Sen. Tommy Tuberville keeps breaking his promises to support veterans and the military

During his 2020 Senate campaign, Alabama Republican Tommy Tuberville ran on a commitment to support the military and veterans. But as he receives bipartisan criticism for unilaterally blocking promotions for hundreds of service members in protest of a Defense Department policy on access to reproductive health care, a new Washington Post report on Wednesday says he has not kept a key campaign promise to help Alabama veterans.

“The first role of our government is to protect its citizens and that is why I will support a strong and robust military,” Tuberville said on his campaign site. “I know we must provide our Armed Forces with the tools and resources they need to protect Americans at home and abroad. Alabamians are proud and we stand with our military and our Veterans who have given so much for our nation.”

Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler examined a March 9, 2020, Tuberville Facebook video called “Veterans First” in which the former football coach accused his primary opponent, former Sen. Jeff Sessions, of abandoning military veterans and pledged: “I stand with our veterans and I’m going to donate every dime I make, while I’m Washington, D.C., to the veterans of the state of Alabama. Folks, they deserve it. They deserve it a lot more than most of us.”

Kessler found no evidence that Tuberville has donated money to Alabama veterans since taking office in 2021, personally or through his tax-exempt foundation.

In response to questions from the Post, Tuberville spokesperson Steven Stafford did not deny that the senator had not kept that pledge and blamed it on an audit of Tuberviille’s foundation.

“My understanding is that during the audit, the Foundation paused most of its activities,” Stafford told the newspaper. “The audit was recently completed successfully, and the Foundation is resolving its longstanding problems, resuming its activities, and Coach is resuming his work with the Foundation to help veterans in need.”

The report comes days after the progressive group VoteVets launched an ad campaign in Alabama criticizing Tuberville for placing holds on hundreds of military promotions, using his power as a senator to block a quick vote and denying those service members positions and the accompanying pay raises.

“For months, one lone senator, Tommy Tuberville, who never served in uniform himself, has held hostage hundreds of military assignments,” the ad’s narrator says, “just to force his MAGA social agenda on women in the ranks, freezing all promotions for top military posts to the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, leaving mission critical positions to go vacant.”

Tuberville has said he will keep blocking military promotions unless the Defense Department ends a policy that provides service members with time off and expense reimbursement if they need to seek reproductive health care.

The U.S. Marine Corps has been without a confirmed commandant for more than a week as a direct result of Tuberville’s actions.

On July 13, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told CNN that Tuberville was jeopardizing national security with his actions.

“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 told the network.

While the Alabama Republican has not kept his promises to most who serve or served, he has repeatedly stood up for one segment of the military: white nationalists.

In recent months, he repeatedly attacked efforts by the Defense Department to screen white nationalists out of the military and disputed that white nationalists are necessarily racist.

“My opinion of a white nationalist, if somebody wants to call them white nationalist, to me is an American, it’s an American,” he told CNN on July 10. “Now if that white nationalist is a racist, I’m totally against anything that they want to do. Because I am 110% against racism.”

The next day, after he was criticized over his remarks, Tuberville told reporters, “White nationalists are racists,” the Washington Post reported.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.