Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 2. He has dug in on holding up Defense Department promotions: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As if it were not embarrassing enough to hang around in the nation’s capital and admit to people that you are originally from Alabama, this bad football coach joke of a United States Senator Tommy Tuberville is running a one man filibuster against the Pentagon by blocking all promotions in every branch of the military — because they are not all MAGA Trump supporting white nationalist neo-Nazis who reject “woke” culture and Critical Race Theory and, oh by the way, vow never to have an abortion.

Talk about a litmus test.

It must have been difficult to find a way to be “fair and balanced” to report on this with a straight face, but Paul Kane, the Congressional bureau chief for The Washington Post, found a way.

Defending white nationalists, Tommy Tuberville fears a military that is ‘going wrong’

Tuberville sees the military in “a dramatic leftward lurch that has hurt recruiting and combat readiness,” the Post reports. The third-year senator believes Pentagon leaders “are forcing troops to read liberal books” and “helping provide abortion services” and “inappropriately driving white nationalists out of the service.”

“They’re politicizing the military so much, they’re ruining our military,” Tuberville told reporters on Thursday, claiming that the Army missed its 2022 recruiting goal by 25 percent. “Something’s going wrong in our military.”

Or, something’s going wrong with Tuberville’s brain.

It’s not like he has to show himself to be a radical, right-wing racist to get reelected. He could sleep in his rocking chair where he actually lives, in Florida, and never even show up for a vote and get reelected in Alabama. All he has to do is tell people he’s a Christian conservative every six years, like Richard Shelby did for decades. He doesn’t have to go all Trump MAGA crazy to keep his seat.

So why is he doing it?

Maybe it helps the fund raising effort, money he gets to put in his pocket after his term is up? Maybe he gets to keep his open invitation to hang out with Trump at Mar-a-Lago where anyone gets to cheat at golf?

According to The Post, these positions have placed Tuberville — “whose military background consists of using war metaphors to inspire his teams during three decades coaching college football” — in the spotlight as the leading conservative antagonist to the Department of Defense. “It’s a particularly unusual twist because Republicans have for decades wrapped themselves in the patriotic mantle of supporting the military.”

Republicans have spent months privately complaining about Tuberville. It was perfectly fine to play to the bookers at Fox News with complaints about a “woke” Pentagon culture.

“But Tuberville has gone too far in actually picking a fight with the most trusted public institution in America, creating a one-man blockade of nearly 200 promotions among top Pentagon brass to critical military positions.”

Tuberville says of white nationalists in the military, “I call them Americans.”

We call them neo-Nazi domestic terrorists who should be locked up in prison, not sent to the front lines with AR-15 assault rifles.

Senior Republican leaders have even begun to scold Tuberville in public, according to The Post.

“No, I don’t support putting a hold on military nominations,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Republican from Kentucky, told reporters on Wednesday. “I don’t support that. But as to why, you’ll have to ask Senator Tuberville.”

Democrats are torn between wanting to break Tuberville’s logjam, and enjoying the political pleasure of appearing on the Pentagon’s side while painting the MAGA-embracing senator as an extremist.

“Look, this term ‘woke’ gets thrown around so much on the other side, I have no idea what they mean when they use it,” Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock told reporters on Thursday. “I stand with the people in our military who lay it all on the line to keep us safe, and I don’t think they deserved to be maligned in any way. And they defend the best of American values, a country that embraces all of us, across racial lines and ethnicity.”

Tuberville made things more complicated when he gave an interview to his local public radio station WBHM on Wednesday that criticized Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for trying “to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists” from the military.

The radio station ran the story with a series of notes, fact checks and clarifications, pointing out that Tuberville is, well, totally full of shite.

Seven U.S. Defense Secretaries representing both parties signed a letter to Senate leaders saying Tuberville’s actions are harming military readiness and “risks turning military officers into political pawns.”

Tuberville held several extended sessions with reporters explaining his position in the Capitol on Thursday, at times embracing white nationalists but also trying to talk out of both sides of his mouth by seeming to reject racism.

“We can’t start distinguishing different types of people,” he said, in terms of supporting their right to serve.

When asked if white nationalists should serve in the military, he said, “Well, you got to define that first. What is a white nationalist?”

Reporters explained that white nationalists are white supremacists who support some Nazi views.

“You think a white nationalist is a Nazi? I don’t look at it like that. I look at a white nationalist as a Trump Republican,” Tuberville said, placing himself within their camp. “That’s what we’re called all the time, a MAGA person.”

Military leaders have long worried about extremist views in their ranks. The deadly standoff in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, came against a former Army engineer. Persian Gulf War Army veteran Timothy McVeigh led the plot to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 that killed 168 people.

A study by the Center for Strategic International Studies found that 6.4 percent of all domestic terror incidents in 2020 involved active-duty or reserve personnel, more than quadrupling the tally from the previous year. Hate groups actively target troops to become recruits while encouraging their own extremists to join the military ranks.

The Military, Police, and the Rise of Terrorism in the United States

And as we have reported over and over again, a major contingent of those who have been arrested for their role in violently attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power and overturn American democracy to install a white nationalist dictator in power, were active or retired military personnel.

New American Journal: Law

So no, we don’t need more domestic terrorists who do not support American democracy in the military. They are all sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution, not one man who they agree with politically.

The presence of many military veterans at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol further alarmed senior Pentagon officials and prompted Austin to create a counter-extremism working group in April 2021, The Post reports.

Confronted with these facts, Tuberville agreed that actual extremists don’t belong in the military — or even college football.

