…second-time (and sure to be multiple) winner Tommy Tuberville, who’s flaunting his conservative bona fides by destroying the U.S. military!
Why would he do that?
Because it’s absolutely vital to constrain female reproductive autonomy, wherever and whenever such horror manifests – silly!
How can Tommy do that all by himself?
By standing in the way of all military promotions.
Wait – how?
Tommy Tuberville, believe it or not, is a U.S. Senator! Really! No, he really is! Courtesy of the good folk of Alabama, who decided that if there are only going to be 100 Senators to influence the governance of over 330 million citizens, well, one of them might just as well be Coach Tommy. See, Tuberville used to be a college football coach of some renown, and that’s really all he was ever good for, and all anybody in Alabama knows about him, which apparently is enough. Indeed, Tuberville still labels himself as “Coach” on his official Senate webpage, because being Coach obviously qualifies him to play a pivotal role in formulating public policy:
Yikes. But what’s a Senator got to do with appointing and promoting military officers?
This gets us into one of the myriad asinine aspects of America’s Craptacular Constitution, the relevant provisions of which grant the Senate the power to approve or reject all presidential appointments of officers to the U.S. military. One of those “advise and consent” matters, checks and balances and all that. The Founders loved that shit. Over time, this has become ridiculous for any number of reasons, most importantly because the United States military is a much, much different organization than the one contemplated by the crew in the tri-corner hats, staffed by officers with complex qualifications almost no Senator is fit to evaluate, and comprising branches that the good 18th Century gentlemen could never have imagined (gadzooks, what is this air force business? And odds my bodkins, what in God’s name is a space force? ), as well as a number of personnel – 1.4 million active, 800,000 reserve – that would have boggled their pre-industrial, agrarian minds. Land o’Goshen, that’s over seven times the size of the army that Xerxes took across the Hellespont! That’s a lot of personnel! Do you have any idea how many officers it takes to run a military of that size? No, of course you don’t, so let me help you out:
About 50,000 nominations for officer appointments and promotions have to go through the Senate each year!! That’s way too many for them to give any thought to any but the most senior positions, so the way it works is to send all the nominations through the Senate Armed Services Committee, which rubber stamps almost all of them, before sending them off en bloc to the full Senate for a second mass rubber-stamping. It all manages to function, albeit without providing much in the way of the oversight envisioned by the Founders.
O.K., but how does Tommy Tuberville get to throw sand in the gears?
Why, because he’s a Senator, silly!
But he’s just one member…
Yes. He is. So? Don’t you know anything about how ludicrously the Senate rules have been drafted, the better to ensure gridlock? After all I’ve tried to teach you, honestly, I just don’t know. Let’s cut to the chase: any one member of the Senate can put a “hold” on an appointment, procedurally blocking it. See, they only get waved through en bloc if there’s unanimous consent. If anyone refuses to consent – let me stress: if any one – then there have to be individual votes on each of the hundreds of appointments. And that’s what Tommy is doing, again and again, over and over.
Wait just a damned minute – what in the name of George Washington and the Continental Congress has any of this got to do with female reproductive rights?
So, you’ll recall that the Republican-stacked U.S. Supreme Court recently overturned Roe v. Wade, thus removing the constitutional right to abortion, just like the Evangelicals and their fellow ideologues have wanted for decades, right? In the aftermath, all sorts of Red States have moved aggressively to make abortion services all but entirely illegal. The thing is, lots and lots of military personnel, a larger proportion of them than you might think being female, have to serve on bases located within those Red States, and they have no choice at all in the matter. This means a woman in the military can find herself assigned to serve within a jurisdiction in which she can’t get an abortion if she needs one, unlike her peers serving in Blue States, and this is not only unfair and inherently unjust, it’s likely to have a negative impact on recruitment. The military needs those women! Yet why stay, or join in the first place, if you can be sent to some patriarchal Handmaid’s Tale shit-hole where your rights will be savagely curtailed by a bunch of cackling redneck chauvinist pigs? In response, the Biden administration implemented a policy to help female service members who need abortions to travel to Blue State jurisdictions where the procedure is still available, covering travel expenses and so on (though not the cost of the abortion itself).
And Tommy doesn’t like that?
Tommy doesn’t like that. Women residing within Red States where abortion is prohibited are still going to be able to get treatment by way of Biden’s clever but nefarious end-run, and that can’t be tolerated.
So Tommy is using his leverage as a Senator to blackmail Biden into revoking his policy?
Yes! Now you’ve got it! No more critical appointments until Tommy gets his way. This has been going on for months now, and thus far Tuberville has put about 300 appointments on hold, forcing some officers to postpone their retirements, and others to serve in an “acting” capacity to fill vacant positions until something changes. The Chief of Naval Operations, Army Chief of Staff, and Marine Corps Commandant are, at present, officers in a limited acting capacity. The Missile Defense Agency, a three-star position, is now led a by a one-star temporary stand-in. Posts filled by other “acting” officers include the commanders of United States Space Command, Northern Command, and Cyber Command, as well as many of the senior commanders in the vital Pacific theatre, among them the Indo-Pacific commander, and the commanders of the Pacific Fleet, Pacific Air Forces, Pacific Submarine Forces, and Pacific Special Operations. If Tommy keeps this up, by the end of the year the unfilled positions will swell to about 600, including the all-important Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Holy crap.
I know, right? It’s all having such a deleterious impact on morale and military effectiveness that the Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force took the extraordinary step of writing an op-ed in the Washington Post, decrying Tuberville’s actions and begging him to stop, or for his fellow Senators to do something.
Tommy doesn’t care. Tommy promises more of the same unless the Feds knuckle under. There must be no corner of these United States where a woman in any position can decide for herself whether she wants to have a child, and that’s that! And no, it doesn’t matter if she was raped (sadly, not at all rare for serving women), or if carrying to term will kill her! And don’t go blaming Tommy for this mess, oh no, this is all Biden’s fault, as Tuberville made clear in a recent Tweet:
OMG, that’s rich. Biden injected politics. Our Tommy wants the whole thing to be just as apolitical as bipartisan comity could guarantee, but what’s he gonna do, that sombitch President has forced his hand.
Jesus Belly-flopping Christ.
Why doesn’t somebody in the formerly pro-defence, pro-military GOP do something? Where’s McConnell? Where’s Romney? Where’s Collins and Murkowski? Why is nobody saying anything? Why aren’t his colleagues taking him out back and slapping him around in the finest tradition of Washington politics, for chrissakes?
All of those gutless GOP bastards are AWOL. They don’t want The Base to think they’re pro-abortion. So Tommy gets carte blanche.
Where, when, and how does this all end?
What do I look like, Kreskin? How should I know? Under the Senate rules, the only way to end the impasse would be for the entire Senate to vote to confirm each officer individually, a process that would take about 500 years, so don’t hold your breath. I dunno, maybe it’ll come to that. Meanwhile, I’m hoping Tommy steps in front of a speeding cement mixer, but until such deus ex machina, about all we can do is award him his latest well-earned Gohmert, and wait until Hell freezes over for our disapproval to count for something. A futile gesture, perhaps, but then, what isn’t?
Here you go Tommy, you craven, despicable arse-hole:
BONUS! Tommy decries wokeness in the Navy, claiming that sailors are so sensitive and soft that they’re out there on the high seas writing goddam poetry:
the needlefish 