An Alabama senator is taking up more and more of the White House‘s time these days.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has been on the lips of President Joe Biden and in dispatches from his press team with increasing frequency in recent weeks, with Biden officials lashing out at the former college football coach.
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION ANNOUNCES $39 BILLION IN STUDENT DEBT RELIEF
“I’d be willing to talk to [Tuberville] if I thought there was any possibility of him changing this ridiculous position he has,” Biden said in Europe last week. “He’s jeopardizing U.S. security by what he’s doing. I expect the Republican Party to stand up and do something about it.”
Tuberville has been holding up military promotions for months over a Defense Department policy that pays expenses for military personnel traveling to get abortions. More than 250 promotions have now been affected, and the Marine Corps doesn’t have a commandant for the first time in more than 100 years.
But Tuberville, who still brands himself as “coach,” isn’t backing down. He sees Biden as the one overreaching, telling Politico that “you can’t dictate a law. It’s supposed to go through us.”
That isn’t the only issue where the two men are at odds.
Biden keeps mentioning the senator in speeches as an example of what he calls Republican hypocrisy, pointing to a tweet where Tuberville praised an infrastructure program he voted against.
A third spat deals with comments Tuberville made to an Alabama radio station that Democrats interpreted as defending white nationalism. The senator counters that he was actually attacking Democrats’ belief that Republicans and conservatives are white nationalists.
The pair traded barbs again last week, with Biden calling Tuberville “a better football coach than a senator” and Tuberville firing back that Biden was “a better senator than a president.”
While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) publicly broke with Tuberville in May by saying he doesn’t support the promotions hold, the senator does enjoy some support among conservatives.
Heritage Foundation Vice President Roger Severino says Tuberville is doing the right thing.
“He’s responding to the Biden administration for their politicizing the military, and using the military as part of a campaign of massive resistance to the Dobbs decision,” Severino said.
Severino added that the Department of Defense policy not only pays expenses for abortions, it pays the criminal penalties of any military doctor caught performing an illegal abortion.
“That is unheard of for the federal government to willing indemnify federal employees for violating state laws,” he said. Severino argues that military readiness is not affected because the personnel remains in, just not promoted, and points to falling recruiting numbers as evidence that Biden’s approach isn’t working.
The latest White House salvo came Thursday night with a dispatch from deputy press secretary Andrew Bates that says the promotion holdup will trigger a Pentagon brain drain and causes uncertainty for military members.
The House of Representatives followed that Friday morning by voting for a version of the National Defense Authorization Act that would end the department’s abortion policies and scrap diversity and inclusion programs. But National Security Council coordinator John Kirby said even before the vote that Biden almost certainly wouldn’t sign it.
The debate has been raging for months, and neither side appears ready to back down. Kirby slammed Tuberville back in March when asked by the Washington Examiner about the promotion row, saying it could have global ramifications.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Tuberville seems dug in as well.
“Since March the Pentagon has been spending our tax dollars for travel and extra paid time off for servicemembers and their kids to get abortions — something Congress neither authorized nor appropriated,” he wrote in a Fox News op-ed. “Politicizing the military would be a tragedy in any country. But it is especially tragic because the American military is the last nonpolitical institution in our public life, the most effective military ever known, and the one force above all that has deterred large-scale war since 1945.”
