The Senate approved roughly 425 military confirmations on Tuesday after Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) backed down on a blockade against promotions, ending a nearly 10-month standoff with his colleagues over a Pentagon abortion policy.
Three-star nominees and below are no longer blocked for promotions, Tuberville had announced earlier on Tuesday. The abortion policy he had sought to end—which provides paid leave and reimbursement to service members who travel to get an abortion—remains unchanged.
“I’m not going to hold the promotions of these people any longer,” Tuberville said. “We just released them—about 440 of them. Everybody but 10 or 11 four-stars.”
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Confirming all of the nominees in one fell swoop on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) criticized Tuberville for putting the nominees and their families through the “pointless and gravely damaging ordeal,” according to NBC News.
“Let this incident be a warning,” Schumer said, “No one—no one—should attempt this in the Senate again. The senior senator from Alabama has nothing to show for his 10 months of delay.”
President Joe Biden echoed Schumer’s words in a statement, pointing out that “[in] the end, this was all pointless.”
“Tuberville, and the Republicans who stood with him, needlessly hurt hundreds of servicemembers and military families and threatened our national security—all to push a partisan agenda,” the president said. “I hope no one forgets what he did.”
For months, military leaders railed against Tuberville, arguing his block over the little-used abortion reimbursement program weakened the United States military.
“It’s been a long fight,” he said on Tuesday. “We fought hard. We did the right thing for the unborn and for our military, fighting back against executive overreach.”
Tuberville ultimately caved under pressure from fed-up Republican colleagues, though he vowed to keep a hold on nominees he considered to be “woke.”
Asked by a CNN reporter what he believed he’d achieved, the Alabama senator said, “Well, I think we exposed people of what they’re about.”
Explaining that it was “the only thing I had to be able to get the attention of the Democrats,” Tuberville added, “I think we proved a point. It’s not—We didn’t lose, the American people lost here.”
