Tuberville ending hold on 'most' Pentagon nominees amid pressure: 'We need to get them promoted'

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) recently signaled he'd be willing to end his months-long blockade of most high-ranking military leadership nominees following an intense public pressure campaign.

Since early 2023, Tuberville had used Senate rules to implement a blanket hold on more than 300 promotions to senior Pentagon posts out of protest of the Pentagon's policy of paying for service members' travel costs to obtain abortions if they lived in states that outlaw the procedure. But CNN reports the Alabama senator is now willing to relent on "most" of his blockade and instead evaluate promotions on a case-by-case basis.

"This started out as, obviously, abortion overreach and those things. Now, since we’ve had all this time, we’ve had different groups across Washington, DC, and the country that have evaluated all these military appointees," Tuberville said. "This is not a private moving to a sergeant and getting one more stripe. This is people that are running our military... We need to get them promoted."

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Tuberville has been under intense pressure from both sides of the aisle to confirm military promotions, particularly in recent weeks. Earlier this month, several Republican senators waged an hours-long battle in the late night and early morning hours in an attempt to get the nominees confirmed, only to be stymied by both Tuberville and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah).

According to CNN, both Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans had been mulling a temporary rules change that would have allowed senators to circumvent Tuberville's hold and confirm the nominees all at once. This may have been what prompted Tuberville's recent change of heart, who said he is now "very much for getting the promotions over with."

"I’m going to sit down and talk to a couple of people on the Democratic side and see what they think, because they’ve done some of the same things, they’ve looked at a lot of these people too, and I think at the end of the day, some of these upper echelon people should be individually brought through a nomination process, and not just ramrodded through," Tuberville said.

"I want to get as many done as possible," he added.

READ MORE: 'Like a car wreck on the interstate': GOP senators wage late-night battle with Tuberville over military