Ron DeSantis defends Sen. Tommy Tuberville's blockade on military promotions

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday defended Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s blockade on hundreds of military promotions in opposition to the Defense Department’s abortion policy.

During an interview on "The Hugh Hewitt Show," DeSantis was asked whether the Alabama Republican should stop holding up military nominees over a new Pentagon policy that covers travel expenses for service members who need to go out of state to have an abortion.

"No, I don’t... They are funding abortion tourism, which is not an appropriate thing for the military to be doing," DeSantis said. "So I think our Republicans in the Congress should just take a stand on this. The [Pentagon] should stand down."

DeSantis, the only 2024 GOP presidential candidate who's a military veteran, laid out his policy proposal on reshaping the military this week and pledged to "rip the woke out" of the Defense Department. During Thursday's interview, DeSantis said that if elected president he would eliminate the Defense Department's abortion policy on his first day in office.

"We have all these other problems in our military. You know, we need more ammunition. We need more recruiting. We need all these other things, and yet they’re focusing on abortion tourism. So that’ll be an easy thing for me, day one as commander-in-chief," he said. "That policy will go out the window, and we’re going to focus on mission accomplishment again."

“The founders also, we well know, had a pronounced fear of and antipathy toward standing armies — large, permanent, professional military establishments — because of the dual temptations for domestic oppression and international adventurism by those in power, the drain on public resources, and, not least, the not-infrequent aberrant behavior of those in uniform.

“This fear led them to invest Congress with specific power to determine the size and composition of the armed services, make rules to govern those forces, mobilize and oversee the federal use of the militia, control the size and distribution of the military’s budget, and, most importantly, declare war.”

https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2013/07/why-founding-fathers-would-object-todays-military/66668/

“Today, we have much of what the founders would have feared most: a totally professional force, largely unrepresentative of American society, increasingly alienated from the public it is supposed to serve, huge in size, gluttonously expensive, more heavily and lethally armed than any other force in the world, deployed all across the globe all of the time, a source of recurring provocation and adventurism, principally prepared for a preferred American way of war that is no longer relevant, continuously guilty over time of socially and politically irresponsible behaviors (from combat atrocities to internal sexual assault), and singularly at the forefront of both global and domestic militarization.”

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.