“Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) is not known for his constitutional scholarship,” Huffington Post says (here).
That’s an understatement. The former football coach (photo, left; note the deer-in-headlights look) knows less about how government works than is expected of middle-schoolers on school quizzes.
There are three branches of government — executive, legislative, and judicial — which are designed to act as checks and balances on each other, so no one branch or individual has too much power, and so the people are actually represented in the halls of power.
Moreover, the legislative branches is divided into two houses: The House of Representatives, which makes spending decisions (among other things); and the Senate, which “advises and consents” (i.e. approves) presidential appointments (among other duties).
“Advise and consent” means what it says: Senators can veto presidential appointees. Someone like Pete Hegseth, whom Trump picked for Secretary of Defense, who has a drinking problem; or Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump picked for Director of National Intelligence, whose Russia ties are suspect. If the Senate says no, they don’t take office.
This senatorial function, as you’d suspect, requires thinking. Each senator, before casting his or her vote, listens to the nominee testify, weighs other information, and carefully considers the nominee’s qualifications, competence, and suitability for the post. At least, that’s what you expect them to do.
That’s the way it’s supposed to work. But America’s dumbest senator doesn’t think so. This system assumes, of course, that senators are capable of thinking. But he isn’t capable of high-order (or, for that matter, low-order) thinking.
Tuberville, asked about Hegseth, told CNN, “I just can’t believe we even have people on our side that are saying, ’Well, I’ve got to look at this, got to look at that.’” Vetting nominees, he claimed, is the Democrats’ job; and then he described Democrats questioning Trump’s nominees as “throwing rocks.” (See story here.)
America is a democracy, where ultimate power resides with the people, and Alabama’s voters have every right to send an idiot to the United States Senate. That’s their prerogative, and I would never question their prerogative, although I do question their judgment and competence as voters.
The saving grace is that Tuberville is only 1 of 100 senators, has only 1 vote, and although he may think his role is to blindly rubberstamp whatever Trump wants to do — because he’s incapable of thinking for himself — there just might be a few Republican senators whose votes, combined with those of the 47 Democratic senators, could prove sufficient to keep truly awful nominees like Hegseth and Gabbard out of sensitive top federal jobs.