Tuberville ends his hold on military promotions
Hundreds OK’d to new posts, including Naval Academy head
The U.S. Naval Academy will have a brand new No. 1 fan cheering on the Midshipmen on Saturday for the 124th Army-Navy Game.
The U.S. Senate in a single stroke Tuesday approved about 425 military promotions after Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama ended a nearly yearlong blockade of nominations. The list of approved names includes Rear Adm. Yvette Davids, who will soon be installed as the first female superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy.
Tuberville had been under pressure to end his campaign after more senators from both sides of the aisle began ramping up their complaints. Tuberville began blocking nominations in February in response to a Pentagon reproductive health care policy.
The one-man blockade was possible because the Senate has a longstanding tradition of unanimously approving military appointments by voice vote, but arcane rules allow one senator to oppose such motions. By the time Democratic leaders realized the former football coach was opposition for the long haul, it would have taken months for the Senate to institute a work-around, scheduling individual hearings on each appointment.
“Thank God, these military officers will now get the promotion they so rightfully earned,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
The action came hours after Tuberville said Tuesday he’s “not going to hold the promotions of these people any longer.” He said holds would continue, however, for the highest-ranking military officers, those who would be promoted to what he described as the four-star level or above.
There were 451 military officers affected by the holds as of Nov. 27. It’s a stance that has left key national security positions unfilled and military families with an uncertain path forward.
Tuberville was blocking the nominations in opposition to Pentagon rules that allow travel reimbursement when a service member has to go out of state to get an abortion or other reproductive care, such as fertility treatment. President Joe Biden’s administration instituted the new rules after the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to an abortion, and some states have limited or banned the procedure.
“Well, certainly we’re encouraged by the news,” Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a briefing Tuesday. “We continue to stay engaged with Senator Tuberville in the Senate directly, to urge that all holds on all our general flag officer nominations be lifted.”
Critics said that Tuberville’s tactics were a mistake because he was blocking the promotions of people who had nothing to do with the policy he opposed.
“Why are we punishing American
heroes who have nothing to with the dispute?” said Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska. “Remember, we are against the Biden abortion travel policy. But why are we punishing people who have nothing to do with the dispute and if they get confirmed can’t fix it? No one has had an answer for that question because there is no answer.”
On Nov. 1, Sullivan called for a floor vote to approve the appointment Davids to be the next superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy. A member of the academy’s Board of Visitors, Sullivan praised Davids as a “great patriot” with an “incredible bio” and urged Navy to beat Army.
“We want her to get there,” Sullivan said, unsuccessfully pleading with Tuberville to relent. “We certainly want her to get there in time for the ArmyNavy game so the U.S. Naval Academy can beat Army badly.”
Tuberville stood and announced, “I object.”
That dramatic moment came on a night when Sullivan and his GOP colleague, Iowa Republican Joni Ernst, took turns calling for votes on Davids and 60 other admirals and generals nominated for high-level military promotions, including Rear Adm. Fred Kacher, who has been serving as acting superintendent of the academy while awaiting his own next appointment — leading the Navy’s Seventh Fleet from a base in Japan — to be approved by the Senate.
Davids was also filling an interim role on the West Coast during the stalemate. A 1989 graduate of the Academy,
she was announced as the Pentagon’s pick for Annapolis in April.
For months, Davids, Kacher and other military officers directly affected by Tuberville’s holds declined to speak out, for fear any comments would be seen as political. But as the pressures on their lives and the lives of the officers serving under them increased, they began to speak about how not being able to resettle their families in new communities was affecting not only them, but their military kids and spouses.
They talked about how some of their most talented junior officers were going to get out of the military because of the instability they saw around them, and they talked about how having to perform multiple roles because of so many vacancies was putting enormous additional stress on an already overworked military community. The issue came to a head when U.S. Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith suffered a heart attack in October, just two days after he’d talked about the stress of the holds at a military conference.
“We can’t continue to do this to these good families. Some of these groups that are all for these holds, they haven’t thought through the implication of the harm it’s doing to real American families,” said Ernst.
In response to the holds, Democrats had vowed to take up a resolution that would allow the Senate to confirm groups of military nominees at once during the remainder of the congressional term, but Republicans worried that the change could erode the powers of the minority in the Senate.
Tuberville emerged from a closed-door luncheon with his GOP colleagues, saying “all of us are against a rule change in the Senate.” He was adamant that “we did the right thing for the unborn and for our military” by fighting back against executive overreach. He expressed no regrets but admitted he fell short in his effort.“The only opportunity you got to get the people on the left up here to listen to you in the minority is to put a hold on something, and that’s what we did,” Tuberville said. “We didn’t get the win that we wanted. We’ve still got a bad policy.”
Schumer said Tuberville ended up failing to get anything that he wanted and held it out as a warning to others who might attempt similar efforts in the future to undo policies they oppose.“It’s a risky strategy that will not succeed,” Schumer said. “I hope it doesn’t happen again.”