Biden ‘Losing Credibility by the Day’ Claiming Tuberville Hurts Military: Senator
As President Joe Biden accuses pro-life Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) of undermining national security, one of Tuberville’s colleagues shot back that it is Biden’s social engineering and extreme abortion advocacy that have weakened the armed forces and “eviscerated” the law.
Senator Tuberville placed a hold on the Senate practice of approving batches of military promotions at the same time, until President Biden rescinds a policy forcing taxpayers to fund the travel of servicewomen seeking to have an abortion — a policy never submitted to, nor approved by, Congress. Biden lashed out at Tuberville during a speech at the National Archives Thursday night, claiming his life-affirming stand “is harming military readiness, security, leadership, and troop morale.”
“All Tommy Tuberville is doing is standing up for the law,” Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Thursday. The federal government cannot use taxpayer funds for abortion, nor carry out abortions at federal facilities under 10 U.S. Code § 1093, but after the Supreme Court ruled the Constitution contains no right to abortion, Biden tested the boundaries of the law.
At President Biden’s direction, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is “trying to create this too-cute-by-half loophole to get around the letter of the law” and “eviscerate the spirit of the law,” Senator Lee told Perkins. Tuberville’s opposition to federally funded is an area where “most Americans still agree … overwhelmingly we shouldn’t be using government funds” to pay for abortion. Polls have consistently shown a majority of Americans oppose taxpayer-funded abortion, at home or abroad.
Biden announced the measure in the wake of last summer’s Dobbs decision, which held Roe v. Wade erred in 1973 when it discovered, for the first time, an unalienable right to abortion in the shadows of the U.S. Constitution. At the time, the administration presented abortion as a perk of military service, claiming through Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough that “pregnant veterans and VA beneficiaries deserve to have access to [abortion] when they need it most. That’s what our nation owes them.” But Biden offered similar travel benefits to the unemployed, signing an executive order last summer instructing the secretary of Health and Human Services to “consider actions to advance” abortion, including funding the travel of pregnant welfare recipients “through Medicaid for patients traveling across [s]tate lines for” an abortion.
Biden presides over “an administration that has pledged allegiance to killing the unborn,” said Perkins.
For opposing such extremism, “Tommy Tuberville should be rewarded,” said Lee. “He should be praised, not attacked.”
Senator Tuberville’s unanimous consent hold on general and flag officer nominations, which went into effect March 8, slows but does not ban the promotion of officers. Rather than approving all such promotions in a batch, senators can approve each of the approximately 250 affected officers individually. “It only takes a couple hours per nominee. We could knock these out one [by] one, but Chuck Schumer doesn’t want to do that,” Lee revealed. That confirms Senator Tuberville’s account of Democratic inaction, who said he had only one 10-minute phone conversation with Secretary Austin since last December. The Biden administration has “made absolutely no effort to find a compromise in our situation,” he told The Daily Signal in June. Democrats seem to enjoy “using Tuberville as a whipping boy too much” to give it up, Lee told Perkins. If Biden would back down from his decision to compel government-funded abortion travel, “We could lift these holds, get these people confirmed immediately, like today.”
Biden is “more interested in taking unborn human life and using government resources to facilitate that than he is focused on military readiness,” said Lee. “They are a whole lot more about being woke than they are about being lethal.”
Such words could put Lee in the crosshairs. On Thursday, Biden also claimed without proof that Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) “fell for Russian propaganda” over a two-year-old tweet stating that the U.S. military has been “emasculated” on Biden’s watch. “Where the H--l?” Biden asked, trailing off.
Among Biden’s first acts as president in January 2021, he allowed people who identify as transgender to serve in the U.S. military and obtain transgender procedures to chemically emasculate themselves at taxpayer expense.
In June, the Army expanded its “Future Soldier Preparatory Course,” a pre-boot camp fitness program to facilitate the enormous number of recruits who are physically unable to meet the military’s physical standards. The Biden administration lowered the physical requirements for female and older members of the armed forces last March. The Biden administration has instituted videos and other training materials instructing soldiers to use such soldiers’ preferred pronouns and instructing 66,000 military children in transgender ideology and critical race theory in schools operated by the U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA).
Biden also attempted to expel enlisted men and women who refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine, which has been linked to a rise in myocarditis among young men age 18-25.
In step with Democratic initiatives to insert social issues into the U.S. military, recruitment has plunged. The Army announced in June it fell 15,000 soldiers short of ifs recruitment goals. Continued recruitment challenges, which have coincided with Biden’s term in office, pose a “grave risk to national security in an era of great-power competition,” said Navy Admiral James G. Stavridis (Ret.), who served as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the Obama-Biden administration.
The administration has stepped up efforts to pin the blame for the recruitment mess on Tuberville. “The senator’s action and the failure on the part of the 48 Republican senators to do something about it are dangerous. They are harming our military readiness. They’re undermining national security, and they’re hurting troop morale. And tonight, President Biden is going to make that clear,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Thursday.
But the senator said the standoff comes down to Biden’s intransigence over his unapproved military abortion policy. “I’ve said all along that I will drop my hold on unanimous consent under only two conditions: Democrats can follow the law or change the law. This is not too much to ask,” wrote Tuberville in June.
Washington Democrats may also target Tuberville, because his actions have emboldened others in Congress to take pro-life legislative action, especially concerning the military. “Because of his stand, I think we got a very good National Defense Authorization Act out of the House,” said Perkins.
“Courage breeds courage,” Perkins concluded.
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.