Unanimous Consent Request--S. 1520

Floor Speech

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Mrs. GILLIBRAND. Madam President, I rise again--again--to call for every Senator to have a chance to vote on our bill, the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act. It is time to move the most serious crimes like sexual assault and murder out of the chain of command and put them in the hands of the most capable people in the military--independent, impartial, highly trained uniformed prosecutors.

This is an issue that deserves urgency. I have been calling for a full floor vote since May 24. Since that time, an estimated 3,136 servicemembers will have been raped or sexually assaulted and more will have been victims of other serious crimes. While I am heartened to see, after many years of pushing for reform, that growing numbers of our colleagues, the Department of Defense, and the President have acknowledged that we must move sexual assault and related crimes like sexual violence out of the chain of command, it is simply not enough.

I ask my colleagues to consider what it truly means to have special victim prosecutors looking only at cases of sexual assault and related crimes. It means that all the myriad crimes that are often linked to special victims' cases will get left out and pushed into a system that is not trained to see them for what they are.

Let's just take a simple case of a forged check. Say a soldier takes his girlfriend's checkbook and forges her name. If a commander looks at that, they are likely to take that at face value, see it as a simple, cut-and-dried case of someone stealing money from someone else, and move forward with nonjudicial punishment.

If a military prosecutor was to look at that same case, they might see something entirely different. That is because prosecutors are trained to see linkages between crimes. They are taught to ask different questions. So when they see a forged check, they ask: Is there more happening here? And there usually is.

Research has shown that financial abuse occurs in 99 percent of domestic violence cases. Financial abuse can be the means by which an abuser gains control in a relationship, and it is often the main reason a survivor stays with their abuser. While a prosecutor who has worked on cases of both financial crimes and domestic violence would know that, a commander wouldn't likely know.

The truth is, the realities of intimate partner violence go far beyond sexual assault and harassment. It can include forging checks and carrying out other forms of financial fraud, as well as other serious crimes.

We know that child endangerment can be linked to domestic violence and intimate partner violence, as can kidnapping. Arson can be the tool of someone attempting to cover up these crimes. And murder, manslaughter, and murder of a pregnant woman can be, and often are, the final, tragic culmination of domestic violence. When these types of crimes are presented to commanders, they may be just the tip of an iceberg--the tip of an iceberg of cases that we all agree should be handled by a special prosecutor.

So if we truly want to help survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, we have to acknowledge that some of those crimes don't happen in a vacuum. We must remove all serious crimes out of the chain of command and into the hands of trained prosecutors who have the education, training, and experience that these cases require and that our servicemembers deserve.

The Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act does exactly that, and it is supported by the major veterans service organization groups, as well as groups like the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which recognize the true impact of this reform. It is also supported by a bipartisan, filibuster-proof majority of Senators who should be allowed the opportunity to cast their vote.

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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