The Daily - A One-Man Blockade Against the U.S. Military

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

For the past few months, a single senator — Tommy Tuberville — has blocked hundreds of promotions in the U.S. military.Karoun Demirjian, a congressional correspondent for The Times, explains what���s behind the senator’s blockade, and why military leaders say it’s becoming a threat to national security.Guest: Karoun Demirjian, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Tuberville’s bid to reverse a Pentagon policy ensuring abortion access for service members has delayed the smooth transfer of power at the highest echelons of the armed forces.Here’s David Firestone of Times Opinion on Tuberville’s blockade.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. For the past few months, a single senator, Tommy Tuberville, has blocked hundreds of promotions within the U.S. military as a political protest against the Biden administration. as a political protest against the Biden administration. Today, my colleague Karin Demersian explains what's behind his blockade and why military leaders say it's becoming a threat to national security. It's Monday, July 24th. Karin, tell us about this Republican senator, Tommy Tuberville, who is very much at the center of this months-long drama. center of this months-long drama. So Tommy Tuberville is probably best known to the general population as a storied coach of the Auburn University football team. Tommy Tuberville is

getting another shower. He took Auburn to more wins over Alabama than anybody else had, and that was his whole public persona until he decided to stage his first political campaign. The way I was raised, before a football game, you stood to honor America. And after the game, you knelt to honor God. And run for Alabama's Senate seat in 2020. So I'm getting off the sidelines and into the fight. As your senator, I'll have President Trump's back.

We can't be bought and we won't back down. And he wins. Right. So Tuberville arrives in Washington three days before January 6th. Obviously, D.C. is in turmoil and we don't hear that much from him

except for, you know, he's one of those MAGA guys that's newly in office in 2021. It isn't until the next year, in the summer of 2022, frankly, that the issue that will end up defining him starts to emerge. And that is that the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, and that creates this patchwork of different abortion laws in various states around the country. And so people are scrambling to figure out how to navigate this new patchwork of a

post-Roe world. And one organization that faces a lot of pressure to do something is the Pentagon. The military has a bit of a unique situation. They deploy service members to states all over the country in places with different levels of access to reproductive care. Right. And so the question becomes whether they're going to dictate a policy that will equalize that playing field for all different service members, regardless of where they're going to dictate a policy that will equalize that playing field for all different service members regardless of where they're stationed. So if you're based in

Massachusetts, you have a relatively equal ability to access abortion, reproductive care, whatever that may be, as somebody based in Alabama because members of the military don't get to choose where they're stationed. Right. Suddenly, a couple of dozen states are banning abortion, and service members might be in those states, or they might be in states where it's perfectly legal in a post-Roe world. Absolutely. And it takes the Pentagon a good long time to come up with what its policy is going to be. It isn't until February of this year that they actually say, OK, what we're going to do is we're going to offer time off and travel reimbursement

to anybody who needs to go out of state to obtain an abortion or some other form of reproductive care that is not offered in the state where you're stationed. And Tommy Tuberville says, oh no, you're not going to do that. Hmm. And why is he upset about this government's solution to a post-Roe world for soldiers who might need abortions? Well, there's two reasons. Politically, it's pretty clear where Tuberville is coming from. He's coming from Alabama. He ran on a very, very conservative Republican platform.

And for him, the logical place that plays well at home, given where his state is, given where he has been politically, is you don't vote for abortion. You don't enable abortions to happen. That doesn't work with your brand of republicanism. The other argument that he makes is that it's illegal, that there are federal laws that say you cannot spend money on an abortion. And his argument is spending money to facilitate an abortion is basically the exact same thing. And so he issues an ultimatum to the Pentagon and says, if you go ahead with this policy, I am going to prevent you from being able to promote any of your generals or your admirals because the Senate actually has to say,

okay, we approve for those things to happen. It's really rare that somebody actually says, I'm not going to allow uniformed senior members of the military to move up in rank because it's a leadership issue in the military. And it's kind of one of those third rails that politicians don't touch. But Tuberville did, and that was the threat that he made. And what is the response from the military, from the Biden administration to that threat? They basically ignore it, and they go ahead and they implement the policy anyway in March. And so when the next batch of senior military promotions comes up on the Senate floor, Democrats try to move it through, and Tuberville says, nope.

