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| Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D.-NY) |
Having fallen only five votes short of the 60 needed for cloture, and a Republican sweep of both houses of Congress having occurred in 2014, one might expect Sen.
Kirsten Gillibrand's Military Justice Improvement Act to leave only an oil slick on the legislative waters. Wrongo.
Here's an article from the
Marin Independent Journal that suggests this bill will rise again.
[Standard disclaimer: These comments are made in my individual capacity and shouldn't be attributed to anyone or anything else.] The article gets important facts wrong. For example, a company commander doesn't have authority to dispose of sexual assault offenses; the initial disposition authority in such cases in DoD is an O-6 special court-martial convening authority. The article also includes a quotation saying that the increase in reports of sexual assault from 2013 to 2014 is "deplorable." Isn't an increase in reporting a positive development when paired with an estimated decline in prevalence, as RAND's study found? And the article discusses the increase in reporting in the same paragraph as the DoD estimated prevalence rate, suggesting that it is conflating the separate concepts of reporting and prevalence. The article also suggests, incorrectly, that sexual assaults may be reported only to a service member's chain of command. In fact, there are numerous reporting options available, including to law enforcement.
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