The Alabama Republican senator Tommy Tuberville is jeopardising US national security by blocking military leadership confirmations in protest of Pentagon policy on abortion, Joe Biden and the US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, said on Thursday.
Speaking to reporters in Finland, where he attended meetings after the Nato summit in Lithuania, Biden said he would talk to Tuberville if he thought there was any prospect he would change his “ridiculous” position.
“He’s jeopardising US security by what he’s doing,” the president said. “I expect the Republican party to stand up – stand up – and do something about it. It’s in their power to do that … they’ve got to stand up and be counted. That’s how it ends.”
The conservative-dominated US supreme court removed the federal right to abortion last year. Tuberville, a former football coach now a supporter of Donald Trump on the far right of the Republican party, mounted his obstruction effort earlier this year.
He is seeking the end of Department of Defense policy that provides paid time off and covers travel costs for servicewomen and dependents in need of abortion services.
The effect of Tuberville’s block became strikingly evident this week, when the US Marine Corps found itself without a permanent commander for the first time in 164 years, since before the civil war.
The Pentagon has said more than 650 leadership positions could be vacant by the end of the year.
Biden’s secretary of defense, the retired army general Lloyd Austin, told CNN: “This is a national security issue. It’s a readiness issue. And we shouldn’t kid ourselves, I think any member of the Senate armed services committee knows that.”
Austin added: “I don’t have an abortion policy, I have an access to non-covered reproductive healthcare policy … and I think that’s an important policy.
“One in five of my troops … is a woman and our women provide tremendous value to this force, and I think we need to do everything we can to take care of them.”
Earlier this week, Gen Charles Brown Jr, Joe Biden’s nominee for chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told a congressional committee: “We will lose talent because of these challenges.”
Brown’s own confirmation could be held up. The current chair of the joint chiefs, Gen Mark Milley, is due to step down in October.
In Finland, Biden said: “The idea that we don’t have a chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the idea that we have all these promotions that are in abeyance right now … the idea that we’re injecting into fundamental foreign policy decisions what is in fact a debate on social policy issues, is bizarre … it’s totally irresponsible, in my view.”
Tuberville is also under fire for having shown reluctance to denounce white nationalism, a position which this week prompted the author Steven King to say the senator “gives new meaning to the word idiot”.
Like Austin, Gen Brown is African American. Austin told CNN Brown was “selected by the president not solely because he is African American. He is a really, really good officer and a great fighter pilot … I think he’s the right guy at the right time for this job.”
Tuberville has told Politico his objection to the Pentagon policy is “not just about abortion” but “about dictating from the White House. Being a dictator, we don’t need dictators. You can’t dictate a law, it’s supposed to go through us.”
According to Politico, Biden sees Tuberville as a profitable campaign-trail target, calling Tuberville “the former football coach from Alabama, who was a better coach than he’s a senator”.
Tuberville told Politico Biden “was a better senator than a president”.
John Wahl, chair of the Alabama Republican party, told the same site Tuberville’s Pentagon protest “does not hurt him at all” politically and is “good representation for the people of Alabama and it’s the right policy for any senator”.
The Democratic Virginia congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA case officer, told MSNBC, Tuberville’s protest was “irresponsible”.
“It’s outrageous and it needs to stop,” Spanberger said. “It is dangerous to our nation, and to our readiness.”
