Senate Republicans are starting to turn on Tommy Tuberville over his blockade of military promotions.
The Senate brought 61 individual nominees to the floor for a vote Wednesday night. Tuberville objected to all of them, tanking each officer’s promotion. He has repeatedly insisted that his blockade, a protest of the Department of Defense’s abortion policy, does not harm military readiness.
But his Republican colleagues were finally sick of hearing it. “No offense, but that’s just ridiculous,” Senator Dan Sullivan said. “He knows it. We all know it.”
Sullivan revealed that the military expects Tuberville’s blockade to affect 89 percent of all general officer positions, across all branches.
“Xi Jinping is loving this. So is Putin,” Sullivan said, referring to the presidents of China and Russia. “How dumb can we be, man?”
I don’t have the energy to pore through Senate rules and find out why this is a thing. But letting one of the Senate’s biggest responsibilities be barred by a single Senator seems like a huge oversight.
It was originally utilized as an emergency procedure to halt a motion that may negatively affect an individual senator’s state. Giving the senator time to pause the motion until he has read through the bill.
If utilized for it’s original purpose, it’s not actually that problematic of a rule, as it doesn’t usually really take much to motivate a motion to continue if the motion is really important.
The issue is that holds were never designed not to be utilized for several hundred motions at the same time. The Senate got rid of holds all together at some point in the 90s but reinstated it the year or so after. I’m guessing this is going to cause them to close this particular loophole by amending the rules.
Though I doubt they will get rid of it all together, as conservatives benefit from holds like this and the filibuster a lot more than progressives.