Tuberville signals he’s backing down on most of his holds on top military nominees after bipartisan pressure

By Ted Barrett and Morgan Rimmer, CNN

Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama signaled that he is backing off of his hold on all top military nominees – as soon as next week – and will instead be focusing his blockade on a smaller number of nominees he characterized as “woke.”

The move comes after bipartisan pressure to cease his blanket hold on military promotions over a Pentagon abortion policy, which started in March and delayed the confirmations of more than 300 top military nominees.

Tuberville said he will not be lifting his hold on every nominee. Instead, he will be evaluating the “background” of each nominee whose confirmation has been delayed.

“This started out as, obviously, abortion overreach and those things. Now, since we’ve had all this time, we’ve had different groups across Washington, DC, and the country that have evaluated all these military appointees,” he told reporters. “This is not a private moving to a sergeant and getting one more stripe. This is people that are running our military. I think that we need to make sure that people that are our generals and admirals should be vetted to some degree, but also understand that we need to get these people promoted, and it’s been a long time for some of them.”

Pressed on whether the focus is on whether any of them have so-called “woke” interests in their backgrounds, such as diversity and inclusion programs, Tuberville said “some of it is, yeah. Some of it is.”

In his comments to reporters Tuberville referenced an effort Democratic move to overcome his hold, which would allow for a temporary rules change so that the Senate could approve all of the nominees at once. The Democratic effort had been gaining momentum and seemed likely to succeed, leading some Republican senators – who had opposed Democrats’ move – to try to overcome his holds and swiftly advance military nominations. They later engaged in discussions with Tuberville to find some sort of off-ramp from the impasse.

“Now, we’re working towards getting, which I’ve been very much for, getting the promotions over with,” Tuberville said Thursday. “We need to get them promoted. I don’t know what they’re going to do with the resolution, but we’re going through all of the people that are up for promotion. We’ll promote people in the very near future.”

He made it clear that he is not only looking at continuing to block all 4-star generals, as GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska proposed as a means to end the blockade. “I want to get as many done as possible, I’m not looking at the different levels. That’s not a consideration,” he said.

“I’m going to sit down and talk to a couple of people on the Democratic side and see what they think, because they’ve done some of the same things, they’ve looked at a lot of these people too, and I think at the end of the day, some of these upper echelon people should be individually brought through a nomination process, and not just ramrodded through.”

Tuberville also argued that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer does not have the votes to temporarily change Senate rules and bypass the Alabama Republican’s hold.

“I saw today that Senator Schumer says he’s going ahead with the resolution. I don’t think he’s got the votes, so we’ll talk again today and probably Tuesday on the resolution,” he said. “But again, I’ve involved all my colleagues, we’ve had real good discussions about this, about the proper way to do this, because we do want to stand up for life and the taxpayers not having anything to do with abortion, and get these people that need to be promoted, promoted.”

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