Edward Markey had been a U.S. Senator for all of two hours when Kirsten Gillibrand buttonholed him in the basement of the Capitol one afternoon last summer. Moving with characteristic speed, she pressed him to join her push to take cases of sexual assault out of the military chain of command and give them to independent lawyers to investigate instead. There were 26,000 cases of unwanted sexual contact in the military last year, she argued, out of which only 3,000 were reported and just 302 prosecuted. Too many victims, she added, are afraid to speak out because their commanding officers were either complicit or in denial about the problem. Within hours, Markey was on board.
After months of such conversations on the Senate floor, in quiet corridors and in a daring, onetime raid on the Republican cloakroom, Gillibrand is on the verge of beating the Pentagon (and the quiet opposition of the Obama White House) on a measure that she says will curb the epidemic of sexual assaults in the military. "I was hoping [the issue] would snowball," Gillibrand says, "because when you're talking about the lives of men and women, who are so selfless and so sacrificing, to have their lives destroyed not by some enemy abroad but by someone in their own ranks, it creates a very grave injustice."
And speaking of snowballs, Gillibrand has become something of a force in short order too, chiefly by taking on and then reviving what seem like lost causes. Since filling Hillary Clinton's seat in 2009, she's led the fight to repeal "Don't ask, don't tell," pushed through a long-stalled compensation fund for 9/11 first responders and helped pass a law that makes it illegal to profit from insider tips from congressional staff. Her agenda gives little comfort to leaders in either party, and already there is talk of higher office. "If you're going to represent your people and be a good legislator, you can't follow the party line," says Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, one of nine Republicans who have signed on to Gillibrand's sexual-assault-in-the-military bill. "She's passionate, and that's not a word I use a lot."
Unusual Coalition
As hopeless crusades go, few seem as unlikely as the one Gillibrand is waging on the military's dubious policy of handling sexual-assault cases inside the established chain of command. She embraced the cause of military-justice reform when she became chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, even though veterans Barbara Mikulski of Maryland and Barbara Boxer of California warned her not to get her hopes up.
After a string of high-profile cases that seemed to favor perpetrators over victims, Gillibrand wants to force the Pentagon to take investigations of most sexual-assault charges out of the hands of Navy captains, Air Force colonels and Army commanders and give them instead to lawyers in the Judge Advocate General's Corps. The brass argues that such a move would be prohibitively expensive and would assign attorneys to cases that are often thousands of miles away, and that breaking the chain of command gives troops two masters to serve.