{"id":35954,"date":"2013-06-04T09:07:41","date_gmt":"2013-06-04T13:07:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=35954"},"modified":"2013-06-04T09:07:41","modified_gmt":"2013-06-04T13:07:41","slug":"congressional-busy-bodies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=35954","title":{"rendered":"Congressional busy bodies"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, a couple of Congress persons want to change the way that the military deal with sexual assault according to the Associated Press<\/a>. They want to remove sexual assaults from the jurisdiction of commanders and put it, oh, I don’t know, in the civilian courts, I guess.<\/p>\n

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., is a proponent of ambitious legislation that would remove commanders from the process of deciding whether serious crimes, including sexual misconduct cases, go to trial. That judgment would rest with seasoned trial counsels who have prosecutorial experience and hold the rank of colonel or above.<\/p>\n

The military has serious reservations about Gillibrand’s plan, concerned that stripping commanders of some authority would make it difficult for them to maintain good order and discipline. Not so, say some lawmakers, who argue that the military’s piecemeal approach clearly hasn’t been the answer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t understand the reasoning, really I don’t. Sexual assault is a crime and it’s punishable under the UCMJ. Just going the news this morning, there was a sexual assault in a DC fire station<\/a>. Some crackpot is assaulting women on a local running trail in DC, yet again (it happens every Spring), no one in Congress is suggesting that they can mandate to DC area courts how to prosecute the perpetrators of sexual assault. Why not? If they think that sexual assault is caused by the military justice system, then it must also be caused by the District of Columbia’s justice system. I mean we’re all people, and all equal under the law, so why is Congress so concerned about military sexual assault?<\/p>\n

I don’t know if there’s a problem in the military in regards to sexual assault, I just know that I never saw any, I never even heard rumors of it. Well, we did have one guy who used to pretend to fall and would grab the breasts of German girls nearby, but they put him in Leavenworth for 10 years. That’s the only case I knew about concerning someone in my unit in my two decades in the military. But, every damn day I see sexual assault on the local news out here in the civilized world. <\/p>\n

I guess this is just another way to undermine the order and discipline in the military by casting doubt on commanders ability to be fair as a legal authority. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, a couple of Congress persons want to change the way that the military deal with … Congressional busy bodies<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress-sucks","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}