Tuberville Ends Military Blockade, Freeing Up Military Promotions

Sen. Tommy Tuberville lifted his hold Tuesday of hundreds of senior military promotions he had blocked for months, clearing the way for a vote to advance nominations as soon as Tuesday afternoon. 

“I’m not going to hold the promotions of these people any longer,” Tuberville told reporters after a closed-door lunch with Senate Republicans. “We just released them. Everybody — I think about 440 of them — everybody but 10 or 11 four-stars. Those will continue to have a hold, and we’re going to ask Sen. Schumer to bring them up one at a time.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters the Senate could vote on military nominations as soon as Tuesday afternoon and said he hoped no senator uses blanket holds the way Tuberville did again.

“And I hope they learn the lesson of Sen. Tuberville,” Schumer said. “And that is he held out for many, many months, hurt our national security, caused discombobulation to so many military families who’ve been so dedicated to our country and didn’t get anything that he wanted. It’s a risky strategy that will not succeed. I hope it doesn’t happen again.”

The Alabama Republican began blocking military promotions from clearing the Senate en masse in February to protest a Pentagon abortion policy, forcing the chamber to take up nominations one by one in order to pass the chamber.

As the number of stalled nominations grew, Schumer held firm that Tuberville’s hold was a Senate Republican problem that should be resolved within his conference. But Tuberville ultimately began to break his own logjam in recent weeks by forcing votes through a so-called cloture petition.

Though the Senate was able to confirm a handful of nominations through individual votes, including Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. C.Q. Brown, hundreds remained in limbo.

“Our top, top leaders need to be vetted, just like everybody else,” Tuberville said. “We need to know who they are and why they’re making all the decisions of our military.”

Tuberville for months continued to insist that he wasn’t getting pressure to back down from his GOP colleagues, though Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had said publicly that he disagreed with Tuberville’s tactics.

On Tuesday, McConnell said he was “pleased” that the situation had seemingly been “ameliorated.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Joni Ernst billed Tuberville's pivot to only holding up less than a dozen top tier military brass as a reasonable compromise.

"We will have to vote on the four-star generals and that's acceptable," Ernst told The Messenger, noting "that's what the standing order had called for anyway."

"So I think we've got a solution here where we can move quickly on these men and women," the Iowa Republican said.

Last month, internal frustration with Tuberville spilled out into plain view, as Republican Sens. Ernst and Dan Sullivan of Alaska and others went to the floor to unsuccessfully request unanimous consent to confirm dozens of nominees to new posts. Tuberville blocked each one.

The public airing of internal disagreements led to a special meeting during which GOP senators floated proposals to end the impasse, such as suing the Defense Department, and Republican senators had signaled last week that Tuberville was close to announcing an off ramp.

The former college football coach said the referees — Schumer — changed the rules on him in the middle of the game by removing a provision in an annual defense policy bill that would’ve reverted the Pentagon abortion policy back to what it was.

Senate Democrats had also added additional pressure by pursuing a resolution that would essentially amount to a temporary rules change to circumvent the bulk of Tuberville’s holds. Schumer had repeatedly threatened to hold a vote on the proposal “soon” but also said he would give Republicans time to sort this out themselves.

Tuberville said Tuesday that Senate Republicans are united in opposition to Democrats’ resolution and that he has no regrets about this months-long saga.

“The only opportunity you got to get 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. “And I think we opened their eyes a little bit. We didn’t get the win that we wanted. We still got a bad policy.”

But, he added: “We got all we could get. There wasn’t anything else we could get.”

Warren Rojas contributed to this report.