Political Quotes

“I rise again to call for this entire body to vote and consider the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act. This commonsense reform would ensure that people in the U.S. military who have been subjected to sexual assault and other serious crimes get the justice that they deserve. I began calling for the full floor vote on this bill on May 24. That was 24 days ago. Since then, an estimated 1,344 servicemembers will have been raped or sexually assaulted. Two in three of those survivors will not even report it because they know that they are more likely to face retaliation than receive justice. This is a scourge that we have been looking at for over 8 years. We have passed nearly 250 measures to address sexual assault in the military, to address retaliation, to address prevention, and none of them have dented the numbers. In fact, our estimated cases are at about 20,000 cases, and among those, only about 200 have gone to courts- martial and ended in conviction. It is not enough. We aren't moving the numbers in the right direction. They are, in fact, going in the wrong direction. We also have a reform that we have looked at for 8 years. It creates a bright line at all serious crimes to handle two issues: one, the bias we see in sexual assault in the military; that if you are a servicemember who reports sexual assault, it is unlikely that you will get justice, and it is likely that you will be retaliated against.…”