Former President Trump pushed a hot button inside the GOP when he criticized the six-week abortion ban signed into law by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”
Trump takes credit for putting judges on the Supreme Court who voted to end a half century of constitutional protection for abortion. But now Trump is saying flat out that unless Republicans opposed to abortion “come up with the right number of weeks” after which to restrict abortion, they are going to lose elections.
Trump concluded that many Republican politicians “speak very inarticulately about this subject.”
At that moment, Trump should have held up a picture of Sen. Tommy Tuberville. On the Senate floor last week Tuberville failed to get close to articulating why a woman in the military doesn’t deserve to choose an abortion if she wants it.
He can’t explain why his personal view on abortion gives him the right to block hundreds of military promotions, harming the U.S. military by preventing commanders from putting warriors in the right location to do their best work.
He keeps repeating that his goal is to force the Pentagon to end its health care policy of compensating female servicemembers who travel out of the states where they are stationed for abortions. But Tuberville has fumbled every attempt to justify his targeting of the military in his divisive, culture-war fight over abortion.
All he can say is that he doesn’t think blocking promotions affects the military’s readiness to fight.
That weak thinking was shot down long ago.
“Any claim that holding up the promotions of top officers does not directly damage the military is wrong — plain and simple,” the Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force wrote in an unprecedented op-ed in the Washington Post earlier this month.
Tuberville’s failed attempt to explain himself looks even worse because he has never served in the military.
Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.), who has served in the military, has called him out: “[Tuberville] mentioned that these are not officers who are warfighters, that these are desk jockeys in the Pentagon, but the reality is these folks have been warfighters for 20 years,” Garcia said. “These are the folks that I flew with in combat operations…they’re looking to continue that service, and they’re being compelled not to because of Senator Tuberville.”
Christine Wormuth, the secretary of the Army, also tore apart Tuberville’s weak attempt to justify interfering with military operations.
She told CNN that an officer denied promotion by Tuberville’s stunt is being distracted from his military duties, because without his scheduled promotion he can’t deal with his family’s housing, his wife’s work and his children’s schooling.
Wormuth explained the case of one officer, whose delay in moving to his new post and into proper housing meant he could not move his aging mother. Tuberville has left the officer in limbo, emotionally upset and paying $10,000 a month to keep the aging parent in an assisted living facility.
How does Tuberville explain that? He can’t.
How does he explain that a majority of Republicans and Democrats support abortion rights? Seventy-three percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal six weeks into pregnancy, including 88 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans, according to a July poll taken by the Associated Press.
Tuberville can’t speak to that reality.
He is, however, winning hosannas and plaudits from far-right, pro-life activists and getting invitations to appear on conservative talk shows to rail against what he calls the “woke military.”
It wasn’t that long ago that congressional Republicans criticized anyone who did not stand up for the military as unpatriotic, unworthy of the sacrifices made by the 1 percent of Americans in uniform, and willing to fight to protect the U.S.
It used to be that Republicans revered the military. They lambasted Vietnam War protesters who disrespected soldiers returning from the war.
Now Tuberville is treating the military with contempt. He reduces America’s fighters to powerless pawns in a political fight over abortion.
Tuberville’s lack of respect for people in uniform sinks lower than the loathing Trump once expressed for a military hero, the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Trump mocked McCain for being captured and enduring five years as a Prisoner of War in Vietnam. He trashed McCain as only a “war hero because he was captured” and added, “I like people who weren’t captured.”
Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy achieved a sizeable following during the Red Scare by baselessly accusing many Americans of being communist agents or sympathizers. It wasn’t until McCarthy started hurling these baseless libels at members of the U.S. military that public opinion began to turn against him. Republicans shut down his investigations and consigned him to infamy. His very name turned into a pejorative, “McCarthyism.”
The tipping point was the famous Army-McCarthy hearings, in which Army lawyer Joseph Welch famously said to McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
To repurpose Welch’s question for 2023: “Have you no sense of decency, Senator Tuberville?”
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.