At the Water's Edge

The myth of America First

Tommy Tuberville, the idiot who’s holding our military hostage.

As Senator Arthur Vandenburg (R-MI) once said, “politics stops at the water’s edge.” This was in 1948 during negotiations over the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Vandenburg recognized that, in order for the United States to play a meaningful and influential role on the international scene, the government needed to present a unified, bi-partisan front.

In more recent times, Republicans have not been stopped from publicly and loudly undermining the authority of Democratic presidents. In 2015, a group of Republicans, led by the execrable Tom Cotton (R-Sedition), wrote a letter to leaders in Iran warning against negotiating a nuclear deal with President Obama. (To be clear, this deal, which resulted in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was meant to curtail Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons.) In response, then Senator Harry Reid said, “Let’s be very clear: Republicans are undermining our commander-in-chief while empowering the ayatollahs.”

In the aftermath of the horrific terrorist attacks committed by Hamas over the weekend, Republicans were quick to claim that Biden had helped fund these attacks by unfreezing $6 billion in Iranian assets as part of a deal to secure the release of five American hostages. The funds were transferred from South Korea to Qatar and can only be used for humanitarian purposes. According to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, not one dollar of this money has yet been spent.

This false attack against the Biden administration comes after months of many House Republicans repeatedly siding with Vladimir Putin in his illegal war against Ukraine. (As if it needs to be said, Ukraine is our ally and Russia is our enemy—it’s really not that complicated.)

It isn’t only that these Republicans—who were willing to keep the government open on the condition that urgently needed aid to Ukraine is withheld—are promoting pro-Russian propaganda; they are undermining America’s ability to strengthen the Western alliance, protect liberal democracy, and prevent the spread of the deadly conflict.

Republicans aren’t limiting themselves to lying about the actions of Joe Biden and his administration; they are actively taking steps to impede Pres. Biden’s ability to govern in the midst of these extremely fraught and consequential foreign policy nightmares.

Senator Tuberville, (R-AL), the unqualified hack who replaced Doug Jones (thanks people of Alabama), has taken advantage of a Senate rule that allows one lone Senator to place a blanket hold on Senate nominations.

Tommy "There is no one more military than me" Tuberville, who’s been a senator for less than three years, never served in the military. Yet, he’s blocking all military nominations because he objects to the Pentagon abortion policy that grants leave and travel expenses to military personnel who have travel out of state in order to obtain abortion services.

The mere possibility that this policy will be reversed has already had a significant negative impact on military recruitment. The damage to U.S. military readiness is already appreciable.

The situation in Israel has raised the stakes significantly: We’re in the process of sending an aircraft carrier strike force to the easter Mediterranean in order to assist Israel. But the U.S. Navy does not currently have a Chief of Naval Operations. In fact, over 300 military positions remain unfilled thanks to Tuberville’s narrow, narcissistic ambitions.

It’s also possible that, like Mitch McConnell with Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Tuberville is keeping vital military positions open (I repeat, the U.S. Navy does not have a Chief of Naval Operations) in the cynical hope that Donald will win in 2024 and fill all of those vacancies with anti-democracy sycophants.

The number of protests against Tuberville’s position from high-ranking military officers and former secretaries of state is rising but Tuberville doesn’t care. And who’s going to stop him?

Also happy to do his part to be an awful American, Rand Paul (R-KY) has put a blanket hold on State Department nominees. Why? Because he wants an investigation into the origins of COVID-19. Let’s leave his insanity aside for the moment—as a result of this hold, the United States does not currently have an ambassador to Israel!

In the short-term, both Rand and Tuberville are willing to advance their own, narrow agendas in order to undermine American national security—and the security of our allies—just to make President Biden look bad. The damage they’re doing to our standing in the world, our military preparedness, and our diplomatic strength is incalculable.

The fact that either of these men has this kind of power is yet another example of how anti-democratic the institution of the Senate is. But we can’t let other Republicans off the hook. I refuse to believe there isn’t something minority leader Mitch McConnell could do to get Tuberville and Paul to drop their holds. But for some reason, McConnell is refusing to do it.

It’s time, then, for the Democratic majority to take the gloves off. If the rules as they currently exist are this wildly unfair and damaging to our very fragile democracy, change them or break them.

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I have no special knowledge of what’s happening right now in Israel and Gaza. I am not particularly knowledgeable about the region’s history. I know at some point there will be a reckoning but right now my greatest hope is that all parties who have the power to put a stop to the slaughter of innocent children, women, and men do so as quickly as humanly possible.

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Thanks to anti-Semite and white supremacist Elon Musk, Twitter has become unreliable as a source for, and even as an aggregator of, actual news. If you want to follow what’s going on, Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo, has compiled a good list of reliable sources for the most accurate, up-to-date reporting on events in Israel and Gaza: The Times of Israel; Haaretz (English language version); and Ynet.