The senior senator from Alabama. Reserving the right to object. I object. He makes good on the threat. I'm holding the DOD nominations because the Secretary of Defense is trying to push through a massive expansion of taxpayer-subsidized abortions. And he makes this speech explaining, I told you what the terms were. I told you what I needed you to change about this policy, how I was not okay with you putting it in place. You did it anyway, so I'm doing what I threatened that I would do. I object and I will continue to object to any nominees as long as this

illegal new abortion policy is in place. Americans want a military focused on a national defense, and that's what I'm fighting for. Okay, well, explain how Tuberville, a single senator whose party, the Republican Party, is in the minority in the Senate, has the ability to be a one-man blockade on any promotion in the senior ranks of the U.S. military? Because that seems hard to wrap your head around. Right. So this gets into the rules and the arcane guts of how the Senate operates. It's a very strange place. But basically, to be able to do anything without having to jump through a series of time-sucking procedural hurdles, you need what's called unanimous consent.

You need all the senators to just be like, okay, I don't care. Go ahead. Do it. And then you can get a whole lot of things done that would otherwise suck up a whole lot of time on the floor. Military promotions are one of these things that traditionally have been done by unanimous consent because everybody supports the uniformed military. Right. But that means any one senator has outsized influence because they can deny you unanimous consent. All of a sudden, we have one senator saying, absolutely not. No, you don't have that unanimity.

And that's what gives Tuberville the ability to have a one-man blockade against basically the entire military and the entire way that things have happened in the Senate for decades upon decades. Huh. So Tuberville has successfully exploited a funky little logistical reality of unanimous consent. Yeah, he does. And then he does it again and again and weeks go by. And then the question becomes, for everybody else, how do we get Tuberville to stand down? He and the defense secretary have a phone call a few weeks into the protest. And the defense secretary tries to explain why it's a bad idea. And Tuberville is not convinced. And he leaves that call and says, nope, this was not enough for me.

I want this policy changed. His GOP colleagues in the Senate also are really not comfortable with what he's doing. There's a lot of defense hawks in their ranks. They are not comfortable messing with the military's ability to do its job. But the most that they're willing to say, publicly at least, at the outset, is, you know, I agree with your protest in substance, but do you have to do it this way? Because remember, the GOP also doesn't like abortion and they don't like this Pentagon policy. More weeks go by. And in that time, Democrats try over and over and over again to bring up these promotions to get them through the floor. And every time, Tuberville is there this issue be settled by an act of Congress. What Tuberville's fundamental complaint is, is that the administration, the Defense Department, should not have been able to do this on their own. And what he wants is for Congress to actually dictate what the policy

should be. That means either an act of Congress to force the Pentagon to undo their policy on abortion access, or proactively passing a law that says that policy, that's the law. And if they fail to do that, if lawmakers can't get that law through Congress, he wants the Pentagon to revoke its policy. Huh. So for him, it's an all or nothing approach. And it doesn't sound like one that's kind of logistically and politically likely to go his way because, of course, the Senate is controlled by Democrats. So this just keeps dragging on week after week, month after month. And I'm curious, what becomes the impact of this one-man, all-or-nothing blockade? all or nothing blockade.

As the blockade goes on, the backlog of these senior uniformed commanders who haven't been promoted grows and grows. So what was initially dozens becomes hundreds. It's also now becoming really visible and tangible because it's affecting the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now, Joint Chiefs of Staff are made up of the most senior uniformed officials in each of the branches of the services.

They're also, as a body, the top military advisory crew for the president. And over the course of the summer, we may end up in a situation where over half of the Joint Chiefs don't actually have Senate confirmation as is traditional process. They will be places occupied by acting officials, but those are temporary and they don't have the authority and the blessing of Congress to make changes, to make decisions about policy. And that's really what's setting off alarm bells now. One in five members of the U.S. military are women. Abortion laws in this country that are now being passed are absolutely having an effect on their willingness to continue serving in uniform.

And you're starting to hear senior members of the military. This is a national security issue. It's a readiness issue. And we shouldn't kid ourselves. I think any member of the Senate Armed Services Committee knows that. The Secretary of Defense, the White House. The idea that we're injecting into fundamental foreign policy decisions what in fact as a domestic social debate on social issues

is bizarre. Saying this is becoming a real problem and could actually affect our military readiness and our ability to respond to threats around the world. Right. If there's one organization in the U.S. government where you want people to firmly be in their jobs and for there to be no question about their authority and its power, it is the United States military and it is especially the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Right. Because their counsel, their advice is considered to be pivotal for the president. And the president's the commander in chief. And so this really goes right up to the top now about how much authority do they have to give that counsel and how is that affecting the United States' standing in the world? I'm really curious what Senator Tuberville says in response

to all these senior military people saying very pointedly, you, Senator, are making the military weaker with this blockade, with this protest. You must stop. National security is at risk. First of all, he's not buying their argument that the sky is falling. And he's also saying, well, if you think so, change your policy because it doesn't help military readiness and defense, he says, to be focused on things like providing abortion access. We should be talking about defense and that's it. And these are extraneous issues that that's what makes us weaker. That's his take. And frankly, he's getting a lot of support for this, both from people at home in Alabama and even increasingly so in Washington, where a lot of far-right

