One, lone Republican in the Senate is actively undermining the military readiness of the United States of America as the country currently finds itself in the midst of some of the most intense and active global crises in recent memory: The wars between Israel and Hamas and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In this incredibly important and precarious moment, we have an unprecedented absence of the key Pentagon officials needed to administer U.S. armed forces. And that is all thanks to literally one man.
He is the embodiment of everything that has broken down about American politics in this MAGA era.
You probably know him: Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville. Tuberville is using the arcane rules of the Senate to single-handedly block about 400 nominations to key military vacancies in a hopeless crusade to get the Biden administration to restrict abortion access for service members. On Thursday, Senate leadership was able to get a few key nominations through, including a second-in-command to relieve the commandant of the Marine Corps, who is currently hospitalized after working 18-hour days to cover the extra work left behind by Tuberville’s blockade.
But getting around Tuberville’s blockade is time consuming. It would take months of around-the-clock voting to circumvent him and confirm all the vacant positions. And to be clear, these are not controversial nominees. Each vote, if it eventually makes it to the floor, garners near-unanimous support. And even Tuberville’s Republican colleagues have lost their patience.
On Wednesday night, we witnessed a remarkable scene on the Senate floor when Senate Republicans tried to bring over 60 nominations — and Sen. Tuberville individually blocked each one. And Tuberville’s obstinance led to some of the most raw, honest, political legislating that I have seen in a while.
I think it is important to put Tuberville’s blockade in context. You might say to yourself, ‘this guy is just one crank.’ And he is. But he is the embodiment of everything that has broken down about American politics in this MAGA era. The defining feature of Donald Trump and MAGA-ism is a belief that Trump and Trump’s base and Trump’s allies should be in charge, whether or not they have the votes to do so. It is sheer hostility to democracy and belief in rule by a minority faction.
Trump’s political ascendancy started because he won an election with 2 million fewer votes than his opponent, thanks to the Electoral College, which allowed him to rule over a country despite losing an election in any other sense.
A single U.S. senator has brought the personnel of the most powerful military to a grinding halt so that he can impose his particular hard-right, anti-abortion politics on the armed services.
The larger Republican Party apparatus around him is similarly committed to minority rule, with states like Wisconsin, North Carolina and Ohio using their power to gerrymander themselves into a position where they can override the will of the voters. And once they have accumulated that power, they still try to limit the democratic process. We are seeing this in Wisconsin with the GOP effort to impeach the newly elected Supreme Court justice. In Ohio, Republicans have gone to extraordinary lengths to intervene in the November 7 abortion referendum.
The ultimate culmination of the anti-democratic Republican movement was the 2020 election and its aftermath. It was no longer an abstraction. It was put into practice. Donald Trump resoundingly lost re-election by 7 million votes. And then he attempted to overturn that loss with the first attempted coup in American history.
Since then, it has only gotten worse. The coup mentality has become the dominant ethos of the Republican Party. It is what caused the unprecedented speakership crisis, when this small faction deposed Kevin McCarthy, having extracted a promise from him during the 15 ballots to make him speaker that one person could bring up this vote effectively to fire him. A tiny minority of the Republicans in the House was able to throw the entire chamber into chaos for three weeks out of personal vanity.
As the Daily Beast reports, at least one of the eight Republicans who were able to collectively oust McCarthy did it for the attention. According to a former senior aide for South Carolina’s Rep. Nancy Mace, “She saw the votes on the board and said, ‘F— it, I’m just gonna vote for it just so I can go on TV and talk about it.’”
That brings us to the Senate, where the logical conclusion of this anti-democratic principle is playing out. A single U.S. senator has brought the personnel of the most powerful military to a grinding halt so that he can impose his particular hard-right, anti-abortion politics on the armed services. He does not have the votes to do so in the normal course of business, so instead he is taking the entire Pentagon hostage.
We have been waiting for Republicans to do something about it since he is one of their own. On Wednesday, they finally reached their breaking point.
The question on the mind of many senators seemed to be, how did we get to this point? And the answer is we got here because Donald Trump anointed Tommy Tuberville as his choice in the primary. That is why Tommy Tuberville is a U.S. senator. He was a retired college football couch who was hand-picked for the role, and the rest of the party just followed along. So it does not matter how few votes you have. As long as you are close to Donald Trump, as long as you have his support, you can impose your will on the entire country.
This is an adapted excerpt from the November 2 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).