Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan on Wednesday night led a scorching attack on fellow Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville over his ongoing hold on military promotions, generating plenty of headlines but little action.
Over several dramatic hours on Wednesday night, Sullivan and several of his Republican colleagues took to the U.S. Senate floor to criticize Tuberville’s one-person blockade of nearly 400 promotions and appointments across the military branches. In all, the group tried to force action on 61 different positions.
Tuberville, as he’s done for much of the last ten months, successfully blocked each one.
“There is growing bitterness within the ranks of our military driven by this fact,” Sullivan said. “The men and women in the military who’ve served our country so well for decades … have made huge sacrifices, multiple deployments, now their careers are being punished over a policy dispute that they had nothing to do with and no power to resolve. … The idea that somehow some of these officers are woke and desk jockeys is ridiculous.”
Tuberville’s objection centers on a Department of Defense policy to cover travel expenses for military personnel who travel for abortion care. The policy was instituted following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last summer, allowing several Republican-led states to institute harsh bans on the care.
The move has been lambasted by Democrats and officials within the U.S. military, who argue it has undermined the country’s military readiness.
Republicans, however, were resistant to criticize one of their own.
In comments earlier this summer, Sullivan defended the Alabama Republican’s decision to block the appointments and argued that it should be on the Biden administration to negotiate a compromise.
“Every senator has the right to place holds on nominees on an issue of policy importance,” Sullivan said during an appearance on “Meet the Press.” “Every single one of these kind of holds, 99% of them get resolved through compromise. And what needs to happen, the secretary of Defense, Senator Tuberville, Chuck Schumer need to sit down and have that pass.”
That seems to be changing in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel and heightening tensions around the world. Sullivan, a long-time member of the Marine Corps, said frustration is growing among the military ranks over stagnating careers.
During Wednesday night’s floor fight, Sullivan also said that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin must be “loving this” exercise.
“How dumb can we be, man?”
None of the 61 appointments brought up on Wednesday night advanced. Instead, those appointments will likely have to wait for a rules change being drafted by Senate Democrats to allow about 300 of the appointments to advance. High-level appointments would still have to go through individual votes, as three key nominations did in September. Another three positions are expected to be voted on in the coming days. An assessment by the Congressional Research Service said it would take the Senate more than 30 days of working 24 hours nonstop to confirm all the pending nominees individually.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
