What is a “hold” in the Senate? This is not a question that many casual observers of American politics would normally ask. But Tommy Tuberville, the senator from Alabama, has made it a more urgent one with his blanket hold on all key military promotions that have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Tuberville’s action, now in its seventh month, has kept hundreds of military leaders, including top officials, in limbo, doing real harm to the nation’s armed forces.
As Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro told CNN, Tuberville is “playing Russian roulette with the very lives of our service members by denying them the opportunity to actually have the most experienced combat leaders in those positions to lead them in times of peace and in times of combat.” The three top service secretaries wrote jointly in The Washington Post earlier this month, decrying what Tuberville is doing.
No specific rule created the Senate-hold procedure; it is a custom, but one that flowed from the rules of a legislative body that values consensus and has enacted that value by requiring unanimous consent to do much, indeed most, of its business. Formally, a hold occurs when a senator writes a letter to the leaders in the body indicating that he or she will deny unanimous consent to moving to a vote on a nominee. Without unanimous consent, the only effective way to get to a vote is for another senator to file a cloture petition, meaning a separate vote to move to act on the nomination. For confirmations, that now takes only a majority of votes (legislation takes a supermajority of 60 out of 100 senators), but it is still a time-consuming process. After the petition is filed, it must be held over for two legislative days, with more parliamentary maneuvering before a cloture vote takes place and then, if that’s successful, hours of guaranteed debate after. With what could be 650 military promotions, each needing individual actions without unanimous consent to bundle them, and with Senate-floor time a precious commodity, this is not feasible. Promotions at the officer level or above require Senate confirmation. This has never been controversial. But what was routinely done without any fanfare—military promotions, confirmed by voice vote, often en bloc, with unanimous consent—is no more.
Tuberville, a former college-football coach and someone who has never served in the military, is taking this step to force the Pentagon to eliminate a policy that enables active service members on military installations in states that ban abortions to travel to another state to obtain such a procedure; service members pay for the abortion itself, but not the travel costs. He is oblivious to the damage to the military and national security, and has faced criticism even from many members of his own party, including his leader Mitch McConnell.
In theory, if McConnell or the Senate Republicans really wanted to stop this insanity, they could do it any time that Tuberville is not on the Senate floor, if the Senate majority leader asked for unanimous consent and no other senator objected. But in reality, someone would object: When the Senate is in session, each party always has at least one member on the floor to prevent mischief from the other. That means denying unanimous consent if the other party wants to jam something through. The standard practice has been that members of your party respect the hold prerogative and deny unanimous consent, even if the person who placed the hold is nowhere to be found. Any move by Chuck Schumer to act on these promotions is denied a chance at unanimous consent by whatever Republican senator is on the floor at the time.
The Senate’s deep and dirty secret is that holds work only because every member of the Senate wants them to. Other senators continue to deny unanimous consent not just to protect the prerogatives of their absent colleague, but to protect their own ability to use holds in the future. Every member of the body is culpable, because every one of them wants to have the opportunity to gain leverage over a president or another executive-branch official or agency. Even senators of the same party as the president find many instances where their pleas for attention or action are ignored or downplayed. Using a hold to block confirmation of someone a president dearly wants in office means that attention will be given. Of course, in most cases, the holds are for individuals and do not last very long.
Holds have been a part of Senate procedure for a long time, but their use for punitive or ideological motives is relatively recent. During the Obama administration, Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas put a hold on Barack Obama’s nominee for ambassador to the Bahamas, Cassandra Butts, that lasted for 27 months, until she died of cancer. The hold had nothing to do with Butts’s qualifications or character—it was purely punitive. Tuberville is not the only senator now using blanket holds for partisan or ideological purposes; Kentucky’s Rand Paul has a blanket hold on more than 60 ambassadors and other key State Department officials, and Ohio’s J. D. Vance has done the same for Justice Department nominees, including the head of the Office on Violence Against Women and several nominees for U.S. attorney, in retaliation for DOJ actions against Donald Trump.
For a long time, holds were an allowable and sometimes beneficial practice that helped balance power between the Senate and the presidency. Senators rarely took advantage of the process by applying blanket holds or sustaining them for unreasonable periods of time. The main abuses in the past were when individual senators tried to keep their holds secret to avoid criticism. That practice was severely limited a few years ago. But the norms that kept the practice in check have been shredded.
What to do? Two simple rule changes could break the impasse. First, by majority, the Senate could require an up-or-down floor vote on a confirmation within 30 days after the nominee has been reported out by the relevant committee. An alternative would be for the Senate to create by rule its own variation of the House’s discharge petition: If a majority of senators sign such a petition, it would force a floor vote under a privileged resolution.
The Senate should go further yet to facilitate confirmations of judges and executive officials. It should allow multiple confirmations to occur en bloc, and move on from the practice of individual votes, which can involve several steps that use precious floor time. And it should significantly reduce the number of positions that require Senate confirmation. The old Senate is no more. In the new, tribalized Senate with too many obdurate and radical members willing to damage governance and national security without regard for the consequences, better rules are the only way to avoid these abuses.