“On a smaller scale, I had to bring 120 young men from all over the country, to build a football team to win games to keep my job. It’s a very small scale,” the former head coach at Auburn and Cincinnati said, explaining his position. “You cannot have racists, okay, involved in anything that you’re doing. You can’t.”

Like coaching Black athletes is the same as fighting wars to protect democracy. What would Tuberville know about it? He never served in the military.

Maybe we don’t need racist football coaches in the Senate, or racist dictator wannabes in the White House either.

It’s clear that Tuberville thinks Austin, the first Black secretary of defense, is driving away potential recruits who support former president Donald Trump — and well he should be.

He’s asked top Pentagon leaders questions around this topic at hearings for the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“I’ve challenged several people on what they’ve done and how they’ve done it. In terms of what we’re teaching, the books that we’re making our military read to be trained. Yes, I have done that,” he said, to no apparent avail in terms of their answers.

“They make no excuses,” he said. “And that’s wrong.”

Making no excuses for granting promotions based on merit, not promoting racists, is wrong? In what world? Only in the MAGA mind.

So let’s burn the books used to train the troops too Tubby? Didn’t the Hitler Youth do that in Nazi Germany?

Fact: The U.S. military has traditionally leaned conservative. A poll by Military Times in late 2020 found that 40 percent of troops identified as Republican or libertarian, just 16 percent said they were Democrats, and the remainder claimed independent status.

By the spring of 2021, conservative Republicans latched onto a recommendation from senior Navy officials to place “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” which connects capitalism and racism, on its rotating reading list for sailors.

They peppered Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of Naval Operations, with quotations from the book at a June 2021 hearing, prompting an angry response.

“I am not going to sit here and defend cherry-picked quotes from somebody’s book,” Gilday said at one hearing, rejecting the “woke” label.

“We are not weak,” he added. “We are strong.”

The next night, Tucker Carlson began his Fox News show with an 11-minute rant focused on the exchange between Gilday and Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), part of the now-fired personality’s semi-regular attacks on the military.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who rose to the ranks of brigadier general in the Air Force, said Tuberville’s complaints are off-base in day-to-day life for the military, but that the Carlson effect has been real.

“I don’t believe it’s reality, but for people who have that perception, it is reality,” Bacon said, describing conversations in some conservative corners of his district. “Some multigenerational military families won’t let their kids sign up right now because this perception is out there, and some of it stems from the Tucker Carlson line of reasoning.”

Bacon said he warned Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their new abortion policy offering travel funds and support for troops and dependents who are based in states abortion is now illegal. Staunch antiabortion Republicans view that as a breach of the decades-old prohibition against federal funding of abortions.

And that’s what prompted Tuberville to unilaterally announce he would place a hold on every military nomination or promotion requiring Senate approval?

Noncontroversial in normal times, such military promotions are approved in a large bloc over a voice vote. Democrats could overcome Tuberville’s hold by filing the normal procedures and holding full votes, but it would eat up weeks of time to process all of them now that the backlog is approaching 200.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts and a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, jousted with Tuberville over the military nominations and released a letter from Austin highlighting that another 650 positions will require Senate confirmation by year’s end.

One option could be to hold votes on some of the most important military posts, to try to embarrass Tuberville by showing him how few allies he has on this stand. But Democrats fear he would miss the point.

“Senator Tuberville is beyond shame,” Warren said.

Tuberville said on Thursday that McConnell’s words had no impact on him and that he was waiting to hear from him, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer of New York or top Pentagon leaders about his grievances.

But so far they have had little interest in negotiating with Tuberville.

“Crickets, crickets, that’s all I can tell you on that,” he said. “It has been deathly quiet.”

Well no wonder.

Former Senator Doug Jones, who lost his reelection bid to Tuberville in 2020, has been commenting on Tuberville’s stand for days on Twitter and TV.

“Most folks probably don’t know that many promotions of military personnel, particularly Generals, have to be confirmed by the Senate. Historically these are done not only on a bipartisan basis but by unanimous consent in groups,” he said on Twitter.

This is a good question Scarlet. I’ll try and explain.

Most folks probably don’t know that many promotions of military personnel, partucularly Generals, have to be confirmed by the Senate. Historcially these are done not only on a bipartisan basis but by unanimous consent in… https://t.co/RbZn06Nbw8

— Doug Jones (@DougJones) May 12, 2023

“In other words with the unanimous consent of all Senators the Senate will waive the time for debate on each nomination and confirm dozens of promotions at once. But it has to be unanimous,” he said.

“Tuberville cannot actually ‘block a nomination,'” he explained. “But by blocking unanimous consent the Senate will be required to consider each promotion one at a time requiring months to go through all that are pending. That is what is so frustrating and disingenuous about what Tuberville is doing. These promotions have a ripple affect down the line and he is putting these families and the military chain of command on hold while he plays this silly culture war game. This has a negative affect on morale and readiness and deters good people from a military career.

“Supporting our military personnel should be a priority of every U.S. Senator regardless of the political party of the administration or of the senator,” he added. “It is clearly not a priority of Alabama’s senior senator.”

Playing political culture war games. That’s what serving their country means to these MAGA Republicans. Never mind getting on with the business of governing, and making our democracy work.

They can’t even seem to find a way to raise the debt ceiling without playing political games. Watch what happens when the Social Security payments stop coming in next month, and millions are denied health care because Medicare is on hold.

Talk about manufacturing a crisis is keep an iron grip on a seat in Congress, where people used to go to serve their country. Now they just go there to get rich and famous.

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