New Yorker: The relentless rise of Kirsten Gillibrand
Protect Our Defenders is featured in this article from the The New Yorker:
This Fall Gillibrand gave interviews to Fox, MSNBC, the broadcast networks, and newspapers—all to put pressure on senators to join her in supporting the measure. It made some of them un- comfortable. Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, is a former prosecutor who specialized in sexual-assault cases; she joined the Armed Services Committee in 2007. As a candidate in 2012, McCaskill became a progressive favorite when her opponent, Todd Akin, said that women rarely get pregnant from “legitimate rape.” In that race, Gillibrand sent out an e-mail to her supporters—“We can’t let Akin win. We need to help Claire”—and gave more funds to McCaskill than to any other candidate.
Although she and Gillibrand agree on many reforms, McCaskill, like Levin, ar- gues that removing prosecution from the chain of command will make prosecu- tions even less likely, because command- ers will have less accountability. In July, the debate turned personal. The advocacy group Protect Our Defenders, which sup- ports Gillibrand’s position, ran a half- page ad in McCaskill’s home-town paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, featuring a letter from a Navy veteran who had been raped by a superior. It asked McCaskill, “How can you possibly be against the cre- ation of a professional, independent, im- partial military justice system?” (Gilli- brand says she did not know about the ad before it ran.)
McCaskill said that Gillibrand’s ap- proach to lobbying the issue had been very difficult for her politically. “There have been things said and things done to me around this,” she told me. “It would be very easy for me to get into a negative and con- frontational place. I’m determined not to do that.”
