Sen. Jack Reed showed up for a floor speech Wednesday with a poster depicting eight framed photos of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Three of the frames were empty, a consequence of the ongoing dispute between Sen. Tommy Tuberville and the Defense Department over its decision to implement a taxpayer-funded abortion policy.
“If the senator does not come to his senses before Gen. [Mark] Milley retires, fully half of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—our nation’s most vital military leaders—will be empty,” Reed, D-R.I., declared.
Reed proceeded to talk for more than 15 minutes, questioning the motives of Tuberville, R-Ala., and warning of a dire situation if these high-ranking miliary officers weren’t approved for promotion by the Senate.
Yet during his speech, Reed never once mentioned that it was the decision of Democratic leaders—not Tuberville—to prevent the 300 officers from receiving a Senate vote on their promotions.
Tuberville has said on numerous occasions, including this week, that Democrats could proceed with individual votes for each nominee. Instead, he’s objecting to “unanimous consent,” the Senate process of rubber-stamping an entire bloc of nominees without a recorded vote.
Take the case of Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown, who President Joe Biden has nominated to replace Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Reed cited Brown’s pending promotion Wednesday while pointing to the poster behind him.
“I’m concerned the senator does not appreciate the gravity of this situation,” Reed said of Tuberville. “These positions cannot simply be filled by other officers. They can only be temporarily covered by their vice chiefs, who must also continue to cover their own jobs. … These are extraordinary challenging times, and the jobs of our vice chiefs are just as important and challenging as the chief of staff or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
He accused Tuberville of a plot to “extort the Pentagon” while doing so for “his own political gain.”
Senate Rule XIX stipulates that “No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator … any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.”
In 1 speech @SenJackReed made 3 dubious accusations against @SenTuberville.
Videos ⬇️
— Rob Bluey (@RobertBluey) September 7, 2023
As chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Reed is responsible for shepherding nominees such as Brown through his committee, which approved his promotion July 20.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., could have scheduled a vote for Brown before the Senate left for its monthlong August recess or when senators returned this week. But instead of doing so, Democrats reserved time for confirmation votes on Federal Reserve and National Labor Relations Board nominees.
“Chuck Schumer can bring them to the floor one at a time as quick and as fast as he wants to, but he won’t do it because that’s an admittance of being wrong,” Tuberville said in an interview with Newsmax’s Greg Kelly.
Tuberville: 'We're going to have holds for a long, long time, and they can just get used to it'https://t.co/L5BMk6Mq7p
— 1819 News (@1819News) September 6, 2023
The Washington Examiner’s Conn Carroll, a former Senate staffer, crunched the numbers and discovered Democrats could have approved 108 military promotions if they worked an eight-hour day, five days a week instead of leaving town for a month.
“I’m sorry to the officers who have been inconvenienced by Tuberville’s holds, but if these nominations were really an issue of national security, maybe Senate Democrats could have skipped even just one day of their August vacation to confirm even just one of them,” Carroll wrote.
Don’t expect Democrats to change course. In fact, Reed acknowledged to Punchbowl News that Brown and other “vital military leaders” would continue to wait.
Another interesting nugget — Milley’s term ends Oct. 1. The Senate usually holds a floor vote on the Joint Chiefs chair nomination.
But REED told @maxpcohen that this shouldn’t happen bc it would set a precedent for all the others Tuberville is blocking.https://t.co/zMsrXiwov3
— Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) September 6, 2023
“Democrats are hesitant to put Brown’s nomination on the floor because it would set a precedent for all of the other promotions the Alabama Republican is blocking,” Punchbowl reported.
“What do you do with the rest of them?” Reed told Punchbowl, revealing that Democrats are keen to continue playing political games in hopes that Tuberville will fold under pressure.
Don’t count on it.
“I know I’m doing the right thing,” Tuberville said in an interview on “The Daily Signal Podcast.” “I’m not going to change my mind unless they change this [abortion] policy back the way it was.”
"I am not holding up nominations because they can do them one at a time. I’m holding up the opportunity for them to just say, 'Listen, we want to do 300 at a time,' @SenTuberville says. https://t.co/iT68PKgU7r
— Samantha Aschieris (@samantharenck) September 7, 2023
Tuberville began blocking the promotions of flag officers and military generals in March over objections to the Defense Department’s taxpayer-funded abortion policy. He asserts the Pentagon’s policy was unlawfully implemented without congressional approval and that he won’t release his “hold” on the promotions until the policy is revoked.
The Pentagon’s policy provides three weeks of taxpayer-funded paid leave and reimbursement of travel expenses for military personnel and dependents who are seeking abortions. An estimate from the Rand Corp. predicts the number of abortions in the military eligible for taxpayer-covered expenses would skyrocket from 20 to more than 4,000 each year.
In his Newsmax interview, Tuberville said he would continue to withstand pressure from his Senate colleagues until the Pentagon reversed the abortion policy.
“They don’t know what pressure is. Try coaching in the SEC,” Tuberville said of college football’s Southeastern Conference, where he once was a coach for Auburn University. “There’s no way they’re going to talk me out of this. We’re going to have holds for a long, long time, and they can just get used to it.”
Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
God Bless Sen. Tuberville!!!
“our nation’s most vital military leaders”
ROFLMAO to the infinite power!!!!!!
Stooges, unqualified and highly sub–substandard!!!
Of course, since the communist structure was implemented at the Pentagon and military under THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION (DEI, communist political minder systems, implemented by SecDef MARK ESPER) he certainly did not help matters!!!
Milley helped train a “phantom army” which disappeared which is why the Taliban rolled into Kabul in under three days —— Milley predicted 90 days to six months!
Austin, as CENTCOM commander under Obama, oversaw the disbursement of $700 million to train “Syrian rebels” but ended up with ZERO rebels —— now whatever became of those funds?!?! [SOURCE: C–SPAN, 2016]