Instead of showing up for work last Tuesday, Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, went to Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., to hear the former president rail against his latest criminal indictment. Tuberville’s absence gave the Senate an opportunity to end his one-man blockade of all military promotions, a campaign he has been waging for four months to protest the Pentagon’s policy paying for service members to travel for an abortion if they live in a state where it is illegal.
But did the Democrats in the Senate seize the moment and try to get a vote on the promotions? Not a chance. “One of the unwritten rules of the place is you don’t take advantage of a person’s absence,” said Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, defending an indefensible Senate tradition that lets a single member defeat the will of the majority and hold up virtually any issue for any reason.
Senators could abolish this practice with a majority vote, but have locked themselves into so many hoary old-boy logrolling traditions that they can no longer see why voters are increasingly repulsed by their inaction. In theory, holds and other obstructive privileges are all about personal courtesy to other senators, but they are the height of discourtesy to the voters who elected a majority of the chamber and expect something other than endless procedural delays.
The real reason senators won’t abolish the personal hold is that they might one day want to exercise the privilege of bogging down the Senate themselves. And in Tuberville’s case, the use of a “hold” has lately become so weaponised that Democrats knew another Republican would probably step up and continue the blockade in his stead.
On the same day, for example, Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, announced that he intended to block all of the Biden administration’s nominees for Justice Department jobs, because he’s angry that the department indicted Trump for purloining classified military secrets from the White House and then lying to investigators about it.
“If Merrick Garland wants to use these officials to harass Joe Biden’s political opponents, we will grind his department to a halt,” Vance said of the attorney general. It’s not clear if Vance somehow expected the department to withdraw the indictment, but whatever his actual demand, his hold will make it much more difficult for the Senate to approve nominations and promotions.
Republicans are hardly the only abusers of this privilege. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said this month that he would block President Biden’s nominee to be director of the National Institutes of Health until the administration released its plan to lower prescription drug prices. In 2021, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, blocked Biden’s nomination for a top position at the Education Department in a dispute over reforms to the student loan program.
But what’s new about the latest version of these Senate holds is the breadth and long-term nature of their effects. Holds have generally been used in the past to delay a single nominee while calling attention to a related issue, or for a fairly brief period until a point was clearly made. The hold is a cousin of other undemocratic privileges in the Senate, like the blue slip process, which allows home-state senators to block nominations for federal judges, or the filibuster, which raises the threshold for passage of most legislation to 60 votes.