https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66745271
Military leaders claim Tommy Tuberville's actions are a national security risk, but the senator is defiant.
Military leaders claim Tommy Tuberville's actions are a national security risk, but the senator is defiant.
He will NOT be appointing officials for an organization that kills people until the government stops allowing abortions. Just let the logic sink in for a while. The guy's a POS, and nobody should be surprised that a single issue candidate is only interested in a single issue.
Not to mention that because of the standing rules of the Senate, all you have to do is send an email saying you’re filibustering and any one person can bring to halt something all the other 99 Senators just want to move on to the next topic.
Literally this guy stands alone on this and the brain dead rules allow him and him alone to bring it all to a halt.
And the rules won't change because most of the Senate loves that someone else can halt things, take the heat, and then they won't have to deal with unpopular decisions.
Not in this case, but they're literally willing to force the military fuck over career professionals so that they can keep their cushy plausible deniability.
Well no, they could hold a cloture vote any time on every nominee. They need 67 senators to vote to end the filibuster.
They haven’t forced cloture because enough republicans support him in the background and wouldn’t vote for it.
They could also change the rules with a simple majority and do what needs done, but that's going to be a last resort desperate measure.
So many self-serving rules. And honestly, if we held any of them accountable to their campaign promises we might actually have a functioning congress. But here we are.
This is the real problem, and it's infuriating. Not only because of the way it stops the Senate from doing so many things, but because so many people now believe it's how the filibuster had always worked. And so people hate it.
But, in fact, the filibuster, in its original form, is a powerful tool the minority can use to make its voice heard and perhaps even effect change. It needs to come back - make Tuberville stand up and talk for hours on end for each of these appointees he opposes. Make McTurtle totter to center stage and wheeze for as long as he can the next time he wants to block a Democrat President's Supreme Court Judge.
I'll bring the popcorn.
...in an effort to force the Biden administration's defense department to rescind a policy of leave and expense reimbursement for service members and their dependents traveling for abortions.
I can only assume this is for bases that don't have the means to just do it themselves. I was a surgical tech in the Air Force, and every hospital I was stationed at provided abortion services.
The VA does, too.
Cuz abortion services ARE FUCKING HEALTHCARE. You want to destroy a service member's mission readiness? Give them a kid they can't support.
You don't want to pay service members to travel for abortions? Fine. Fine. Equip and staff every single military base with an OBGYN clinic w/ surgical capabilities. Don't want to give them med leave to recover from an abortion? Fucking FINE. Schedule a uteroscopy and biopsy along with it so we can throw in a cancer screen, nab any polyps, ablate any endometriosis, etc; and give them extra leave for those, cuz damn was that one a bleeder! She'll need extra time to recover for sure!!
Do the same at VAs, cuz on federal facilities, state law can eat a bag of dicks.
Then declare a state of emergency in the Y'all Qaeda infested regions of the US on the basis of denied healthcare leading to the current and worsening humanitarian crisis; and in doing so, enabling the VA to provide abortion services to non-veterans under section §1784 of title 38, United States Code.
This dystopian GOP shit is maddening. We need to stop trying to argue with it, and start finding ways to just work around it. Fuck em.
Working around the GOP's bullshit is a short-term solution. They need to be permanently removed from power.
Then we need to do the short term solution while we work on the long term solution. I'm kind of sick of one side trying to keep it a fair fight. GOP politicians have all shown they don't care about that and will employ any means necessary to get their policies enacted while doing everything they can to disrupt the policies on the other side
Do the same at VAs
The problem with that is that it may have been legal at the place it was done, but states would absolutely place police next door to wait for those women to come out. They already have laws that criminalize women who go out of state
How is that legal? I thought states can only enforce laws that are broken in their own jurisdiction? Interstate would make it a federal matter, no? (In regards to women going out of state)
It's almost certainly unconstitutional, but there's not specific case law so it has to be litigated to know for sure. So there needs to be people charged who have the means and willingness to go through several years of trials and appeals. And they have to maintain that motivation for a long time - some cases drag on for a decade or longer.
