Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., has warned the Senate GOP to not give in to Democrats' potential "runaround" of his constitutional authority to hold Democrats to voting on individual military confirmations, retirements, and promotions.
He has backers urging the same in the Tea Party Patriots Action group.
Tuberville reportedly had planned to announce lifting holds on all military promotions below four-star level Tuesday, but that news conference was canceled, according to Capitol Hill reports.
"Sen. Tuberville deserves our full support, full stop," Tea Party Patriots Action Chair Jenny Beth Martin wrote in a statement Tuesday. "If his Senate Republican colleagues go behind his back and make a deal with Democrats, they will be making a fateful error."
The Democrats' "end run" — as Tuberville has called it on Newsmax — is going to encourage further abuse of power by the party in the majority of the Senate on other confirmations and nominees, Tuberville, and now TPPA, warn.
"The Democrats could use this change in Senate rules to confirm liberal judges en masse," Martin's statement continued, pointing to Democrat efforts to force through judges to combat the conservative judicial confirmations under former President Donald Trump. "The major gains made by conservatives in restoring the federal judiciary during the Trump years could be wiped away in an instant."
Ultimately, just as Tuberville has long argued, the Pentagon can help its cause by not forcing unconstitutional actions on helping fund abortions with taxpayer dollars, Martin concluded.
"The most practical way to resolve this stalemate is for the Pentagon to reverse its decision to facilitate abortions, as Sen. Tuberville is demanding," the statement finished. "The Biden administration needs to focus on readiness and response, not social issues and 'owning the cons.' "
Senate Democrats are recruiting Republicans to support a rules change that would end Sen. Tuberville's monthslong push to force the Senate to bring forward military promotions individually instead of forcing multiple nominations en bloc.
Tuberville made the move against mass nominations to force the Pentagon to reverse its decision to change long-standing policy to pay for travel costs for service members and their dependents who choose to travel out of state to obtain an abortion.
The Pentagon — retaliating for the Supreme Court's overruling of Roe v. Wade to force abortion law to be decided constitutional by individual states — put that rule in place without the constitutional authorization of Congress, Tuberville has long argued.
"The only power you have in the minority in the Senate, whether you're Democrat or Republican, the only power you have to get anything on the floor is to put a hold on somebody," Tuberville told "National Report" last week. "And so that's what I did when they had this executive overreach from the White House and the Pentagon of charging taxpayers across this country with funding something to do with abortion.
"They're going around the Constitution, and if we continue to do this, we're not going to have a country."
Republicans are going to be signing a death warrant for minority authority in the Senate, according to Tuberville.
"I'm afraid we're going to have some Republicans that will vote for this to let this resolution go through — which then they can bypass me and promote everybody they want to, and then we will have no power in the Senate," Tuberville added. "I'll be shocked if it happens, but we're going to see something very unusual here."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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