What, exactly, is Tommy Tuberville doing?

An explanation, of sorts.

(Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville)

On Wednesday night, a group of Republican Senators — led by Alaska’s Dan Sullivan — spent four hours trying to get votes on more than five dozen military promotions.

Alabama GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville blocked them all.

This led to some, uh, consternation among his colleagues.

“How dumb can we be?” Sullivan asked at one point.

“You just denied this lady a promotion — you did that,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham scolded Tuberville at another.

Tuberville, who rose to fame in Alabama as the head coach of the Auburn football team, offered no response — simply (and repeatedly) objecting to the nominations, effectively tabling them.

All of which leads to a simple question: What the hell is going on here?

This all began 13 months ago — in October 2022. In response to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Roe v Wade decision, the Biden administration put in place a policy that the Pentagon would pay for travel expenses for members of the military seeking abortions who lived in states where the procedure was banned. (Notably, the policy does not fund abortions.)

“The practical effect of the recent changes is that service members may be forced to travel greater distances, take more time off work and pay more out-of-pocket expenses to access reproductive health care, all of which have readiness, recruiting and retention implications for America's armed forces,” a Pentagon spokesperson told NPR at the time.

In February, Tuberville announced he would put a blanket hold on ALL military promotions until the Pentagon changed the policy or Democrats put a bill with a change to the policy on the Senate floor.

A quick and very important aside about how the Senate works here: Unlike the House, which has a Rules Committee that determines the, well, rules that govern debate on anything that comes to the floor, the Senate works by unanimous consent. Meaning all 100 Senators have to agree on letting something be debated and voted on. One Senator can clog the works — for as long as he or she sees fit.

In the past — and on a bipartisan basis — large numbers of military promotions were grouped together and approved via unanimous consent and a simple voice vote. It took minutes. Tuberville is demanding that each promotion be subject to a roll call vote, a hugely onerous and time consuming process that would tie up Senate business for months.

Explained Tuberville in a June 2022 op-ed in the Washington Post:

I am not stopping anyone from getting confirmed, and I am not stopping anyone from voting. Democrats could simply put these nominations up for a vote, but they clearly don’t want to. Instead they wasted hours of Senate floor time trying to harangue me into letting the nominations pass through unanimous consent. This tactic hasn’t worked, and it won’t work. I am more than happy to vote on these nominations, and I would probably vote for many, if not most, of them.

Tuberville echoed that sentiment Wednesday night on the floor.

“Every day this continues is a day that Democrats think abortion is more important than the nomination, and our military,” he said. “I support many of these nominees, and I agree that these are very, very important jobs. But we could have been voting on these nominees the entire nine months.”

He also insisted, as he has done many times before, that his hold on hundreds of military promotions was not, in fact, affecting our country’s ability to defend itself.

“My hold is not affecting readiness,” he insisted.

That is a point of considerable debate, however.

In September, the heads of the Air Force, Navy and Army did an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper to push back on Tuberville’s assertion that his holds weren’t causing any harm.

“Our potential adversaries are paying attention,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said. “It is affecting how they view the United States and our military capabilities and support for the military. This needs to stop.”

Added Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro: “This is having a real negative impact and will continue to have an impact on our combat readiness. That is what the American people truly need to understand.”

Senate Democrats have long expressed their frustrations and concerns with Tuberville’s tactics. But, until Wednesday, Republicans had generally limited their public criticisms of Tuberville — hoping to find a negotiated settlement out of this blockade.

That ended last night — as frustrations boiled over. “I’ve worked closely with Senator Tuberville for months, always defending his holds, always looking for compromise, the one we are working on now,” said Sullivan at one point. “But we haven’t made progress, and the world’s a dangerous place.”

The central questions moving forward are a) how angry the likes of Sullivan really are b) how many GOP Senators share his frustration with Tuberville’s tactics and c) what are they willing to do about it.

Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, reversing his earlier opposition, said he would move forward on a proposal by Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed that would, effectively, suspend the Senate rules on promotions until the end of the year — an attempt to end-run the Tuberville hold.

“Patience is wearing thin with Senator Tuberville on both sides of the aisle,” Schumer said Wednesday. “What happened with the Marine Commandant just showed many people how dangerous what Tuberville is doing is. And so I will call for a resolution on the floor to allow us to vote on all these people at once. And I’m very hopeful and optimistic about it.”

(Over the weekend, the top Marine officer collapsed while running in Washington. Tuberville led an effort to confirm the Marines’ second-in command — a promotion he had been blocking since July.)

The move by Senate Democrats would require 60 votes to pass. Meaning that nine Republican Senators would need to vote for it.

It’s not clear whether the votes are there for the change. But, this paragraph — from a CNN report on the holds earlier this week — suggests that at least some Republicans are considering breaking with Tuberville:

The same source added that several senators are upset with Tuberville’s staff claiming in several press releases that Republicans are “united” against a possible rules change to break the standoff over military holds, when several of them are still undecided.

After 9 months of, largely, behind-the-scenes carping about Tuberville and his tactics, the issue now seems certain to come to a head some time very soon. The question for Senate Republicans is how far party loyalty takes them — and whether it should trump, ahem, principle.