Senate confirms top US military officer

Brown becomes 2nd Black officer to lead Joint Chiefs of Staff after Colin Powell

U.S. senators voted Wednesday to confirm General Charles Brown as the country’s next top military officer, one of hundreds of nominations that have been stalled by a lawmaker’s protest against Pentagon abortion access policies.

Brown was approved 83-11 and will become the second Black officer to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — after Colin Powell from 1989 to1993 — at a time when the Pentagon is headed by Lloyd Austin, the country’s first Black secretary of defense.

Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer also moved to set up votes on the nominations of General Randy George as chief of staff of the Army and General Eric Smith as commandant of the Marine Corps.

“They should already be serving in their new positions. The Senate should not have to go through procedural hoops just to please one brazen and misguided senator,” Schumer said on the Senate floor, voicing his frustration with Senator Tommy Tuberville.

President Joe Biden selected Brown — who is currently chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force — in May to become chairman after General

Mark Milley retires on Sept. 29, and the Senate usually approves military nominations quickly through unanimous consent.

But Tuberville — a Republican from Alabama who voted against Brown — has blocked that option for months in opposition to Pentagon efforts to assist troops who must travel to receive reproductive health care that is unavailable where they are stationed.

The Defense Department issued the policies earlier this year in response to the 2022 Supreme

Court decision striking down the nationwide right to abortion.

They allow service members to take administrative absences to receive “non-covered reproductive health care,” and established travel allowances to help them cover costs.

Because of Tuberville’s actions, the Senate can only approve military nominations individually, which takes far longer — a total of about 30 days and 17 hours for all of them if lawmakers worked the entire period without stopping, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service

said in an August 23 memo.

That estimate was based on there being 273 military nominations awaiting votes. The number currently stands at more than 300.

Schumer had resisted holding individual votes until now, only doing so to head off a move by Tuberville to force one on Smith’s nomination alone, which the Democratic senator said amounted to the Republican “essentially trying to make himself the gatekeeper of which officers are promoted and who sits and waits.”