Political Quotes

“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.…”