November 13, 2020, 11:33 am
Newly elected U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville, who will take office in January, showed his lack of political experience (to put it mildly) in a recent interview when he listed the three branches of the U.S. government very incorrectly. When asked about how Republicans would be working with Democrats next year, he dubbed these branches “the House, the Senate, and executive.”
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“You know, our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three of branches of government,” he said to Todd Stacy of the Alabama Daily News. “It wasn’t set up that way, our three branches, the House, the Senate, and executive.”
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The three branches of government are, of course, the executive, judicial, and legislative, the last of which consists of the House and Senate.
The senator-elect also seemed to be confused about the basics of WWII, telling Stacy: “That’s concerning to me, that we’re to the point now where we’ve got almost half the country voting for something that this country wasn’t built on…I tell people, my dad fought 76 years ago in Europe to free Europe of socialism.” (WWII, of course, was a global fight against Adolf Hitler and the spread of fascism.)
According to the New York Times, Tuberville also erroneously claimed that former Vice President Al Gore, the 2000 Democratic presidential nominee, was president-elect for 30 days—(“Neither Mr. Gore nor George W. Bush were considered the president-elect during that process,” writes the NYT‘s Catie Edmondson.)
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Tuberville is another one of those sports-star-turned-politician types, having gone into the senate race with zero political experience. He started as a football player and later became a coach, then worked for ESPN as a “color analyst” on college football. The closest thing he has to a political background is being the president of the American Football Coaches Association in 2015.
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That lack of experience is already showing, and Tuberville isn’t even in office yet. On the bright side, he did defeat miniature white supremacist Jeff Sessions in the primary race.
On the not so bright side, Tuberville also said in the same interview that “I think it still is still up in the air who’s going to be the president” when asked if he would work with the Biden administration.
It’s not making many people feel confident about the former football coach’s future performance as a senator.
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“Maybe it’s just my current mood, but this isn’t funny,” Larissa Morgan commented. “How does this even happen? Do we have to start requiring candidates to pass basic civics exams? But hey, he was a helluva football coach, so I guess that’s all the experience necessary to go straight to the Senate. Travesty.”
*First Published: November 13, 2020, 11:33 am
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