For more than nine months, a single Republican senator has been blocking promotions in the U.S. military over a Pentagon abortion policy.
The stance taken by Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has resulted in more than 400 vacancies — including some of the top leadership positions of the U.S. army, navy and air force — and sparked concern that military readiness and retention is being impacted at a time of increasing global conflict.
Despite mounting pressure from military leaders, the White House, and even his own party to stand down, Tuberville has repeatedly said he has no plans to stop objecting to the promotions. He said Thursday he would continue to object amid plans by a Democratic senator to raise the issue again in the Senate later in the day.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, has resisted the senator’s demands to drop the policy that covers military members’ travel costs when they access abortion care. And while Republicans in the Democrat-led Senate appear to be increasingly open to supporting a rule change that could bypass Tuberville’s hold, that process could take weeks and has no guarantee of success.
Republican senators held a closed-door meeting Tuesday where they confronted Tuberville on the issue, but emerged without a clear strategy of how to resolve it. Tuberville said after the meeting that he wants to negotiate a solution and “hopefully we can start moving forward” — but he admitted he’s “still dug in.”
“I’m not too sure how this ends,” said Richard Shimooka, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute who studies American military policy.
“The U.S. already has recruitment and retention challenges in the military, and this kind of disruption — whether it’s real or reputational — it doesn’t help with that.”
What is Tuberville doing?
Tuberville launched his one-man crusade in February over the Pentagon’s policy, enacted after the fall of Roe v. Wade last year, that covers travel expenses and paid leave for military members who seek abortion care in another state.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin noted in his memo announcing the policy that it’s meant to ensure members don’t face unequal health-care access if they’re stationed in a state where abortion is restricted.
Fourteen states, including Alabama, ban the procedure in nearly all circumstances, and seven others restrict abortion earlier in a pregnancy.
The Pentagon policy does not pay for abortions themselves, which are only performed by the Defense Department health-care staff if the life of the woman is at risk, or in cases of rape or incest.
But Tuberville, a former college football coach who has closely aligned himself with former president Donald Trump since he was elected in 2020, has argued the policy amounts to government abortion funding. He says the Pentagon should either revoke the policy or allow Congress to vote on whether to enshrine it into law.
“I cannot simply sit idly by while the Biden administration injects politics in our military from the White House and spends taxpayers’ dollars on abortion,” Tuberville said on the floor of the Senate last week.
On Tuesday, Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh confirmed the number of affected positions has risen to 452 nominations for leadership roles across the armed forces.
“Some of the positions that are stalled for confirmation include the Fifth Fleet commander, the deputy Fifth Fleet commander, the defence attaché to Israel and the list goes on,” she told reporters. “As we’ve said before, these holds have a direct effect on our military readiness, our national security and our military families.”
Under normal circumstances, military promotions are typically agreed upon by unanimous consent in large groups, allowing them to take effect quickly and allow what Shimooka called the “conveyor belt” of advancement through the ranks to keep humming along.
But just like in Canada’s House of Commons, such votes can fail if just one lawmaker objects like Tuberville has. The only other recourse is for promotions to be brought up one at a time through regular roll call votes, which can take an hour or two each.
CNN reported in September that the U.S. Congressional Research Office had estimated it would take over 700 hours of time on the Senate floor to undertake that vote-by-vote process. That was when the number of stalled promotions hovered around 300.
“The legislative calendar is busy enough as it is right now,” Shimooka said.
He pointed to the annual budget bills senators have to pass by Nov. 17 to avert a government shutdown, as well as the need to fulfill a request by the White House to approve billions of dollars in emergency aid for Israel, Ukraine and other national and international security issues.
“(Senators) know the mechanics of (individual votes on military promotions) would just gum up the system … at a critical time.”
What impact is the hold having?
Senators have managed to confirm a few of the most high-profile positions affected by the holds, including new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. CQ Brown, and confirmed three more last week: Adm. Lisa Franchetti as chief of naval operations, Gen. David Allvin as chief of staff of the U.S. air force, and Lt. Gen. Christopher Mahoney to serve as assistant commandant for the U.S. Marine Corps.
Filling that last position was given extra urgency after the Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Eric Smith, was hospitalized on Sunday after defence officials said he suffered “sudden cardiac arrest” at his home. He had been covering the duties of the assistant commander in addition to his role as commandant and had been vocal in public about the strain he was under as a result.
“He’s trying to work two jobs, he’s working from 6 a.m. to 11 at night,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks told reporters at the Pentagon last week. “I think that speaks for itself.”
Republican senators, who for months refused to publicly condemn Tuberville for the holds, took the issue to the Senate floor last week for an hours-long session where they highlighted the credentials of the officers awaiting their promotions, the important roles they’re meant to fill, and the impact it’s having on those members and their families.
“Why are we putting holds on war heroes?” asked Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska, himself a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. He later said Tuberville’s actions would be remembered as a “national security suicide mission.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the issue was harming efforts to recruit and retain the troops.
“No matter whether you believe it or not, Sen. Tuberville, this is doing great damage to our military,” Graham said.
The public display did little to sway Tuberville. As the senators asked for unanimous consent on more than 60 individual promotions, Tuberville stood up and objected to each and every one.
Military leaders are also getting increasingly vocal about the impact.
During the summer, Franchetti testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee — which Tuberville sits on — that if the holds are lifted, it will take three to four months to get the three-star general officers in place, but it will take years to recover from the impact the promotion delays are having on lower-level officers.
That’s because as each officer is promoted, it creates an opportunity for a more junior officer to rise. The military is capped at the numbers of personnel it can have at each rank, so keeping a colonel from being promoted to a general means there are younger lieutenant-colonels who can’t get promoted to colonel.
That affects pay, retirement, lifestyle and future assignments — and in some fields where the private sector will pay more, it becomes harder to convince those highly trained young leaders to stay.
Shimooka said it’s difficult to quantify the impact on military readiness and whether that could spill over into the U.S. response to the growing conflicts in Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. Many of the top positions being held up are filled in an acting capacity.
“A lot of those senior officials are starting to talk about the impact, though, and they sound stretched thin, they sound overworked,” he said. “You’re hearing some officers say they don’t have the necessary experience to fulfil certain positions they’re filling in for. So according to them, there’s certainly an impact.”
With no end to the holds in sight, Democrats are considering a resolution that would allow batches of military nominees to be passed over Tuberville’s objections. That resolution first needs to clear the Senate Rules Committee before going to a full Senate vote, and will require two-thirds of senators to support it.
Democrats appear confident they will get the necessary Republican support for the change, particularly after last week’s contentious session. Democratic Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer has said that “patience is wearing thin” with Tuberville’s blockade.
Even Republicans who say they agree with Tuberville’s opposition to the Pentagon’s abortion policy have criticized him for his strategy, saying it’s impacting people who have nothing to do with deciding how the department operates. Republican Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell said last week the holds are “a bad idea” and that he’s tried to convince Tuberville to express his operation in a different way.
Tuberville has been urged to bring forward legislation on the policy, as he originally called for. But he has said he wants Democrats to bring that bill forward, something the party has flatly rejected.
“It’s a mess,” Shimooka said.
— with files from The Associated Press
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