Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

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Mrs. GILLIBRAND. Madam President, I rise for the eighth time to call for this entire body to have the opportunity to vote on and consider the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act.

This commonsense reform would ensure that people in the military who have been subjected to sexual assault and other serious crimes get the justice they deserve.

I ask for this vote because I want to ensure that this important reform, which is backed by a bipartisan filibuster-proof majority of the Senators, becomes law. If we leave this debate and this reform to the national defense authorization committee review, I have no doubts that that will not happen.

We all know how a bill becomes a law. It passes the Senate and the House, and is signed by the President. And we all know how this process can be subverted. We have seen popular provisions that have passed both the House and the Senate be minimized, watered down, or removed in conference altogether. And I have certainly seen good proposals killed behind closed doors of the NDAA markup.

In 2019, I introduced a much smaller reform called Safe to Report. That provision was designed to improve reporting rates by allowing survivors of sexual assault to report the assault without fear of retaliation in the form of misconduct charges for related minor offenses, things like underage drinking or breaking a curfew.

That commonsense reform, which could have allowed more survivors to come forward, passed in both the House and the Senate, but it was removed in conference. We had to reintroduce the very same bill the following year in order for it to be included and become law in the next year, the fiscal year 2021 NDAA.

If a program focused solely on helping to make it easier for survivors to report their assault was removed in conference, I have little reason to believe that this once-in-a-generation reform will survive.

Given the lack of progress we have made on sexual assault in the military and the entrenched problems with the military justice system, we cannot allow this widely supported reform to be left to the whims of those working behind closed doors in conference--a process with a rich history of subverting reforms on behalf of the Department of Defense. Let us have this vote in the Senate, and let us send it to the House to become law.

Every day we delay this vote is another day we deny justice to the survivors of sexual assault. We deny justice to servicemembers who have been affected by serious crimes. We deny justice to the men and women who do so much for this country. We owe it to them to not wait another minute longer.

1520 and the Senate proceed to its consideration; that there be 2 hours for debate, equally divided in the usual form, and that upon the use or yielding back of that time, the Senate vote on the bill with no intervening action or debate.

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Mrs. GILLIBRAND. Madam President, there are several reasons why I disagree strongly with the chairman.

First of all, this is not a complex reform. In fact, only one thing changes: After the military police conclude their investigation, instead of the case file being handed over to the commander's JAG, the case file is handed over to the prosecutor, who might eventually have gotten that case anyway. The prosecutor reviews the case file and decides whether or not to prosecute.

If he decides not to prosecute, he will send it back to the commander. Only 3 percent of commanders have this job; 97 percent of commanders' jobs will not be affected by this change. And then they will get to do what they typically do, which is to review the case; perhaps, ask for nonjudicial punishment for related crimes; perhaps, do a special court-martial. That sits with the commander.

The second reason why I disagree with the chairman is that if you remove only one crime from the commander, you will essentially create an entirely different system just for survivors of sexual assault, who are more often to be women who report those crimes. Even though males suffer more from sexual assault, they just don't report them, and that, therefore, will become a special court for women servicemembers. And experts have said that it will further marginalize them, it will further diminish them, it will further alienate them. It will be a special court for women, or a ``pink court.''

Third, this reform has already taken place in the countries of our allies. The UK did it over 10 years ago for defendants' rights. Israel did it over 40 years ago. Canada, Netherlands, Australia, Germany--all have taken serious crimes out of the chain of command.

And in each of those instances, they have said it has not reduced good order discipline, and it has not had any impact on command and control.

And so the truth is that this is a change whose impact will be to give survivors of sexual assault and any survivor of a serious crime the confidence that the military justice system is unbiased and highly trained.

The other reason why this change is so necessary to be a bright line at all serious crimes is defendants' rights. And I can tell you that we now have data developed in 2017 from Protect Our Defenders, a report that says that it is up to 2.5 times more likely for Black and Brown servicemembers to be punished than White servicemembers. That is a shocking statistic--a shocking statistic.

So I believe that if you create a bright line at serious crimes, you will not only improve the system for survivors of sexual assault but for all litigants--plaintiffs and defendants--and you will protect the civil liberties and civil rights of Black and Brown servicemembers from a defendant's rights perspective.

The committee has had 8 years to debate, discuss, have hearings, and pass legislation. We have passed nearly 250 bills on this topic. They have lost their sole jurisdiction over this issue. They have failed to improve sexual assaults in the military, and it is now time for an up- or-down vote, which has 66 cosponsors in this body. It is now time for an up-or-down vote on our bill. It should no longer be the purview of the NDAA and the Armed Services Committee because they have been unwilling to have a vote on this for over 5 years and unwilling to take a serious look at how to fix these injustices within our military.

Our military servicemembers deserve a military justice system worthy of the sacrifices they make every day.

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