WASHINGTON — The Senate is likely to vote this week to confirm the Marine Corps’ second-in-command after the service branch’s commandant, Gen. Eric Smith, was hospitalized due to a medical emergency on Sunday.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., facing fresh attacks over his military holds, is trying to force a floor vote on the nomination, while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer privately told Democrats he’ll bring up the nomination along with two others this week, a Senate source said.
Tuberville told reporters Tuesday that Smith’s unexpected health issues have caused him to reconsider his hold on the nomination of Lt. Gen Christopher Mahoney to be the Marine Corps’ assistant commandant.
“Just on that one,” Tuberville said, adding he won’t lift his blockade of hundreds of other senior military promotions until the Pentagon reverses its new abortion policy.
“If they move the policy back, then we’ll drop ‘em all,” the senator said.
Mahoney’s nomination was submitted in July, and he likely would already have been confirmed if not for Tuberville’s hold he put in place in protest of the Defense Department’s policy allowing for service members to be reimbursed for travel expenses if they go to another state for an abortion.
Tuberville’s tactic to try and force a vote on Mahoney, called filing a cloture petition, is rarely used by the minority, given it’s almost always the prerogative of the majority leader, Schumer, to decide what goes to the floor and when. Tuberville used this same tactic in September to force Schumer into bringing up votes on members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But Tuberville confirmed Tuesday that he had secured the 16 signatures needed to force the procedural vote on Mahoney’s nomination. And he suggested that Schumer now may decide to bring the nomination up himself in an effort to avoid the precedent of the minority taking over the floor.
“Schumer will take it to himself to bring him up and try to take credit for it,” Tuberville said. “I’m sure he’s gonna point at me of holding everything back.”
During a closed-door lunch, Schumer told rank-and-file Democrats that he plans to file cloture Tuesday on three top military nominations, including the Marine Corps’ assistant commandant, the Senate source said.
The Middle East “crisis that we have makes it even more apparently that Republicans themselves should get Tuberville to back off what he is doing now more than ever,” Schumer told reporters after the lunch. “What happened with the Marine Corps commandant shows just the reason we should — we don’t know who the next person is who might get ill or whatever.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also reiterated his opposition to Tuberville’s military holds.
“I’m sure you remember that I said this was a bad idea quite a while ago. I still think it’s a bad idea and particularly applied to people who don’t make policy,” McConnell told reporters. “And so I have been among those trying to convince Sen. Tuberville to express his opposition some other way, by people who actually make policy as opposed to our military heroes.”
At an event on Friday, Gen. Smith said, because of the holds, he was filling the roles of both the Marine Corps commandant and assistant commandant — “two full-time jobs filled by one person,” he said, pointing to himself.
“I am still doing both of those jobs and using my staff the best I can to fill in where the assistant commandant would normally be full time,” Smith said at the Military Reporters and Editors Conference, “because I simply can’t be at two places at once.”
Two days later, Smith suffered an apparent heart attack, according to multiple news outlets. The Marine Corps said Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, a three-star general, was stepping in to perform the duties of commandant.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a member of the Armed Services Committee, said Smith’s medical absence could be a lengthy one and that it underscores the dangers of Tuberville’s holds.
“My heart and thoughts are with Gen. Smith and I hope for his speedy recovery, but there is the possibility that he may not be returning for a while. And the potential as well for an absence in the commandant position just re-emphasizes how the Tuberville hold is a desperate threat to our national security,” Blumenthal told reporters.
“So I’m just really frustrated and angry that this hold is continuing,” he said, adding that he is pushing for the Senate to take up a temporary workaround to Tuberville’s holds.
Tuberville’s holds on more than 300 high-level military promotions do not prohibit them from being taken up for a vote. It just dramatically slows down the process for each and every nominee he’s put a hold on.
Democrats have largely dismissed calls from Republicans to consider the promotions one by one, saying they should be done in batches, and that doing them individually is not tenable.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
