Tommy Tuberville: What's Wrong With the Republican Party

You can’t say you support the military, and then stand by while one man, one senator, prevents the military from having its senior leadership in place. But that’s where we are. As of today, there is no longer a Senate-confirmed Commandant of the Marine Corps. Top level military positions require Senate confirmation, and Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville is blocking it. This isn’t because he has an objection to the candidate. The nominee, General Eric Smith, is well qualified. He graduated from Texas A&M and was commissioned in 1987. He has held commands at every level in the Corps, including, as a general officer, in the U.S. Marine Corps Forces Southern Command, 1st Marine Division, III Marine Expeditionary Force, and Marine Corps Combat Development Command.

General Eric M. Smith

Smith is certainly better qualified to hold the Commandant position than Tuberville is to vote on Pentagon nominees.

But early this year, Tuberville adopted a policy of blocking all votes for military appointments that require Senate confirmation because he objects to Department of Defense policy on reproductive health care. The policy, enacted post-Dobbs, ensures “service members and their families are able to access non-covered reproductive health care.” It means access out of state where necessary to receive care.

The policy is important because service members and their families have no control over where they are stationed. The demands of military service often require travel or a move to fulfill the military’s operational requirements. So, if you’re sent to Redstone Arsenal in Alabama and you suffer a miscarriage that requires treatment to prevent sepsis and preserve your ability to carry a future pregnancy to term, you’d be stuck in a dangerous position without the DoD policy. That’s what Senator Tuberville objects to so strongly that he’s damaging the military over it. If a service member is raped and becomes pregnant, Tuberville thinks she should be forced to have the rapist’s baby.

The rest of the Republican Party is mostly remaining silent. When questioned, a few senators have declined to be overtly critical and offered platitudes above moving nominations forward. If they’ve tried to discourage Tuberville behind the scenes, they haven’t been particularly successful. Tuberville is getting away with it, with the complicity of his party.

Democrats need to take it to the Republicans on this. Every time a Republican so much as mentions support for the military, Democrats should be there to illuminate what’s happening. In Alabama, they should be hammering the bottleneck Tuberville has created for confirmations—he is currently holding up more than 250 military promotions, and he vowed today that he would not “change my approach.” Informative ads in Alabama, which has five military bases and tens of thousands of active service and National Guard members, might open some eyes and land on fertile ground. This is an important issue that impacts both military readiness and the ability of our armed services to recruit. It should be front and center, and Republicans should bear full responsibility for what they’re permitting one of their number to do. That’s certainly what would be happening if the shoe was on the other foot and a Democratic Senator was preventing confirmations of Pentagon nominees.

Tuberville was Trump’s pick to be the Republican nominee for the Alabama Senate seat. When he beat Jeff Sessions in the primary, he called Trump “the best president in my lifetime.” Tuberville also drew support from Vice President Mike Pence, who called him while he was giving his victory speech on election night in 2020 after beating Doug Jones. Tuberville interrupted his speech and put Pence on the microphone. Pence thanked Alabamians for "delivering a great victory for Donald Trump, and thank you for sending a great new senator to Washington, D.C." Ouch.

Tuberville’s media consultant for the 2020 election had this to say about Tuberville’s campaign promises in a “case study” of the strategy they used to win the race: “Alabama is a state with a large veteran population and proud military heritage. We ran an ad from Coach talking about his father’s service in World War II and his promise to donate his Senate salary to charities that help Alabama veterans.” Irony is dead. The Republicans are no longer a party that cares about the military or military families and prioritizes their well-being. But with Fox as the news source on bases across the country, even military families may not fully appreciate the sleight of hand going on here.

Truth is increasingly of no importance to elected officials in the Republican party. And pretend support for the military isn’t Tuberville’s only brush with defrauding his constituents. In late June, he voted against President Biden’s rural broadband bill, which provided $1.4 billion in support to Alabama, where it is sorely lacking. His no vote wasn’t a principled opposition to the measure. Almost instantaneously, Tuberville was out on Twitter, and in public, taking credit for bringing broadband to his constituents. Taking credit!

Tuberville was called out for misrepresenting his role on Twitter, which added one of its “readers added context” notes to clarify that Tuberville had voted against the measure. Even Dark Brandon got into the act in a classy way.

Alabama voters should be offended by their Senator’s shameless effort to mislead them about the role he played in bringing internet infrastructure to the state. They should feel lied to and patronized. Tuberville seems to think his constituents won’t realize that he is deliberately misleading them. If he will lie to them about something so obvious, what won’t he lie to them about? Maybe he’ll tell them he supports the military, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.

Tuberville is not the only one, but he is a classic example in this moment. 

Where does that leave us? Civil discourse is about accurate information; it's about truth. It's about returning to the time when we were an America that operated on a common set of facts. We might disagree about what those facts meant, but we used them as the basis for public conversations about who we wanted to be as a country. That's not what's going on with today's Republican party.

This is this what Trump has unleashed on America. But it’s more than Trump. It’s what the Republican Party has seemingly accepted as its fate. It’s unwilling to shake off unacceptable behavior from members like Tuberville. It tolerates far worse from the man it continues to accept as its leader. None of this is a surprise, but the details of Tuberville’s behavior are still shocking. Don’t assume the people around you know them—share the story. There is no civil discourse without shared facts, and sharing them is something we all have the opportunity to do.

We’re in this together,

Joyce