The point isn't to make it illegal forever, it's to scare people and organizations without the resources to engage in a legal fight to stop supporting interstate care for the next three or five or ten years.
Tuberville is a complete imbecile. That’s not a baseless ad-hominem attack - he’s established a solid, bipartisan reputation in the Senate as the densest, dumbest motherfucker who’s been elected to that legislative body in a long, long time.
Notice that the comment you're responding to specifically qualifies him as the dumbest person in the Senate. There's a lot more competition for "dumbest member of Congress" in the house. Boebert is still a representative (for now at least), after all.
Don't forget meat puppet Senator Ted "Cancun" Cruz!
While Bobert probably has a singular brain cell randomly impacting her skull forcing a vomit of nonsense from her mouth. Cruzy boy barely classifies as sapient even after he's been loaded up with whatever bullshit he's meant to unload into people ear cannals.
The difference is that Raphael Cruz is a Princeton and Harvard educated attorney who understands that he's unloading bullshit as part of a political grift. Boebert barely got her G.E.D. and truly believes every idiotic word that comes out of her mouth.
Well, in point of fact, Cruz actually appears to be somewhat intelligent, based on transcripts of private conversations he’s had. It’s just that he’s an asshole who had pretty much zero integrity. And everyone knows it.
People keep naming others, but after hearing him say things like we don't want poets in the military and whit supremacy isn't racist, I think he's so fucking stupid he can barely breathe. He also insists people call him Coach instead of Senator, which is also unbelievably stupid.
He should be made to apologize to trees for wasting the oxygen they’re so kind to provide us with.
We should be so lucky to have someone on the left in Congress with a political project they believed in so much that they would do something like this.
The issue is that by Senate policy, one person can throw a massive wrench in the process and grind things to a halt. Progressives typically want to do things, which cannot be done by one person throwing a hissy fit.
From the news it appears that the USA has a political system where fairly important things can be shut down by just a single person. It also appears that every time this happens that the single person is a monumental asshole. Is there any reasonable explanation for this? I am guessing no but it is still happening and fairly often....
It only seems like a monumental asshole each time. You are forgetting how many "trans people don't exist" stuff gets blocked by the courts.
I wonder how quickly Tommy Tuberville would have driven one of his sons' girlfriends to an abortion clinic if they got her pregnant in high school...
We need legislation to prevent this type of government meddling. Just like with the filibuster. Asshole.
Currently living in Alabama, I really wish there wasn’t quite so much truth in this statement.
I was stationed in Biloxi, MS for over a year and almost went insane of boredom on base. We thought "hey let's visit Mobile" once, so we did. After that we accepted dying of boredom rather than ever go back to AL.
This is where we are: military leaders claim it's a security risk. The senator (who has no military experience) doesn't care. Ironic that I am typing this on 9/11.
Congratulations, comrade. You passed the test of patriotism. Here's your gun and manifesto, we'll be sending you to confront the US army at dawn.
yes the whole nation is in jeopardy because some warmongers arent getting their promotions... if this is really the case, then the military is being mismanaged way worse than anyone knows.
we could cut those positions outright, and 10,000 others, and still be the biggest assholes on the planet.
I mean, that's true, but the actual issue is that in the system as it currently exists, the entire reason Tuberville is doing this is to create empty vacancies, in hopes of stonewalling until the Presidential election. The entire plan is literally another attempt at a coup, just looking for ways to have a Republican administration put in a bunch of Yes Men in key positions, if they're lucky enough to keep the House and win the Presidency. Having cronies in control of the military is no joke.
While we would still indeed be the biggest assholes out there, with a military that would still outmatch much of the world, the difference if that if this is continued to be allowed, there is real risk of the "biggest asshole" military on the planet being controlled by an actual dictatorship, not the dog and pony show we call a "democracy." A fascist dictatorship that wants to wipe women and minority rights off the map and take us back 100 years or more.
