Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley adopted White House talking points Tuesday when she condemned Republican Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s hold on military promotions over the administration’s embrace of far-left social policy.
In a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt, the Republican presidential candidate said Tuberville’s standoff with the Pentagon over the military’s embrace of abortion and transgenderism jeopardized national security.
Tuberville placed a hold on military promotions when the Defense Department implemented a new abortion policy allowing servicemembers three weeks of paid leave and travel in pursuit of the deadly procedure. Federal law prohibits U.S. tax dollars from funding abortion.
The administration’s “new abortion policy is immoral and arguably illegal,” Tuberville said on the Senate floor in March, noting if Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “wants to change the law, he needs to go through Congress.”
Haley Stands With Mitch McConnell
Haley railed against Tuberville’s move to rip the Pentagon out of the abortion business as “shameful” and tied the senator’s effort to the military’s recruiting crisis.
“There’s got to be other ways to go about doing this,” Haley said on Hewitt’s program.
You know, I mean, in a time where our recruitment is 25 percent down and you know, 80 percent of those recruits typically come from military families, and military parents are telling their kids not to go into the military, it’s because they don’t feel like anybody’s got the military’s back.
“It’s totally wrong that the Department of Defense is doing this,” Haley added, “but have we gotten so low that this is how we have to go about stopping it?”
Haley sounds more similar to Senate Republicans who repeatedly prefer to turn a blind eye to administrative abuses than a champion for conservative voters seeking the Republican presidential nomination. While the Biden White House declares abortion a “sacred obligation” of the military, GOP Senate leaders Mitch McConnell and John Thune have similarly condemned their Republican colleague for being effective.
[READ: Senate Republicans Have A Choice: Back Tuberville Or Fail A Majority Of Americans On Abortion Again]
But it’s not only abortion that’s become one of the latest far-left projects of the Pentagon. The administration’s obsession with identity politics and pronoun policing has led the Defense Department to embrace a form of radical activism that, contrary to Haley’s comments, is the true culprit for the military’s recruitment woes. One of President Biden’s first executive orders reversed the policy of his Republican predecessor disqualifying individuals with a “history or diagnosis of gender dysphoria.” In other words, Biden reinstated trans-identified servicemembers despite disruptive treatment regimens jeopardizing military readiness.
Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, explained to reporters last month how the admission of trans-identified soldiers can require more than a year of medical interventions that slow down deployment.
“If you bring people in and you start this process, it takes months, months, and months, well over a year before you guys do the hormone transition, before you get the gender reassignment surgeries and all the stuff,” Jackson said. “During this entire time, these individuals are not deployable. They’re not deployable, so someone else is going to do a second deployment in their place during this process. That’s not fair to the other members of the military.”
Along with the president’s order also came bizarre pronoun activism alienating new recruits.
Biden Dismissed Healthy Warriors When Americas Remain Too Fat To Fight
While the White House and allies in Republican Senate leadership claim Tuberville’s hold on military promotions jeopardizes readiness and recruitment, President Biden might regret having discharged healthy servicemembers who refused an experimental vaccine.
Congress forced the Pentagon to end the coronavirus vaccine mandate in the December National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), but Secretary Austin only partially complied. During the two years that the vaccine mandate remained entirely in place, more than 8,400 were expelled for their refusal to take the shots, according to Politico. Maybe the president should order the mandate’s termination entirely and reinstate those who turned the vaccine down. Instead, Biden ripped the Space Command headquarters from Tuberville’s home state of Alabama in an act of pure political retribution.
The Army, Navy, and Air Force are expecting to miss recruitment goals this year as the administration dismissed thousands of otherwise healthy servicemembers. Most prime-age Americans, meanwhile, remain too fat to fight, with just 23 percent of those aged 17-24 eligible to enlist. Obesity is the leading disqualifier.
Nearly 1 in 5 active-duty members are already obese as the military continues to subsidize “Dip, Doritos and drinking.”
Yet Haley claims that it is Tuberville threatening military vigilance.