Republicans in the House have basically taken up his cause and made this a fight against the Pentagon, not just to undo the abortion access policy, but a whole bunch of other social policies that they say should be more conservative. We'll be right back. So, Karin, describe exactly what it is that Senator Tuberville seems to have helped inspire over in the Republican-controlled House? So over the months that he's objecting, there's a group of far-right Republicans who are actually coming to physically show their support for Tuberville in the back of the Senate chamber when he makes these objections. And then it becomes time for the House to do its annual defense bill. This is something the House tackles

every year. It's basically Congress setting the rules of the road for how the Pentagon can spend the money, the taxpayer money that Congress eventually appropriates for them. And they demand an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would basically bar the Pentagon from being able to implement this policy for service members that would need to leave the state for an abortion. Huh. So they basically put Tuberville's plan in their bill. They put Tuberville's plan in their bill, and they succeed in getting it attached. One, because a couple Republicans in the House also have outsized power

because the GOP's majority is so, so slim. But also because, you know, Republicans don't like the policy. And so when you put it to the floor, the GOP is hard-pressed to vote against it. Even if they're worried, it might blow up the whole defense bill. And actually, the far-right Republicans managed to do a lot more. They go after health coverage for people transitioning gender and say, you can't spend money on that in the military. They go after the diversity

training initiatives, and they stop just short of saying you can't spend money on that in the military. They go after the diversity training initiatives, and they stop just short of saying you can't spend money on it at all, but they say we're going to cut all the offices and all of the personnel that are tasked to those offices to actually teach about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the military. So they take what Tuberville is up to, which is pretty narrow, take the issue of abortion out of the military, and they broaden it. And they are basically trying to take all social issues they don't agree with out of the military. Right. The military thus becomes a forum, at least in the House's defense bill,

for these culture wars. And what ends up happening to the bill is that you took a defense bill that started off as a bipartisan product with support from Democrats. And by the time you're actually voting on it, loaded up with all of this stuff, almost no Democrats are willing to support it anymore. And so what you have left is a GOP-backed bill. And that's kind of a unique situation because normally you end up having a bipartisan vote for these defense bills.

That's the goal. And for the last 60 years, Congress as a whole has managed to annually pass a defense bill. But that's in doubt now because you can't get this bill with all of these conservative social policy clawbacks through a Democrat-backed Senate. And that could fundamentally change Congress's relationship overseeing the military. overseeing the military. Right, because you're saying it's quite likely in the coming weeks, or I guess months, that the Senate might not pass this defense authorization bill, and suddenly the military's budget would be

in doubt. The Senate's working on its own defense authorization bill version right now, and it's not going to look anything like the House's bill on these issues. After this, they have to appoint negotiators to go work out a compromise. The question is, can they actually compromise? And whatever compromise they strike, can it get through both of these chambers? Usually the answer is yes, because Congress thinks that continuing to direct how dollars should be spent in the military is a super important thing. But the answer to that question is a big question mark right now, because there's such a split on these social issues that

really cut to the core of each party. Right. So at this point, Tuberville has seemingly emboldened his far-right Republican colleagues to make social issues so central to the way that they think about the military that it may end up jeopardizing the military's funding in a very unusual way this year. Usually, if you have disputes over social policy as part of the whole defense bill, they start to go away by the time you actually strike a compromise. But the far-right Republicans have been emboldened. They realize the outsized power that they can have, even in small numbers, and they are not inclined to make a deal. I'm curious if Republican leaders have either a plan or the power to end what Tuberville is doing, and I guess by extension, sending a message to House far-right Republicans to stop what they are doing. Well, the thing is, they don't. Unless you change the rules of the Senate, you can't really stop one senator from objecting. Unless you miraculously find dozens more Republicans to give you a bigger than a

