Concern is mounting that hot war with China may not be many years away. We’re already in a cold war despite occasional efforts to effect a thaw, such as with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s recent bowing and scraping in Beijing.
Republicans and conservatives worry more than Democrats do that the Pentagon is distracted by race and gender ideology from a proper focus on winning or deterring wars. But one of Capitol Hill’s most conservative Republicans is making matters worse just when the military needs to be as sharp as possible.
BIDEN RIDICULES TUBERVILLE'S 'RIDICULOUS' HOLD ON PENTAGON NOMINATIONS
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is blocking appointments to hundreds of military vacancies. Senior promotions are stalled. The Marine Corps doesn’t have a commandant!
Tuberville won’t budge until the Defense Department stops paying expenses for military personnel traveling to get abortions. He’s also fighting to prevent Colorado from being chosen as headquarters for U.S. Space Command, as the Air Force and Space Force recommended, instead of Alabama.
Few are happy with Tuberville’s intransigence, which President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) alike condemn.
Senate rules allow any senator to demand a full debate on legislation rather than waving it through. It would take every work hour until the end of the year to clear all outstanding promotions. There’d be no time for anything else, such as appropriations.
Such nonsense, with a single elected official stymieing agencies on unrelated matters, prompts trans-Atlantic transplants like me to yearn occasionally for the brutal efficiency of a parliamentary system. It gets things done.
The executive is not separated from the legislature but emerges within it. They reinforce each other. When a party commands a majority in parliament, it forms the government. A single member can block legislation only if he or she thus tips the government into a minority in the legislature. Single malcontents cannot thwart the will of 99 others.
This is why Margaret Thatcher, for example, was able to get so much done in the 1980s. Having won landslide majorities, she could, blessed relief, demolish the sclerotic labor laws that put businesses over a union barrel and turned Britain into the poor man of Europe. A parliamentary system means the government voters choose can take decisive action.
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But there is a big problem with this, too. It means one government’s reforms can be swiftly reversed when the pendulum of popularity swings back to the other party. The country tacks and veers, sometimes wildly. The tyranny of the majority means minority concerns can be swept aside. Indeed, they are set aside as a matter of routine. If you’re in the minority, you get to speak, but you don’t get a say.
The U.S. Constitution, with its checks and balances, was written in part to prevent such a thing, although it was also written as it was to prevent a minority of one, a king, from going to war. Now, one senator, not a king, is making decisions that affect the nation’s ability to win and deter war. At least, that is what his critics contend. This wasn’t quite, to put it mildly, what the founders had in mind.