I'm no fan of the milquetoast wimpy Democrats who watch the Republicans break rules all the time and are unwilling to play hardball themselves, but whinging while ignoring the literal rising threat of fascism that's out there making plans to take power isn't gonna help.
So, to quote a great man, "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole."
Honestly, I think you give Tuberville way too much credit in terms of political machinations. I think he's just very, very stupid. Every sign I've seen points to that.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that Tommy Tuberville is a mstermind who conceived of, and is executing, a grand scheme. Just that someone told him to do something and he's doing it.
im not sure if you noticed, but my point is party agnostic with regards to our out of control military, both parties are complicit.
. and no, i dont believe we have to spend 1t/per to be the worlds police. we as a country suck major ballls.
Did I argue that they aren't complicit or did I point out that what's happening is literally part of a plan for an intended coup by the way more fascist of the two shitty parties?
We can suck major balls and you can still live in fucking reality where if the Republicans succeed at this, they will be using the military to root out and murder people like you and me, just because they can.
Democrats just want to be rich fuckwits above it all, but Republicans legit want to fucking hurt people, and ignoring that means you'd rather play pretend that we could just dismantle the military overnight. We can't dismantle the military industrial complex we don't have the political power. So in the meantime, let's live in fucking reality and understand our own limitations shall we, hmm? Because acting like something we literally don't have the power to do is something we should focus on while the fascists are at the gate is fucking nanners, to put it lightly.
We can be upset about more than one thing at once. Our military spending is out of control, and one person in congress should not be able to grind government functions to a hault.
OP is right, this is just a veiled attempt to maintain vacancies in the hopes of getting a republican president.
They learned from their mistakes last time, and they're going to try again later.
That's... Literally not the point. Usually you don't want your military to be controlled by people who wanna take over the government.
and no, i dont believe we have to spend 1t/per to be the worlds police. we as a country suck major ballls.
I agree with that. That money would be much better spent on universal healthcare and universal college-level education.
On the other hand, Tuberville's reasoning is insanely backward and needs to be punished.
yes the whole nation is in jeopardy because some warmongers arent getting their promotions
The whole nation is in jeopardy because these leadership positions are being held open until Trump is reelected in a rework of the Merrick Garland SC nomination. Which should be terrifying. Jan 6 failed in part because some of the military top brass (Miley) put oath before Trump.
Read up on Project 2025 if you haven't. These "unconnected events" are anything but. It's a strategy.
Man. This round of "republican or tankie" is fucking difficult. I might have to use a lifeline
The theory that as disparate political ideologies move further from the center that they get more alike past a certain point. The spectrum isn't a line, it's a horseshoe.
I'll make the argument that tankies aren't really leftists tho. They're some weird amalgam of authoritarian communists. They have more in common with fascists, but they just took a different trip to get there. It's shitty political convergence
Remember when they held up the judicial nominations under Obama, only to force through a massive number of federal judges (and three Supreme Court picks) once they had control again? You can see how they're doing the exact same thing with the military right now.
Now imagine if, on January 6th, the military was being run by MAGAts.
[Republicans intentionally mismanage something.]
You: Look how terrible the organization is!
Literally their playbook for decades. The government sucks in their hands because they make it suck, not because it's inherently ineffective. But suckers are gonna suck.
yes the whole nation is in jeopardy because some warmongers arent getting their promotions... if this is really the case, then the military is being mismanaged way worse than anyone knows.
When you refuse to fill management positions, yes, it will become even more mismanaged. Moreover, this is still messing with people's pay and families as well. You can't really cut management positions in the military and expect it to function. Our readiness will absolutely be hindered.
You can hate the army, but they're also one of the biggest suppliers of aid to other countries. Their logistics and planning help save more lives than you ever will, plus they save more lives than they actually ever take in combat.
You're no better than a Republican who just wants to shut down and obstruct without offering any actual assistance or plans to move forward. You're a child not getting their way. Are you related to the Senator as you throw a similar hissy fit?