The Senate is set to take its first vote in over 40 days on Tuesday, which is an important fact to keep in mind as the civilian leaders of the Navy, the Air Force, the Space Force, and the Army take to the op-ed page to accuse Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) of “putting our national security at risk.”

Let’s set aside, for the moment, the claims of these secretaries that President Joe Biden’s unilateral decision to change Pentagon policy to pay for abortion is absolutely essential to national security. Because, remember, all Biden has to do to end Tuberville’s hold on most military confirmations is to go back to the same Pentagon policy that existed before Roe v. Wade was overturned.

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Even if we grant that paying for service members to get abortions suddenly became critical to national security, Tuberville does not have the amazing powers that Democrats claim he does to halt all military nominations completely.

The reality of Senate procedure is that once the Armed Services Committee approves a nomination, that nomination is automatically placed on the Senate’s executive calendar. At that point, any senator can make a motion to proceed to consideration of that nomination. This motion only requires a simple majority (typically 51 senators) to pass.

Now at that point, a senator can filibuster the nomination. But in 2013, the Democrats changed the Senate rules so that all filibusters of nominations can also be ended by a simple majority vote. Senate rules allow 30 hours of debate after a motion to end a filibuster passes, but that rule was changed in 2019 to just two hours for military nominees.

In other words, if all the military nominations that Tuberville is holding are so critical to the defense of our nation, Schumer could have been popping one out every two hours for the past 40 days.

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Now if we assign the Senate an eight-hour workday and five workdays a week (I realize it is a tall order to make Democratic senators work a typical working schedule), that means Democrats could have cleared (27 workdays times eight-hour days divided by two hours per nominee) 108 military nominees in the time they took off since their last Senate vote — and that assumes Senate Democrats can’t work overtime or on weekends.

So I’m sorry to the officers who have been inconvenienced by Tuberville’s holds, but if these nominations were really an issue of national security, maybe Senate Democrats could have skipped even just one day of their August vacation to confirm even just one of them.