five vote majority in the House, you can't really change the fact that the far right Republicans in the House have a lot of power. And the leaders of the party, knowing that they're between a rock and a hard place, are not talking as tough as a lot of the mainstream Republicans and Democrats want to see them talk. They're not threatening these guys in ways that they're between a rock and a hard place, are not talking as tough as a lot of the mainstream Republicans and Democrats want to see them talk. They're not threatening these guys in ways that they want to see happening, at least not openly, because they really don't have

their hand on that lever to pull the kill switch and make this stop. So back to the beginning of our story here, Karin, how does this all come to an end? How does this one-man blockade end, does it ever end, if Tuberville wants to keep doing what he's doing? Well, first of all, I should say that Tommy Tuberville has basically rejected the idea that you can settle this under the defense bill because he thinks that Congress is too split,

and it's true, to actually be able to get it done that way. And he's making these demands for standalone bills that, frankly, could never pass both the House and the Senate in similar ways. So that's not very practical. The only way to get through Tommy Tuberville's blockade right now seems to be to go around Tommy Tuberville's blockade. And what does that look like? That means the Senate has to start putting these nominees one by one up for votes on the floor. The concern is, if you have to do that for every single one of the promotions

that are stuck in this backlog, you would be on the Senate floor for weeks on end if you went 24 hours, seven days a week, which is not how they work. Months on end if you actually parcel it out so it's something akin to a normal workday. And you wouldn't be able to get very much else done. Right. This is the virtue of unanimous consent. It avoids having to spend hundreds, thousands of hours trying to get military promotions to the Senate. It's efficiency when it comes to things that should be pretty non-controversial. Yeah.

And so now the question being laid at the feet of the Senate majority leader, Democrat Chuck Schumer, is are you going to do that to get your joint chiefs in place? And even if you say, okay, fine, we'll do that. We'll relent on the joint chiefs. We'll make that a special issue. What about everybody else?

There's still no conclusion on the hundreds of other senior officers, commanders, who are still stuck in that backlog and need to see those promotions get through. Right. So it doesn't look like Chuck Schumer is going to take this laborious, time-consuming approach for all the hundreds of promotions that are in this backlog. That's what you're saying? It's the equivalent of shutting down the Senate floor for a long, long time to anything else. But also remember, it's not just about what you happen to have time to do this month. It's what precedent do you set for the future? Right.

And they are very, very concerned about saying, this is a legitimate protest that we will engage with. Because what about the next time somebody has a complaint with the Pentagon policy? What if everybody could have their way on niche issues by threatening to block hundreds of promotions for months on end? You wouldn't actually be able to ever get any laws passed, even in a season where, you know, you'd need to. So what would it look like for Senator Tuberville to prevail here and for the military and the Biden administration by extension to cave and give in on this abortion access policy so that it can get the military appointment process back to normal? It would not be unprecedented for the Biden administration to cave on a social policy to Republicans. This actually happened recently when they said, okay, we'll take down the COVID mandate. That was more of an argument that

happened in the contours of the defense bill. But there's something very different about this one. We're heading into a presidential election year next year, and Democrats think that the abortion issue for them is a winner on the campaign trail. They did better than they were expecting to in the midterm elections because they campaigned on Roe v. Wade. Right. They want to still paint the GOP as extreme on abortion and a whole bunch of other social policies because they believe that will get them votes to keep a Democrat in the White House. If they give up on this, that is undermining what is supposed to be a signature central campaign issue. And so the long-term consequences of that

could be pretty severe at the ballot box. Hmm. So they can't politically afford to cave on this issue, and the result is going to be a somewhat dysfunctional U.S. military. Yeah, at least organizationally. And the thing is, we don't know how long that's going to go on

and what the repercussions are going to be in the long term. Because frankly, right now, Tommy Tuberville seems like he can continue this blockade for just about as long as he wants to. Well, Karin, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In Israel over the weekend, tens of thousands of people marched to the capital city of Jerusalem in a last-ditch protest against their government's plan to reduce the power of the country's highest court. against their government's plan to reduce the power of the country's highest court. That plan, which is supported by the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is expected to be adopted today. Netanyahu and his supporters say it's necessary to prevent the left-leaning court from repeatedly overruling his government.

But opponents say it's a dangerous power grab that will endanger Israel's democracy. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Asta Chaturvedi, Carlos Prieto, and Sidney Harper, with help from Eric Krupke. It was edited by Lexi Diao and Rachel Quester, with help from John Ketchum, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Chelsea Daniel, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bilboro.

See you tomorrow.