Political Quotes

“Madam President, first let me thank Senator McCaskill for her terrific leadership on this matter and Senator Ayotte and others on our committee who worked so hard to strengthen our laws against sexual assault and strengthen the ability of our commanders to act, as we did in our defense authorization bill and in the second bill we will be voting on today. We will be voting today on two bills regarding sexual assault in our military, and I believe the strongest, most effective approach we can take to reduce sexual assault is to hold commanders accountable for establishing and maintaining a command climate that does not tolerate sexual assault. In order to do that, we must maintain the important authority to prosecute sexual assaults that our military commanders now have, and we must add greater accountability for those commanders. The evidence shows that removing this authority from our commanders would weaken, not strengthen, our response to this urgent problem. That is why I believe the bill offered by Senator Gillibrand and others, though offered in the hope that it would strengthen our efforts against sexual assault, will in fact have the opposite effect. In the last year we have learned that in scores of cases during the period study, commanders prosecuted sexual assault cases that civilian attorneys had declined to prosecute.…”