Friday, during an interview on Mobile, AL radio’s FM Talk 106.5, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) discussed the current situation on Capitol Hill, which he likened to a “war zone” with the National Guard presence.
The freshman U.S. Senator also questioned the treatment of the guardsman deployed around the U.S. Capitol.
“[I] live a hundred yards from my office,” he said. “I actually bought a house next to Mitch McConnell. Having a lot of it reworked. It’s only 1,000 square feet. That is kind of a small place. That’s all you need, but it’s a war zone. I’ve never seen anything like it. My dad was in the military forever and National Guard. We’ve had 25,000 National Guard people there, I guess for now for three weeks. I guess now we’re down to maybe 10,000 now. But we have 20 miles of razor wire all the way around all of the buildings — the Capitol, the Senate buildings. These guys and girls have been sleeping outside my office on the floor. We take candy out to them, popcorn. They’ve been MREs. It’s a shame.”
“They were treated badly — not they were abused or anything,” Tuberville continued. “There was just no planning, and how are you going to sleep that many people? They’re walking about with M5s and M16s. It is very different. I talked to the Alabama troops who were up there. We took pictures and ran into a lot of them. Every time I would walk by a National Guard — ‘Hey, where are you from?’ ‘I’m from Tennessee.’ ‘Where are you from?’ You know, we had troops from all 50 states. We’ve spent millions of the taxpayers’ dollars on this.”
Tuberville speculated the continued National Guard troops on Capitol Hill is attributed to the security lapse, one which he said fell under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) watch.
“I guess this came from Nancy Pelosi because she dropped the ball,” he said. “She’s the head of security for the Capitol. Of course, she isn’t going to take the blame for anything. They’re all there, and I think they’re going to stay there through the State of the Union address. But they don’t need to be there. Capitol Police obviously were overwhelmed.”
The Alabama Republican lawmaker said the January 6 incident set the Republican Party back “a good ways,” and added those involved “had no business going in the Capitol.”
“It really disappointed me how people handled that,” Tuberville added. “It is what it is, and it is kind of like in a football game. We fumbled three or four times in a row there as Republicans, and now we’ve got to fight back because they’re using it against us every day with all these troops and the razor wire, and ‘Republicans are bad,’ and you know ‘we want to take over the world.’ But we’ll come back. We just got to keep a positive attitude, and work and work for the people of this country.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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