temporarily drop the rule allowing one senator to block a unanimous-consent vote. Senate aides told me many Republicans were planning to support the change—enough for Tuberville to be roundly defeated, even within his own party. His stance of principled opposition would be exposed as the sheer ego trip it has been all along.

As soon as Tuberville announced his concession, a measure to promote 445 generals and admirals passed without objection.

Tuberville said he would continue to block the swift approval of 11 officers who have been nominated for promotion to four-star general or admiral on the grounds that some of them have views that are “too woke.” He has particularly condemned the Navy on this score, complaining, in one interview, “We’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers.”

The Senate will no doubt approve all 12 of the remaining officers in one-by-one votes. Last month, the body took votes on the three most senior officers that Tuberville was blocking—the candidates for chief of naval operations, Air Force chief of staff, and assistant commandant of the Marine Corps. The first two passed 95–1; the last, 86–0. Even Tuberville voted to confirm all three.

The head-shaker is why Tuberville’s Senate colleagues didn’t threaten to change the rule months ago, when this drama began. One reason is that senators tend to hold their rules sacred, especially those that distinguish the body—even in the most bizarre ways—from the House. Another is that many Republicans feared crossing Tuberville, who was enthusiastically backed for office by Donald Trump, and alienating their constituents, many of whom oppose abortion.

Three factors helped spur them to action. First, polls are showing that a firm anti-abortion stance doesn’t help most Republicans. Second, with the U.S. military facing active threats on several fronts, most recently in the Middle East, Tuberville’s antics really did seem to be harming national security. (The nominees whose promotions were blocked included several combatant chiefs, including the commanders of the Pacific Fleet, the 7^th Fleet, the 5^th Fleet, the Pacific Air Forces, the Air Combat Command, and the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command.)

Another turning point came in late October, when the Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Eric Smith, suffered a heart attack. Smith had been working 18-hour days, a situation he’d recently described as unsustainable, because the nominee for his assistant had been among the officers blocked. It was shortly after the heart attack—for which Tuberville was blamed—that the vote to promote three top officers, including the assistant commandant, was scheduled. (Smith has since recovered, by the way.)

Democrats will doubtless cite the episode as a campaign issue. President Biden released a statement on Tuesday: “In the end, this was all pointless. Sen. Tuberville and the Republicans who stood with him needlessly hurt hundreds of service members and military families and threatened our national security—all to push a partisan agenda. I hope no one forgets what he did.”