Tuberville Fires Back at Biden’s Comments on His Senate Military Hold-Up: ‘He Can Call Me Everything He Wants’

Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is still standing by his decision to hold up military confirmations in the Senate until the military changes its existing abortion policy — and criticism from President Joe Biden is definitely not going to change his mind.

CNN’s Manu Raju caught up with Tuberville to get his reaction to Biden’s comments on Wednesday that his position was “ridiculous” and that standing in the way of hundreds of non-political military confirmations was “jeopardizing U.S. security in the world”:

Didn’t sound like anybody wants to sit down and visit and work a problem out. It sounds like somebody who wants to argue about it. I’m not in this to argue. You know, I’m just in this to try to be fair and do what’s right, and go by the law and the Constitution. He can call me everything he wants. We need to get this worked out.

When Raju told Tuberville that it was his fellow Republicans who wanted him to relent on this and let them move forward, the senator said flat-out: “That’s not going to happen.”

Biden’s comments while he was abroad also included a call to Senate Republicans to “stand up” to Tuberville: “The idea that we don’t have a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the idea that we have all these all these promotions that are in abeyance right now and we don’t know what’s going to happen. The idea that we’re injecting into fundamental foreign policy decisions, what in fact, as a domestic social debate on social issues is bizarre. I don’t ever recall that happening ever. And it’s just totally irresponsible in my view.”

Watch the clip above via CNN.