J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, talks to reporters as he faces backlash for remarks he made about white nationalists in an interview about his blockade of military nominees, at the Capitol in Washington, May 16, 2023.
If history had been any guide, Republicans should have won the 2022 midterms in a blowout. President Biden’s approval rating was underwater, inflation was higher than it had been for 40 years, and most importantly, first-term presidents almost always lose seats in the following midterm. Instead, Republicans just barely won control of the House, and actually lost a Senate seat. It was the best Democratic performance from such an incumbent position since 1934.
There were manifold reasons for this GOP faceplant, but the main one was the Dobbs decision striking down Roe v. Wade. It was deeply unpopular at the time and has only become more so as the gruesome consequences of state-level abortion bans have become clear.
And now with the 2024 election heaving into view, Republicans have yet another abortion problem on their hands: Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), who has launched a one-man crusade against the Pentagon’s post-Dobbs policy of providing abortion care to military members by holding promotions hostage until the policy is reversed. His antics are making it all too easy to point out what the GOP will do if they get the chance: ban all abortion across the country.
Senate approval of military promotions has hitherto been routine, but now Tuberville has blocked some 256 officer promotions and counting—including most recently the head of the Marines, which now lacks an official chief for the first time in 164 years.
Since Dobbs, many national-level Republicans have attempted to sidestep the abortion question. Donald Trump and Chris Christie have said that the issue should be left up to the states. Nikki Haley said in a speech that she would seek some “national consensus” without saying what that means. House Republicans have struggled to get a national ban after 15 weeks to the floor (though they have passed other more modest restrictions).
But the real Republican preference here is obvious: Abortion should be banned across the country, with as few exceptions as they think they can get away with. That’s what they’re doing at the state level, where the GOP is enacting ever-stricter bans wherever they can. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a ban after six weeks—before many women even know they’re pregnant. Fourteen other states have banned it entirely. A Nebraska teenager and her mother were recently convicted of obtaining and using abortion pills after the state’s 20-week ban; they both face potentially years in prison.
Savvier Republicans are starting to grasp that abortion is a massive political liability. But they won’t moderate their position; they will try to “force it through under cover of darkness,” to quote Alex Pareene. The likely strategy is judicial rule-by-decree—witness the recent attempt from Texas Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk to seize personal control of the FDA approval process and ban abortion pills.
But Tuberville’s stunt plays havoc with that strategy. He’s not only demanding abortion access for a large group of Americans be cut off, he’s doing it to one of the most prominent and respected institutions in the country. A Gallup poll finds that 64 percent of Americans express confidence in the military—somewhat alarmingly the highest figure aside from small business. (Congress, by contrast, gets 7 percent confidence.)
You don’t have to be Napoleon Bonaparte to think that a single airhead former football coach is not the person to be meddling with the Pentagon command structure at any time, but Tuberville’s doing it at a time when the military is extensively involved in helping Ukraine fight off Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression. The Democratic attack ads practically write themselves.
Yet if Tuberville’s recent addle-brained comments in defense of white nationalism are any guide, he’s not going to back down anytime soon.
