As the Senate returns from its August recess, one of the top focal points for the Biden administration is to smash the roadblock that is Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville.

For months now, Tuberville has held the line on his demand that the Biden administration reverse course on its unprecedented and arguably unconstitutional decision to pay for service members’ transportation to other states in order to obtain elective abortions. Of course, the Biden administration maintains the fiction that such elective abortion services are essential to ensuring “service members and their families have access to reproductive health no matter where they are stationed.” At best, this is a violation of the spirit of the longstanding bipartisan-supported Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortions.

Refusing to back down, Team Biden ran a blitz against the old football coach in the form of a Washington Post op-ed cowritten by the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. They warn of “the dangers of politicizing our military leaders” and insist, “It is time to lift this dangerous hold and confirm our senior military leaders.”

The people politicizing the military occupy the White House.

Since Tuberville took his principled stand, the U.S. military has incurred a backlog of hundreds of pending officer promotions, including the heads of three of the five military branches — the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps.

The Democrat-controlled Senate could easily take the time to individually vote on these officer promotions, especially the pending heads of the military branches. But rather than doing so, which would involve more time that could potentially derail some of the Democrats’ legislative agenda, they have chosen to play what amounts to a game of chicken.

Democrats and the Biden administration argue that Tuberville’s stand is threatening national defense by impacting military readiness. Yet if that were indeed the case, Senate Democrats would have long ago acted to hold individual nominations. And according to calculations by the Washington Examiner’s Conn Carroll, “[Senator Chuck] Schumer could have been popping one [confirmation] out every two hours for the past 40 days.”

This is a battle of political wills. Tuberville is standing between Joe Biden and an expansion of the power of the executive branch beyond constitutional limits — all because the commander-in-chief and his administration view elective abortion as a (non-enumerated) constitutional right. (Where do we apply for subsidizing elective gun purchases? Asking for a friend.) But Congress doesn’t see it that way, and Biden knows he can’t get what he wants via the legislative process, so he’s going around it.

Thus far, Tuberville has proven himself much more of a stalwart than the Biden administration bargained for. And it appears this game of chicken is nowhere near ending. As Tuberville rightly sees it, the lives of pre-born Americans are at stake, not just a political agenda.