Political Quotes

“I rise again to address another issue. I rise because, according to the Pentagon's recent biannual survey, almost 21,000 servicemembers were sexually assaulted in the year 2018. That was a 38-percent increase from the year before. I rise because the current climate of retaliation in our armed services and the lack of justice provided by the chain of command meant nearly three-quarters of those assaults went unreported, and less than 10 percent of cases considered for command action went to trial--less than 10 percent. I rise because I stood in this very Chamber in 2013 and shared essentially the same statistics. Year after year, the leaders of our armed services come to Congress and commit to making things better. They commit to us in hearing after hearing: We will get this right. Yet, year after year, thousands of servicemembers are raped and sexually assaulted, and their assailants are not held accountable. In many of those cases, the assailant is someone in the survivor's chain of command--the same chain of command that will decide the case, picking judge, jury, prosecutor, defense counsel--all decided by a commander in that chain of command. There is no other judicial system in America that would ever allow this to happen. This system is not delivering justice. The chain of command is not delivering justice. These decisions--these fundamental civil rights decisions--need to be made somewhere else.…”