Since February, Alabama Republican Tommy Tuberville has been using a “senatorial hold” to block personnel moves by the U.S. military that require Senate confirmation. The media and Democrats are very upset that Tuberville is “waging an unprecedented campaign” and embroiling our vital national defense policy in the culture war.
Joe Biden claims that Republicans are “injecting into fundamental foreign policy decisions what in fact is a domestic social debate on social issues is bizarre,” which is “totally irresponsible.” While I don’t know much about Tommy Tuberville, the president has it backward. It was Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, not any Republican, who broke with 45 years of policy last year by instituting effective reimbursements for elective abortions by military and dependents. It is just as true to say, probably truer, that the president is the one holding up military promotions by unilaterally trashing policy that has been in place since 1980.
One of the implications of most stories covering the military hold debate illustrates the radically rightward shift and unprecedented fanaticism of Republican politics. This, too, is backward. Biden, who supported the Hyde Amendment, a law banning federal funds to pay for abortion, from 1976-2019, is an exemplar of the hard-left cultural lurch of the modern left.
Biden had not merely gone along with the Hyde Amendment as a means of compromising with Republicans back in the ’80s and ’90s. Until the past couple of decades, the abortion debate wasn’t neatly divided by party, and Biden, purportedly a
