Tuberville Military Stunt Taints the Entire Senate. By Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

While responsibility falls squarely on the Alabama senator and other Republicans, Democrats haven’t handled things well either.

November 16, 2023 at 2:57 PM UTC

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville has been reckless in his eight-months-and-counting blocking of military promotions, but no one comes out of this looking good.

First, here’s where we are now. The Senate must confirm hundreds of military promotions, just as it has to confirm the president’s judicial and civilian executive branch nominations. It’s usually a routine procedure: The Senate votes on them in a single, quick package that takes only a few seconds of floor time. However, the procedure depends on everyone going along, and the Alabama lawmaker has placed a hold on all of them — essentially, forcing the Senate to fully debate and vote on each promotion separately.

Tuberville is using the tactic to pressure the Department of Defense over its abortion policy which allows active-duty troops to travel to another state for the procedure if it isn’t available where they’re posted. While any single hold is easy for the Senate to overcome, there are far too many promotions to spend time on each one, and neither the Pentagon nor the Senate majority is going to back down on the policy. So, we have a stalemate.

Most Republicans oppose Tuberville’s stunt and they’ve complained about it publicly and on the Senate floor, including in a late-night session ending Thursday morning. However, they’ve so far refused to join Senate Democrats to change the rules in order to defeat him.

So whom should we blame? Certainly, Tuberville is at the front of the line. He brags about having quickly learned Senate rules and procedures, but he doesn’t seem to understand that holds work mainly when they’re used to bargain for something that a senator cares deeply about — and that no one else cares about much either way. That’s not the case with abortion. While it’s possible that he’s just enjoying the publicity, it’s also possible, as West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin says, that he didn’t realize what he was getting into. If that’s true, however, it’s entirely Tuberville’s fault that he doesn’t just take credit for drawing attention to the issue and ending the blockade.

But it’s hard to single out Tuberville for blocking military promotions over a policy dispute when Republicans as a party are basically doing the same thing by systematically blocking all of President Joe Biden’s civilian executive branch and judicial nominations. Indeed, there’s an argument that Tuberville’s holds are more in the spirit of the rules, since at least he’s using them to demand a specific policy change, while the blanket Republican filibuster is pure obstruction.1And while most Republicans don’t support Tuberville because he’s hurting the military, they’re perfectly fine with harming the smooth functioning of the civilian government — including, by the way, the Department of Defense and other departments and agencies dealing with national security.

Even if there were a legitimate distinction between military promotions and other presidential nominations, Republican reluctance to do something about Tuberville’s holds is surely linked to their fear that once a precedent is set, it will be easier for Democrats to overcome other Republican foot-dragging. It’s no surprise that a Democratic resolution that would allow the promotions to go through received a straight party-line vote in committee this week, with every Republican opposing it. It’s hard not to conclude that Republicans are mainly upset with Tuberville’s actions because it looks bad for the party and works too well — thus forcing action to end it — and not because they oppose the principle of blocking nominations. Without any Republican support, the measure to end Tuberville’s filibuster will itself be defeated by filibuster.

But while the blame falls squarely on Tuberville and Senate Republicans, Democrats haven’t handled any of this well either. We’re now in the third year of Republican obstruction and Democrats have mostly just accepted it. That’s in part because of Democrats such as Manchin and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an Independent who still caucuses with the Democrats, who often tout themselves as defenders of the institution by preserving the current rules.

But those rules evolved more or less randomly in response to various short-term situations in the chamber. They were never drafted to achieve overall institutional goals. And to the extent they have ever, for example, protected the influence of individual senators — a worthy goal in my view — they did so only because senators acted within the spirit of the institution, not because specific rules governed what they did. True institutional support would mean updating rules and procedures to account for the reality that nominations have been a mess for years now, not insisting that change can be stopped.

As for the more liberal senators, they’ve mostly checked out of the debate. Most of them just want a majority-party-rules chamber, which is how the House and many state (and foreign) legislatures run. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that goal, but given that they don’t have the votes to achieve it they have a responsibility to find a compromise that would fix the nominations mess while preserving the rights of chamber minorities, including individual senators. Such efforts to do so stalled long ago, presumably because neither party really wants to find a compromise.

And so we sit. Tuberville seems willing to continue indefinitely. Republicans aren’t willing to vote to end it. Democrats apparently aren’t united enough to be able to stop it without Republican votes. And no one wants to do what’s needed to set up a system that actually works.