Kirsten Gillibrand has made sexual misbehavior in the military her signature issue.
New York’s junior senator is pushing an amendment to next year’s military budget, expected for a vote in Congress some time after Thanksgiving, that would take sexual- assault cases out of the military chain of command. These cases would instead be tried by uniformed special prosecutors.
The logic here is that commanding officers have too much say over whether charges should be brought, and can even overturn convictions. Gillibrand claims that too often this has led military officers to be more concerned with covering up an embarrassing incident of assault than ensuring justice for the woman assaulted.
“Our military-justice system is broken,” says the senator. But what about her home-state Legislature, where Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver doled out taxpayer dollars to hush up women who came to him with reports of sexual harassment from members? Given Gillibrand’s intense focus on this issue, one might think her moral-outrage meter would be blinking red about our Assembly’s own harassment problems. Guess again.
When Gillibrand was asked earlier this year whether Silver should keep his speakership, she punted. Silver’s fitness as speaker, she said, was something best left to the state Assembly to decide for itself.
Silver can count himself lucky that he is not a Navy officer. Because the message Sen. Gillibrand is sending here is that she trusts New York’s state politicians in Albany to do the right thing more than she trusts the officers of the US Armed Forces.