Political Quotes

“I rise today to once again call for every Senator to have the opportunity to cast their vote on the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act, which was unceremoniously and undemocratically removed from the NDAA behind closed doors. I started calling for an up-or-down vote on this bill on May 24 because I feared that this would happen and that the NDAA would not do enough to address the epidemic of sexual violence and serious crimes in the U.S. military. Now that we have seen the text, it is clear that those fears were well-founded. Committee leadership has overridden the will of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a majority of the House, who called for real reform that would have moved serious crimes to independent military prosecutors. Instead, committee leadership has codified the status quo, leaving commanders as the convening authority-- even in sex crimes cases. That is the same system that everyone supposedly agreed is failing our servicemembers. Unfortunately, this does not fix the issue of convening authority, which was the singular ask from the survivor community. The NDAA does not make the necessary changes to the military justice system. The change we must make--the change that survivors and veterans have asked for--is to remove all serious nonmilitary crimes from the chain of command. Commanders are not lawyers or judges, and they don't have training or expertise necessary to make those complex legal decisions.…”