Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) prefers being called Coach rather than Senator. This is largely because he is not a career politician and never planned on becoming one. Before being a senator, he was a football coach. In fact, he had been named “Coach of the Year” multiple times and ultimately retired in 2016 as one of the top 50 most-winning football coaches of all time. He went on to join ESPN as part of their broadcast staff. But Coach Tuberville was concerned about the way the country was headed. He saw how it was straying from the country his father served faithfully on the beaches of Normandy during World War II (WWII). He decided to compete in the new arena of politics and ran for the U.S. Senate. He became Alabama’s senior senator in 2021.
Throughout Coach’s campaign, he shared his conviction of protecting life in the womb by saying, “I will fight to protect the sanctity of every human life because future generations may very well look back at the current wave of infanticide sweeping across our nation as this generation’s holocaust.” Politicians often espouse such views. Coach Tuberville has been able to show his sincerity through recent circumstances.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the made-up “right” to an abortion, the Biden Administration has implemented its radical abortion policy through every means possible. In June 2022, the Department of Defense (DoD) claimed that the ruling would “have significant implications … for the readiness of the Force.” For months in the Senate, pro-life senators asked Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to further expound on the DoD’s claims. Their requests for further information went ignored.
Fast forward five months, and the Secretary finally decided to share with pro-life senators the DoD’s plan to fund extra time off, travel, and additional expenses for service members and dependents seeking elective abortions. It was in this very meeting that Coach Tuberville shared he would place a “hold” on all DoD nominees if it implemented this new rule. He made this commitment to rebuke the Administration’s attempt to circumvent the legislative branch to enact policy.
Unfortunately, Secretary Lloyd Austin did not heed Coach’s warning and went on to implement the policy. But Coach Tuberville has proven himself to be a man of his word as well as a man of his conviction. He has held every DoD nominee since. For a whopping eight times, Coach has had to stand on the Senate floor to hold the line while senators like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) deride him and try to advance the Administration’s abortion extremism.
We are grateful for Coach Tuberville’s stand for the unborn. There are a few important things to remember here. Coach Tuberville did not—as Sen. Warren and other pro-abortion senators have claimed—radicalize the DoD. The Biden Administration threw the first blow by using the DoD to expand abortion access on demand. Coach warned the Secretary that he would hold DoD nominees if the DoD proceeded to violate the law, and the DoD decided to ignore his warning. Another accusation that has been thrown at the Senator is, “You are hurting the military by slowing down nominations.” However, when you look at the facts, there is little basis for this claim. Consider the ratio when Coach Tuberville’s father was serving in WWII—one general for every 6,000 troops. Now there is one general for every 1,400 troops. Moreover, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) can bring any DoD nomination to the floor for a vote. Coach Tuberville is doing nothing more than holding true to his word to protect the unborn and providing accountability to unelected bureaucrats who are trying to ram through radical abortion policy that could never pass through the legislature.
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